Land and Hold Short

Yesterday, I got into a situation that I couldn’t handle on my own and needed to call in backup; fortunately, it had nothing to do with flying.

I was a few kilometers from home just before 7:00 am, running in -10 degC weather, when suddenly I felt an intense pain with every deep breath I took. When I stopped, I realized that my upper back was somehow injured, and that I could barely walk, much less run. I shuffled slowly, like an old man, for about three quarters of a kilometer past many houses where I could have knocked on the door and asked for help, but was too shy to risk waking people up. Finally I came to a public school, and fortunately the front door was unlocked — I found an early-rising teacher with a cell phone, called home, and was picked up in about 10 minutes.

I’ve always known that eventually, something would happen during a run that would prevent me from finishing, though I’ve always assumed that it would be a leg injury. That could be a very big deal for a winter runner — I have run in temperatures as low as -25 degC this winter, and when you’re running, you have to dress relatively lightly to avoid overheating. An injury on a deserted country road, outside of cell phone coverage, could possibly be fatal. Personally, I run in the middle of Canada’s fourth-largest city, so I know that there are always people around to find me, even if I suddenly crumple unconscious with no warning (backup #1); I’m the first one awake in my house, but I always leave a note saying where I’m running and when I should be expected home (backup #2); and finally, I know that there are people I can call, starting with my spouse, to come and pick me up if I’m too injured to keep going (backup #3). If I lived in the country, running would be a whole different kind of thing — I could run on the road, and risk being killed by the reckless, high-speed drivers who seem to fill country roads all over North America, or I could go on isolated paths and just hope that I was still conscious and within cell phone coverage if anything happened. Or, more likely, I’d run only with a buddy — that’s a kind of backup that can work.

As pilots, we get pelted with safety warnings about almost everything, to the point that we eventually become a bit numb and cynical. Really, though, I think that just about all of those warnings come down to the same thing that saved me in my running: backup. Staying current on partial panel? Backup, in case your vacuum pump fails. Setting personal IFR minima of, say, a 1,000 ft ceiling? Backup, in case you have to go VFR underneath. And so on.

I’ve had exactly one icing encounter so far in my flying. I was coming home from Toronto in IMC last last winter (or early spring — I don’t recall) when I noticed that the temperature was lower than forecast at my altitude, and that I was surrounded by drizzle. I kept an eye on my outside air temperature probe — the Piper Cherokee’s icing early warning system, since it is a thin stick poking out the front of the windshield — and soon noticed that a small piece of clear ice was forming on it. I asked for a lower altitude, descended 1,000 ft, and the ice disappeared. I continue to Ottawa and made a slightly-fast, no-flaps landing, just to be safe.

I was never in any serious danger during that trip, because I had all kinds of backup, even before I saw any ice:

1. I had already listened to the ATIS for the nearest big airport, Trenton (CYTR), and knew that the surface temperature was 6 degC, so there was warmer air below me (an underpowered plane like mine cannot necessarily climb above icing, but anybody can descend).
2. I tune in NDBs enroute to keep myself entertained, and in this case, I already had the Trenton NDB tuned and identified, which would be the first step for an approach. I also had the Trenton approach plates open, since I’d used them to get the ATIS frequency.
3. Even though I was only 1,000 ft above MEA when I saw the ice, I was much further above MOCA, flying over flat terrain with few towers.
4. I knew from the ATIS that the ceiling below me was at least marginal VMC.

My first backup plan was to change altitude, and that worked. If it hadn’t, I would have shot an approach at Trenton just until I broke out, and then (depending on the actual ceiling and whether I was still picking up ice) either declared an emergency and landed at the military base there, or (most likely) broken off the approach and proceded VFR at 1,000 ft AGL (well under the ceiling) along Lake Ontario just off the shore until Kingston, where the airport is right beside the lake. Other options included staying on my course IFR but descending to MOCA, in the hope that would melt off the ice, but it seemed like a less promising approach, since once I was at MOCA, I wouldn’t have any further backup if things didn’t work.

I’ve already written about my experience with Hope Air. That’s another place that backup is a nice thing. Usually, there’s a backup pilot for every flight, and in my case, it’s often Frank Eigler with his twin-engine, ice-certified Aztec. Knowing that there’s a backup takes a lot of the stress out of both flight planning and winter running. Now, it’s time to get myself to the physiotherapy clinic for some more repair work on my upper back, which, fortunately, is much less expensive than body work on my plane.

Thanks to Aviatrix, I see that Michael Oxner has finally joined the blogosphere with his weblog Aviation in Canada — welcome, Michael.

Michael is a controller at Moncton ACC (i.e. “Moncton Centre”), one the seven area control centres that handle aircraft cruising through Canadian airspace (including, in Michael’s case, trans-Atlantic flights). The stereotypical controller is a jaded, tired, complaining Don Brown sort-of person; from the little contact I’ve had with Michael so far, he’s just the opposite: in fact, he loves his work so much that he actually goes home and does more air traffic control on his own time for the VATSIM flight-simulator network, trying hard to educate the sim users about how the real system works. He seems like just the kind of person you’d like to hear at the other end of the radio after a long, tiring flight.

Before he joined the blogosphere, Michael published a series of excellent articles on the rules of flying called Aviation Topic of the Week. The articles are aimed at flight simulation users, but most of them are just as useful for real pilots, and I was thrilled to find a source of Canadian aviation information online. That was in early summer 2004, and I was planning a family trip through Michael’s airspace (I’d never flown down east before), so I sent him a quick e-mail to ask about routings, etc., and he sent me a helpful reply. I then suggested that he think about moving to a weblog format so that he could reach a larger audience, and offered technical help if he was interested (though I hadn’t started by own blogs yet). At the time, Michael wasn’t ready to make the move, but clearly now he is, and this weblog — which is already well underway — will be an excellent addition to the growing aviation blogosphere. It’s great that he’s Canadian, of course, but I expect that pilots all around the world will be interested in hearing from a Centre controller off the record.

Since both countries have statistics for 2003 available (U.S. stats, Canadian stats), and I thought it would be interesting to compare trends in Canada and the U.S. Unfortunately, statistics for the two countries do not follow the same categories, so comparison is sometimes tricky. With this posting, I’ll start by looking at how many hours we logged on both sides of the border for civil aviation (obviously, the U.S. logs a lot more military hours).

Total hours

The U.S. logged a lot more civilian flight hours than Canada did relative to its population: a full 33% more per person. In many ways, that makes sense: while Canada is a bigger country in land mass, most of our population is concentrated in the south along the U.S. border; even more importantly, about half of Canada’s population and a much larger proportion of its businesses live in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor. A business traveller in the U.S. will frequently be making long flights from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Denver and so on; a business traveller in Canada is more likely to take a one-hour flight (or a even a six-hour drive) from Toronto to Montreal, with only the occasional hop out west to Edmonton, Calgary, or Vancouver. Many small communities in the Canadian north rely on aviation as their only transportation link, but they are small and few, and probably not enough to tip the statistics.

General Aviation

It is much trickier to come up with general aviation numbers. The U.S. NTSB statistics divide civil aviation into three categories:

1. Part 121 Operators
2. Part 135 Operators
3. General Aviation

The Canadian statistics, on the other hand, divide civil aviation into seven categories:

1. Airliners
2. Commuter Aircraft
3. Air Taxi
4. Aerial Work
5. State
6. Corporate/Private/Other
7. Helicopters

How do we reconcile these? It is entirely possible, for example, for a helicopter to be carrying out scheduled air service or making a private flight. My best approximation (and this isn’t a very good one) is to take Aerial Work, State, Corporate/Private/Other, and Helicopters as very roughly equivalent to the U.S. General Aviation category. With that enormous caveat in mind, here’s how general aviation compares in Canada and the United States:

Again, there’s a big difference between the two countries. Allowing for the comparison difficulties, it looks like general aviation accounts for well over half of air traffic in the U.S., but well under half in Canada. So Canadians log fewer hours per person, and we log more of them on commercial or airline flights. That’s not what I initially expected to find, given that so much of Canada is sparsely populated and accessible only by air, but again, the explanation is probably the concentration of Canadian population near the U.S. border, and especially along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor.

In future postings, I’ll take a look at the differences (if any) in accident statistics between the two countries.

There’s a lot of noise in the blogsphere about the new Google Maps site, and most of it is good. One of the nicest features is the ability to find things using plain query strings like airports near livingston, nj or ice cream in gananoque, on and see the results plotted on a detailed map (if you zoom in far enough, you can even see the taxiways at many airports).

This will make a good first stop for planning a flight to a new town.

Transport Canada is planning to put an Aeronautical Information Manual similar to the U.S. AIM online in HTML format this fall. While we’re waiting, they’ve put the existing ICAO-conformant Aeronautical Information Publication online in PDF format.

The PDF is fully searchable (i.e. it’s proper text, not a scan), so Canadian pilots can start resolving pilot-lounge arguments about rules and regulations without spending hours reading through the paper AIP. This, obviously, is a good thing. Once the HTML-based AIM is out, web sites, newsgroup postings, emails and blogs will be able to link directly to subsections and paragraphs of the document, which will an even better thing.

What Transport Canada will need, though, is a new way to report changes in each release of the AIP. While struggling to insert page updates into the current paper AIP was a major hassle, it did give me an easy way to see what had changed each time. A change summary is OK, but what if I miss a cycle? Here’s an idea for Transport Canada: why not set up a weblog with a posting for each AIM ammendment and a back link to the appropriate section of the online document? If you need help, I know a good XML and web consultancy right here in Ottawa.

Philip Greenspun is posting about transitional training from his Diamond Star into a super-high-performance Piper Malibu. Here is one man living the geek dream, especially since he made his money from a company associated with Open Source software, the basis of street-credibility in the software world. I hope that he will post a lot more about the Malibu transition, so the rest of us can live the life vicariously.

(photograph courtesy Philip Greenspun)

[Update: once again, I missed a syndication URL] Pilots have been painfully slow to take to the blogsphere compared to people in other areas. We love our newsgroups, mailing lists, and web sites, but gosh-darn-it if we’re going to mess with them new-fangled blog thingeys. One of my ongoing goals for Land and Hold Short is to collect together links to other aviation weblogs, especially those that have something to set them apart, to start to build us from a bunch of fragmented sites into an online community.

I just stumbled upon an entertaining aviation weblog, Cockpit Conversation, which has three strong selling points:

1. it’s by a professional pilot (using a pseudonym for obvious career-protection reasons)
2. it’s by a fellow Canadian (giving an alternative to the usual U.S. perspective)
3. it’s by a woman (not the one pictured here, though)

It’s been 76 years since Amelia Earhart (the one who is pictured here) and 98 other pioneer woman pilots founded the Ninety-nines, but the face that aviation presents to the general public is still usually that of the pudgy, grey-haired middle-aged male (i.e. people who look like me). The reality inside aviation is different: go to many flight schools and you’ll see lots of women going through the professional pilot programs as well as sitting in the right seats as instructors, trying to survive their students’ bounce-and-go landings. It’s time we heard from a lot more from them, so that girls don’t end up thinking of flying only as an embarassing-old-dad kind of thing and shun it, either as a career or as a hobby.

I hope that the author finds a way to make an RSS or Atom feed available some time in the future. [Update: I missed it here]

Sometimes it’s hard to love the Canada Flight Supplement or its U.S. equivalent, the Airport and Facility Directory, printed on cheap, easy-to-rip newsprint in tiny smudged type, going out of date every seven weeks, and filled with abbreviations you have trouble remembering. Still, I was looking at the entry from Hearst, ON, where I’ll be flying for Hope Air next week (see this posting about my last trip), and I thought it might be interesting to see how the (very short) entry would look written out in proper English prose. First, a scan of the entry, with a link to a larger image:

Now, the same thing written out in proper English prose.

Hearst/René Fontaine Municipal Airport (ICAO code CYHF)

Location

The Hearst airport is located at latitude 49 degrees 42 minutes 51 seconds north, longitude 83 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds west, 1.5 nautical miles northwest of the town. The magnetic variation is nine degrees west, and the time zone is five hours behind UTC (four hours during daylight savings time). The elevation of the airfield is 827 feet above mean sea level. The airport appears in the AIR5008 Visual Navigation Chart (Thunder Bay), the E-18 World Aeronautical Chart, and the LO-4 low-altitude IFR enroute chart. It has at least one published instrument approach in the Canada Air Pilot.

Operator

The airport operator is the Corporation of the Town of Hearst, which can be reached by phone at (705) 362-4341. The airport can be reached directly at (705) 372-2842. The airport is certified by Transport Canada.

Public Facilities

The airport has a terminal building with telephone and taxi services available. Food, medical facilities, accomodation, and car rental are available within five nautical miles of the airport.

Flight Planning

NOTAMs for this airport are available in the NOTAM file CYHF. Flight planning services are available through the London Flight Information Centre at (866) WXBRIEF.

Services

Services are available from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm local time (1400-2200z, 1300-2100z during daylight savings time) Monday to Friday. At other times, a callout charge may be levied for one or more services. 100 low lead avgas and Jet-A fuel are available, as well as all grades of engine oil. Airplane storage, services and minor repairs, long-term parking, airplane tie-downs, and airplane plug-ins are also available. The airport offers supplementary de-icing fluid and 1000/1500 amp jet starting units.

Runway Data

The airport has one runway surface, serving as runways 04 (magnetic heading 41 degrees) and 22 (magnetic heading 221 degrees). The surface is 4500 feet long, 100 feet wide, and paved with asphalt. Runway condition reports are available from the operator, and there is only limited winter maintenance.

Lighting

Both runways 04 and 22 have flashing strobes serving as runway identification lights, together with green/red threshold and runway end lights and three-position, medium intensity edge lights. There is also PAPI approach path lighting at each end of the runway designed for an eye-to-wheel height of up to 10 feet. The pilot must key the microphone seven times within five seconds on the frequency 122.8 MHz to activate the runway lights. The pilot may then select the brightness by keying the microphone seven times for maximum brightness, five times for medium brightness, or three times for minimum brightness, also within five seconds.

Communications

The unmonitored aerodrome traffic frequency is 122.8 MHz. It is in effect for a five nautical mile radius up to 3800 feet above sea level.

Navigation

The nearest navigation aid is the Hearst NDB, on the frequency 241 KHz broadcasting the Morse code identifier “HF”. It is a medium-power (50-2000 watt) transmitter located at latitude 49 degrees 40 minutes 2 seconds north, longitude 83 degrees 43 minutes 28 seconds west. From the NDB, the airport is 2.8 nautical miles on a magnetic track of 38 degrees.

Procedures

Right-hand circuits are in effect for runway 22, in accordance with the Canadian Aviation Regulations, section 602.96.

Caution

There is a possibility of winter maintenance equipment on the runway outside of operational hours. There is also a possibility of wildlife on the runway. There is bird activity during the months of April to October.

That is a lot of information packed into a tiny space (and I left out the information printed on the diagram, including the safe altitudes around the airport). There is a certain ugly beauty about it. Now, if only I could remember all of those abbreviations …