Land and Hold Short

Yesterday, under a low ceiling and poor visibility in showers, I made my shortest-ever point-to-point trip in an airplane, flying the 7 nm from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier to my plane’s new home at Ottawa/Rockcliffe.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of light aircraft based at Rockcliffe, of all descriptions: the largest is a shorter-bodied version of the Piper Navajo, and the smallest are Cub-sized two-seaters and similar. There are many vintage and unusual aircraft tied down along the long rows of the flightline.

While one of the Rockcliffe instructors and I were standing in the rain kicking, raking, and digging through the mud trying to find the long-disused tie-down chains in my new spot, he mentioned that he thought my plane was the only Warrior on the field (though there are many other Cherokees). Who’d have figured that a Warrior, of all planes, would stand out on a flightline? I’m glad I don’t fly anything more mundane, like, say, an Ercoupe — I’d hate to blend into the crowd.

Note to American readers: while the Warrior is a very common training plane in the U.S., it’s not very popular in Canada — until the mid 1990s, spin training was required for a Canadian PPL, and unlike the Cessna 172/150/152, Warriors are not certified for intentional spins.

I just finished a three-day business trip to Boston, once again using the very friendly Norwood Memorial Airport (the Wikipedia article needs some TLC) to the south of the city. Boston has a nasty airport security zone with high security fees, required prop locks, etc. Norwood is far enough to be outside the zone, but is near stations on two MBTA commuter lines, making it easy to get in and out of downtown.

When I’m flying, I usually leave my cell phone turned on (a grey area, I know) so that I can get access quickly in case of emergencies. During this trip, however, I noticed something strange: once I was in the U.S., I had either no signal or an extremely weak one with no bars. This continued all the way into Boston, even over cities and Boston suburbs. Coverage was great as soon as I was on the ground, so it wasn’t a problem with roaming.

I think that the cell phone company who partners with Bell Mobility (Sprint?) must be refitting their towers to block out signals coming from above. I’d guess that this is the first step to allowing cell phone calls from airliners, before setting up satlink cells inside the planes themselves. This change is significant for pilots like me, who hope to be able to use the cell phone for last-ditch emergency communication if all else fails. As an historical footnote, this change would also would have prevented the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 from finding out about the WTC and Pentagon attacks and deciding to fight back against the highjackers. That said, the change is probably inevitable for simple business reasons.

Almost the second I flew across the St. Lawrence River from New York State into the province of Ontario, all of the bars on my cell phone lit up again.

I flew from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie yesterday, then flew a Hope Air patient from the Soo to Kingston this morning, before making the short hop back to Ottawa in the afternoon.

Westbound

Flying westbound to the Soo is a slow prospect in the Warrior. The trip is a bit under 400 nm, but due to the headwinds, it generally takes around four hours. This time, it was all IFR, but at least it was smooth, the icing levels were well above me, and all the thunderstorm activity was about 50 miles to the north of my route. Everytime Toronto Centre gave me a new altimeter setting, it was significantly lower, sometimes requiring an altitude change of a couple of hundred feet, as I flew towards the big low parked over Lake Superior and the nasty weather around it. The IMC on my route from Ottawa, however, had a different cause: the tropical storms and hurricanes had pushed a huge amount of hot, humid air north above them, leaving a stationary front a bit south of James Bay (north of my route). Because the front was there for so long, what had been supposed to be nice and clear became cloudy and hazy, plunging us into unseasonable IMC of the summer variety.

Cold front

A cold front was be blowing through overnight, and I know that I’d have to fly through that cold front from the back side in the morning. For those who don’t fly, you need to understand that cold fonts suck — they mean lots of rain, thunderstorms, turbulence, fog, cloud, and just about anything else you don’t like (in the summer, they even bring tornados). Lying awake in my hotel room at 5:00 am I heard the rain pounding outside, and knew that the front was on its way through.

When I walked out of my hotel in the morning, I found an airplane sitting in the parking lot right outside the door. I wasn’t sure whether to take this as an omen of good luck (the flight will go fine) or a warning (it’s a good day to tow your plane on a trailer) — I guess superstition is too complicated. Here’s a second cellphone photo of the plane, this time from behind, the way I saw it when I walked outside.

Eastbound

IMC and thunderstorms are a bad combination, because when you’re in cloud, there’s no way to see a storm coming. Before I left, weather radar showed that all the activity was well north of my route, though the GFA called for isolated thunderstorms all over ahead of the cold front. I evaluated the situation, and decided to list every way I had to avoid storms:

1. try to stay out of cloud so I can see buildups coming
2. use my Stormscope to watch for lightning strikes
3. ask Flight Services for regular updates from ground-based radar

None of these is 100% reliable: between cloud layers (and the layers go very high ahead of a cold front), it’s often hard to make out buildups ahead, since everything fades to white; the Stormscope is a very blunt instrument and misses intense weather that doesn’t happen to produce lightning; and Flight Services is looking at outdated and and low-res lightning and radar pictures, when I can reach them by radio at all. As a result, I made a couple of rules for my flight:

• At least two of these three methods had to be available to me at every point during the flight, or else I’d abort and land at the nearest airport.
• All available methods had to show a wide, clear path with no storms moving towards it.

It turned out a bit bumpy, with a lot of rain, but nothing more disturbing. Three hours of hand-flown IMC has left me a bit tired now, though. As usual, the weather cleared up just before my destination, so I didn’t get to log an approach.

Northbound

With the tailwind from the southwest, I flew into Ottawa like a rocket: the whole flight from Kingston took about a half hour, and I made it home before the front hit Eastern Ontario. Unfortunately, I then had to wait 35 minutes for a cab to take me the last 10 km home. The wind’s starting to shake the leaves outside my window now, so I guess the weather’s on it’s way in our game of leapfrog.

Warm front pushing in, ceilings at 800 ft AGL with occasional 400 ft, light rain, freezing levels above 10,000: it looked like great flying weather to get in some IFR approaches in actual IMC.

Recency

Pilots have to do a certain amount of flying in real or similated instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) to keep their instrument ratings current (otherwise, they’re allowed to fly only in visual conditions). In Canada, the recency requirements include six hours and six approaches to minima.

Air mattresses and sailors

Note the phrase real or simulated IMC. Simulated IMC — flying wearing foggles or a hood to block the view out the window — is one of the sad jokes of aviation, since it simulates flying in real instrument conditions about as well as floating on an air mattress in a hotel pool simulates sailing in a storm on the high seas. While flying six approaches wearing foggles (with a safety pilot) meets the legal requirements for IFR recency, I don’t think it does much for actual flight safety, so I use it only as a last resort, mainly in the winter when IMC near the ground almost always comes with icing. As a result, on the rare days when I have no meetings booked with customers, no family committments, and beautiful low rain arrives without any thunderstorms or icing, I rush to the airport, get soaked preflighting the plane, ignore the people standing inside shaking their heads with pity and disbelief, and take off into the clouds.

Getting started

There hasn’t been a lot of rain this summer, but I did manage approaches in IMC in July on actual trips — one into Boston/Norwood, and one into Toronto/City Centre — so if I could manage a quick four approaches today, I’d be current until mid-January (when I’ll probably have to use the hated foggles). I called flight services, and they confirmed with ATC that a mid-day training flight would be OK. At the airport, I fueled the plane (full tanks are always a good idea in low IMC, since diversions can come unexpectedly), holding one hand over the tank opening to keep the rain out, then took off, and within a couple of minutes, there was nothing but white outside my window.

Smith’s Falls NDB 06 full procedure

I’ve developed a nice circuit of approaches around Ottawa. I started by flying to Smith’s Falls/Montague for the full procedure NDB 06 — that has me flying directly to an NDB (an AM radio navigation aid), flying away from the runway for two minutes, doing a funny kind of loop, coming back into to the navaid, then continuing at a pre-determined altitude until I either see the runway or run out of time. I was in and out of cloud bases at the minimum descent altitude of 980 ft MSL (564 ft AGL), but I did see the runway in time that I probably could have landed with a fast dive and some borderline aerobatics. Fortunately, that wasn’t my plan today, so I started climbing again for the missed approach and called back in to Ottawa Terminal.

Ottawa/Carp VOR/DME B with 21 DME arc transition

The second approach was the VOR/DME B (B is pronounced “bravo”) approach into Ottawa/Carp. For this one, instead of a full procedure (flying away from the airport, then reversing and coming in), I flew something called a DME arc, which is my very favourite IFR procedure. DME is an old-fashioned (pre-GPS) instrument that tells how far my plane is away from a UHF transmitter: in this case, from the Ottawa VOR (an FM radio navaid) on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. To fly a DME arc, you simply turn 90 degrees from the DME at a pre-determined distance, and adjust your course so that the distance on the DME stays the same. If you flew long enough, you’d do a complete circle around the DME transmitter. There are all kinds of convoluted procedures for flying a DME arc, including messing with VOR radials, etc., but mine is easy: just turn the plane a few degrees away from the DME if the distance is getting too low, or a few degrees towards the DME if the distance is getting too high. It works a charm, and requires almost no work. I flew the 21 nm DME arc until I intersected a VOR radial that would take me over the Carp airport from the south, then followed the radial, lowering my altitude in steps: down to 1,400 ft once I was on the inbound radial, 900 ft (518 ft AGL) at 11 DME from the VOR (1.8 DME from the airport), and then climbing back up to 2,900 ft at 9.2 DME when I was over the airport. I saw the Carp airport at the last second, and again, could have made it in with some aerobatics, but this was a circling approach (I wasn’t lined up with a runway), and it might have been a bit too exciting. More on circling approaches later. Note also that at both airports, I was barely able to see the runway at around 500 ft AGL.

Ottawa/Gatineau VOR/DME 09

The third approach in my circuit is a straight-in VOR/DME 09 approach for Ottawa/Gatineau, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. The transition from the Carp approach is trivial: the Carp missed approach heads for the Ottawa VOR, and the Gatineau approach starts at the VOR, so just … fly to the VOR. For the Gatineau approach, I fly away from VOR on a predetermined radial, again, with a series of step-downs at various DME distances: 2,900 ft to the VOR, 2,400 ft until 5 DME, 1,300 ft until 11 DME, then 760 ft (551 ft AGL) until 14.3 DME, when I’m right over the airport and begin the missed approach. The weather was a little better here, and I broke out of the cloud bases around 1,200 ft MSL (1,000 ft AGL) and was able to see the runway clearly. That led me to think that I could expect about the same ceiling across the river at Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier.

Ottawa ILS 07 circling 04 … no, straight-in 07 … no, circling to a taxiway … I mean 04

My last approach was back into Ottawa. All of the previous approaches were non-precision: the navigation aids guided me to the airport horizontally, but did not guide my altitude (except through step-down fixes). Ottawa has two more advanced navaids called ILS, that can provide a precision approach: not only does it help me stear left or right, but it tells me precisely what altitude I should be at during each stage of my descent. I have to fly around to the west side of the airport to get in line for the ILS 07, which I’ll be sharing with big transport jets. ATC tells me that there are three big jets on the way in, so I have a couple of choices: fly out 15 miles and have a nice, easy approach behind them, or turn in tight almost right over the final approach fix and rush down ahead of the jets. When I was an IFR student, I would always have taken the easy one because approaches seemed so hard to set up, but the tight one sounded like better practice (and is more realistic for a small plane at a busy airport), so I took that.

Terminal gave me an immediate turn and descent. I turned sharp (30 deg bank) and dropped the plane at 1,000 fpm to show them that I was capable of taking this approach without messing up their traffic flow. That was good enough, and they kept turning me in and dropping me until I joined the ILS right outside the final fix. I knew enough not to fly an approach at 90 knots in these circumstances, so I pushed the throttle forward and whizzed down the ILS at 120 kt. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to be in the way of the jets, Terminal turned me over to tower.

An ILS approach straight-in to a runway has very low minima: normally, you can fly right to 200 ft above the ground before you have to see the runway. However, I was planning on doing a circling approach to the runway near my parking spot (remember circling approaches from Carp?), so I needed legally to see my runway at 506 feet above the ground (880 ft MSL) and be able to stay at that altitude until I was lined up for my final approach. No dice. While the airport was reporting better conditions over the control tower, there was low cloud over the approach to 07, and I was coming down through 1,200, 1,100, 1,000 ft with no sign of either runway 07 or 04, though I could see a bit of ground straight down. At 950 ft I began a rapid call to the tower asking to cancel the circling and land on 07, but right at that moment — as I passed through 900 ft, 20 ft above circling minima — I broke out and saw the whole airport. In the middle of a sentence, I switched back with “correction: 04 in sight, continuing with circling approach”. Unfortunately, in those 2-3 seconds, I forgot that airports always look different in IMC, and I actually lined up with a taxiway instead of 04 and descended below the 880 ft circling minima. Fortunately, I caught the mistake before tower did, and — with some of the stupid borderline aerobatics I had been smug about avoiding at Smith’s Falls and Carp — sidestepped a half mile to the actual runway 04 and did a smooth landing on the wet pavement.

Lesson learned: circling approaches near minima really are a dumb idea, and it’s hard to make good decisions in a fraction of a second at the end of an approach. When the ceiling was close to circling minima, I should just have planned on the straight-in landing and an extra 10 minutes taxiing.

I have no idea how the flight got to this point, but according to this CBC article, once the pilot found himself low over downtown Montreal in a Cessna 172M without a working engine, he seems to have done a good job landing on Avenue du Parc in Montreal, with no harm to people or property.

The incident happened yesterday on September 10, the day before the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, so it’s easy to imagine how people might react when they saw a plane swooping down and landing in the middle of a major city, right? Wrong: Montreal continues to deserve its reputation as Canada’s (and North America’s?) most laid-back city. Here’s how people actually reacted:

No one was hurt during the emergency landing, which unfolded in front of a crowd of amused onlookers lounging on Mount Royal Park’s green hillside.

They hovered around the plane and snapped photos.

What about the police? Surely they activated some kind of emergency anti-terrorism plan? Well, actually …

Montreal police were the first emergency workers called to the scene.

Police spokesman Robert Mansueto said he’d never seen anything like this in the city.

“I think this surprised a lot of police officers,” Mansueto said.

“Everybody did a double take, you know, saying is this a joke or is this for real.”

Terrorists win whenever they make people afraid, so it’s nice to be able to celebrate a victory of common sense over fear on this otherwise-grim anniversary. Kudos to the good people of Montreal.

(Photo: Tanya Birkbeck, CBC)

After a lot of agonizing, I’ve decided to move my Warrior from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier (CYOW) eight nautical miles northeast to Ottawa/Rockcliffe (CYRO) effective 1 October. The short flight means a huge number of changes for me: I’ll be leaving Canada’s 6th busiest airport, where you have to tune in three different frequencies (ATIS, Clearance delivery, and ground) before you even start taxiing, and moving to an uncontrolled airport in the middle of parkland by the Ottawa River. Here’s a shot of part of the flight line, taken from the clubhouse porch:

I’ve flown into, maybe, 30 or 40 different airports, from tiny grass strips to huge international airports much busier than CYOW, but coming home from a long trip I’ve always know that there was a lot of support waiting for me, including two ILS approaches, several FBOs, heated hangars for deicing, emergency equipment, all types of servicing, washrooms available 24/7 for desperate passengers, etc. Now, I’m going to be arriving at an airport with no instrument approach, one tiny maintenance shop on the field, and a barbeque that never seems to stop churning out hamburgers (little use to a vegetarian like me, sadly). It’s going to be a big adjustment. One nice feature is the Canada Aviation Museum on the south side of the field, across the runway from the tie-downs:

I’ve never kept my plane anywhere but the big airport. I did my primary flight training, night rating, and instrument rating there, and when I bought my Warrior, the broker flew it in from Toronto and we did the preflight there. I have no regrets about training at a busy airport — I know too many pilots who are terrified of ATC and busy airspace, but I’ve flown around Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia (as well as many smaller airports) with no problem at all, because I was used to the radio work right from the start. When I was first asking about flying lessons, flight schools at small airports gave me a lot of BS about higher training costs or long delays at towered airports, but they didn’t turn out to be a problem, and I feel like I would have had only a partial education learning to fly somewhere like Rockcliffe.

Now, though, the expense is catching up with me. I have a very good deal on a tie-down spot with plug-in at the big airport, but when I add up landing fees and other costs, I calculated that it’s costing me about $1,000/year more to park at Macdonald-Cartier than it will at Rockcliffe (they’re the same distance from my house), even when I factor in two diversions/year for weather and the resulting cab fares and parking expenses. Next year, when Nav Canada brings in their new user fees for large airports, I calculate that the price difference will jump to $1,500/year. I won’t speculate about how hard a commercial pilot like Aviatrix or Sulako has to work to make that much, but it’s a lot for me, too, especially with two daughters hitting university in the next decade.

Here’s my new tie-down spot. It doesn’t look like much, but presumably, there are tie-downs and some paving stones under all that grass and weed:

It’s not just a matter of money — I’m hoping that a new airport will give me a new start with flying, maybe bringing me closer to other pilots and to my plane itself. Rockcliffe seems like a much more pleasant place to spend a sunny afternoon waxing the plane or BSing with other pilots in the clubhouse (or mowing my parking spot), even if I can’t eat the burgers.

A reader (who wishes to remain anonymous) sent me the link to this picture. Here’s a high resolution version. The photo was taken over the Atlantic Ocean near Charleston, SC on 16 May 2006 — a C-17 released flares, and the smoke from the flares makes the turbulent air in the big plane’s wake visible, including the wingtip vortices.