Land and Hold Short

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.

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?

Novelist Hugh MacLennan referred to the English and French in Canada as Two Solitudes, but that’s not a great working model for aviation. In eastern Canada, we do have to deal with both languages on the radio; I’ve developed an marginal passive understanding of aviation French from a few years of flying out of Ottawa, and I thought it might be worth collecting some of the most common terms I happen to remember — these are important words you may need to understand on the radio, not a complete French-English aviation glossary. Please let me know if I get any wrong — and does anyone know the French word for “FBO“? (It’s “exploitant d’aérodrome privé” according to Nav Canada, but “le FBO” in real life — see comments for more info.)

à destination de

heading for …

l’aérogare (m)

terminal (building)

l’aéroport (m)

airport

l’aire de stationnement (f)

apron (parking)

l’amerrissage (m)

water landing (c.f. “l’aterrissage”)

l’approche (f)

approach

l’approche finale (f)

final (leg); “en approche finale” on final

l’approche interrompue (f)

overshoot/go-around; “en approche interrompue” on the overshoot/going around

l’approche manquée (f)

missed approach

attendre à l’écart

(to) hold short

l’atterrissage (m)

landing (c.f. “l’amerrissage”)

l’atterrissage complet

full stop (landing)

l’avion (m)

aircraft

le calage altimétrique

altimeter setting

le cap

heading

le circuit

(traffic) circuit/pattern

le contrôle sol

ground control

le côté inactif

inactive/upwind side of the runway (in Canada, pilots usually approach an uncontrolled airport from the upwind side “du côté inactif” and cross overhead the field to join the mid downwind)

le décollage

takeoff; “décoller” to take off

l’étape de base (f)

base (leg); “en étape de base” on base

les installations (f)

airport buildings; more generally, the airport/field (e.g. “cinq milles des installations” five miles from the field)

le mille (marin)

(nautical) mile

le pilote

pilot

la piste

runway; “la piste en service” active runway

le posé-décollé touché-décollé

touch-and-go (landing)

remonter (la piste)

backtrack (on the runway)

le seuil (de piste)

(runway) threshold

le tour (de contrôle)

(control) tower

le vent arrière

downwind, tailwind; “en vent arrière” on (the) downwind (leg)

le vent debout

upwind, headwind; “côté vent debout” the upwind side

le vent traversier

crosswind; “en vent traversier” on (the) crosswind (leg)

verticale de

above/over; (e.g. “à vingt-cinq mille pieds verticale de Lachute” over Lachute at 2,500 feet)

le virage

turn (change in direction); e.g. “virage à droit”

la voie de circulation

taxiway

le vol

flight; “en vol” in the air

There’s a much more complete glossary here (also from English to French), but these are the terms you’re most likely to hear on the radio.

Gunner William Henry Ranson (born 1843) has started a blog about his life in the ranks of Royal Artillery and as a civilian in Canada right after Confederation:

http://whranson.blogspot.com/

Gunner Ranson was my great-great-grandfather. After serving in the Royal Artillery during the 1860s, he ended up settling in Canada permanently in the 1870s. While many British officers kept diaries and wrote memoirs, very few men of the ranks did — although a good number could read and write, few had the inclination and the available time (and light) to do so — but my great-great-grandfather was an exception. While we don’t have the original diary, we do have a summary that he wrote later in life as a memoir, based on the lost diary, giving a working man’s view of both the British military and of later civilian life (often more brutal) in Victorian Canada.

My brother Tom has had the memoir for some years and has been trying to decide the best way to edit and publish it. In the end, he has decided to publish sections serially as a blog. I encourage anyone interested in British or Canadian history to read this. The blog format reminds me very strongly of the serial magazine publication common during the Victorian period.

A bunch of us agreed to post on the same topic yesterday, writing about one good part of flying, one bad part, and one weird part (unfortunately, I’m running a day late). Here are some of the other blogs with a post:

• Off the beaten path
• Nec temere nec timide (I also have a blog with a Latin name, Quoderat — so there!)
• pilot in training
• Sulako’s blog

This time, my cheers and jeers are for the airports and airlines (yes, there are cheers), since I decided to leave the Warrior at home and fly to Newark, New Jersey this week.

Jeer: Us the voters

We have no one but ourselves to blame for the ridiculous security procedures in place at the airports now. The poor screeners are doing only what the politicians order them to do, and we’re the politicians’ bosses, so the buck stops with us. I guess it’s good to know that civilization is safe from my shoes, belt, toothpaste, and shaving cream for at least one more day.

Jeer: airline advertising

It’s scummy for an airline to advertise, say, a $99 one-way fare when they know that the real fare is going to be something like $250 with security fees, airport fees, sales taxes, and so on. People want to know what they have to pay, not what the airlines will receive. In the UK (or all of Europe?), it’s already illegal to advertise fares that way. Also, a jeer for the governments (and that means us the voters, again) who treat airlines like cash cows by taxing tickets into the ground.

Cheer: the crew of CO 2686, Monday 12 February

Nothing heroic here, but on descent and approach, they dealt with moderate turbulence all the way below the cloud deck — I shudder to think what the turbulence would have been for my Warrior. I appreciate having someone else worry about weather, routing, clearances, turbulence, etc., just for once.

Cheer: anonymous Continental Airlines ticket agent

Sure, my last-minute ticket here cost far too much, but it still came with a $100 change fee. With heavy snow and freezing rain coming Wednesday morning (OK, I admit that I checked the TAFs — I’m not very good as a passenger), I called to move my return flight to this evening, and Continental waived the change fee without my even asking. Cheers for an airline smart enough to understand that I’m doing them a favour by giving them one less irate, stranded customer to deal with tomorrow.

A friend sent me a link to this 20 minute U.S. government training film for the F4U Corsair (Google Video). Make sure your wings are locked in the down position before takeoff, and remember that you’re burning well in excess of 200 gallons/hour at military power. Stall is a bit exciting, and make sure you don’t pull more than 7Gs in a dive.

A lot of the stuff here, though — like the checklists and mixture management, and the caution not to ride the brakes while taxiing — will still be familiar to a student pilot in 2007.

When I bought my Warrior, there was a small plastic sign in the middle of the panel reading “If you wish to smoke, please step outside.” My daughters were angry with me for removing the placard, but I’ve never been one to wear a stale joke on a tee-shirt or a car bumper, so keeping one on the panel just didn’t work for me.

In a recent blog entry, Sulako, a bizjet pilot, found a much funnier way to express the same opinion about smoking. He dug up some old notes from when he was flying an MU-2 medevac back in 2004, and quoted these lines:

On that note, thank Jebus for the smokers, they are our bread and butter. If you smoke and aren’t smoking at this exact second, I urge you to pull one out and light it up. Things have been a bit slow so far today and I wouldn’t mind flying.

Even though Sulako has moved on, he’d probably appreciate it if you could start smoking so that his colleagues flying medevac can keep putting food on their tables. Do you really want to put hard-working pilots out of jobs?

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.

I flew my family of four to Gaspé last Monday 24 July, and flew back yesterday (Sunday 30 July). Here are some disjointed notes, since I’m too far buried in work-related e-mail and demands to construct a continuous narrative.

• Flying four adult-sized people plus luggage plus full fuel in a 160 hp Warrior is legal, but it’s a huge challenge. You have to treat every takeoff as a short-field takeoff, and have to be bang on the numbers to make the thing leave the runway and climb at all on a hot day (I’ve posted before about how flight training fails to prepare pilots for heavily-loaded, underpowered planes). Expect to see frequent negative climb rates above 7,000 ft (4,000 ft if there are any mountain waves): just hold Vy and be patient.
• Deviating around thunderstorms in a slow plane is also a huge challenge because of the distances involved. I guessed wrong and deviated south when all the airliners were deviating north, and ended up giving my family a grand tour of the Eastern townships of Quebec (which we couldn’t actually see, but no matter). I’m looking forward to having radar images available for Canada.
• Bilingualism is a good thing, except in a busy circuit at an uncontrolled Quebec airport. I do speak some French, and I managed to understand that an incoming pilot behind me was bound and determined to land on 05 when I was already in the circuit for 23 and Unicom was insisting over and over that 23 was the preferred runway. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand enough French to realize that he was cutting me off after I switched 180 degrees and joined the downwind for 05 to accomodate him. He was behind me, but when I turned base I saw him right in front of me on a straight-in final (which isn’t even legal for VFR in Canada at an uncontrolled airport). Life’s too short to argue with morons, especially in another language, but I have another good reason to prefer controlled airports. The other pilots at the airport were decent, no matter what language they were speaking.
• With fuel prices so high, I’m glad to fly a plane that doesn’t burn too much of it, even if our trips are sometimes a couple of hours longer. I found some good prices in Quebec, though, sometimes in unexpected places.
• I always worry about emergency landing spots when planning a flight over completely deserted areas, such as the interior of the Gaspé peninsula (where the St. Lawrence River meets the Gulf of the St. Lawrence). No need, really. It turns out that the interior is criss-crossed with, literally, hundreds or thousands of wide logging roads. I imagine that the surfaces are rough, and it might take a while for someone to find us, but even though I flew for over an hour out of range of towns, farms, roads, airports, etc., if I had lost an engine I would always have had a choice of literally dozens of easy, straight landing spots right under the plane. They might not have been nice on the landing gear, but they’d be a lot better than trees or plowed fields.
• It’s very hard to resist cheating when you’re IFR in actual IMC, have a VFR-only GPS and ATC offers you a direct routing that will shave 15 or 20 minutes off your trip (and vectoring isn’t possible, because you’re below radar). I won’t say whether I resisted successfully or not, but if I hadn’t, it would have been easy to verify my position periodically using VOR/DME fixes.
• I have a decent amount of actual IMC now, all of it hand-flown, and much of it in rough conditions. In a simple plane like a Warrior, I don’t think there would be any real benefit in having an autopilot, because the plane is draggy and unresponsive, giving me lots of time to fold maps, talk on the radio, etc. without going off course or tilting the wings. I know that things would be very different in a retractable.
• A long, non-stop flight is always tempting, especially when you’re flying back home westbound and might not have serious headwinds. The upper wind forecasts suggested that I could do the return flight (503 nm) in only 4:10, while my Warrior holds enough fuel to fly over 5:30 lean of peak at 75% power (8.5 gph from 48 gallons usable). When the actual winds indicated 4:30-4:40, however, I decided that I didn’t want to be one of those morons who runs out of fuel, even if the GPS said that I would have minimal legal VFR reserves, so I added a fuel stop. It turned out that I did have enough fuel, but family bladders appreciated the stop all the same.
• Flying an underpowered plane over hills makes me appreciate that the air moves in three dimensions: in addition to headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, etc., there’s always an updraft or downdraft. I was high enough to avoid the rough stuff, but at 8,500 feet over the mountains (3-4 thousand feet still make a mountain) I was constantly aware of the gentle waves (5-10 minute cycles) that were adding or subtracting about 5-10 knots of airspeed. I notice that flying over the Adirondacks as well. Some people just hold a constant airspeed and ride up and down on the waves, while others hold constant altitude and let the airspeed climb and drop. I chose the latter, since I was in an area of no radar coverage, and didn’t want to crowd the IFR altitudes.
• I had my first experience flying a significant amount of IFR in class G airspace (green on the map), but it wasn’t actually uncontrolled. Because I was going to be crossing a controlled airway, ATC kept talking to me and never said that I was uncontrolled, even though I was flying no-radar. I could legally have flown about an hour of my route IFR without a clearance, though, as long as I could have crossed the airway VFR.
• My family has almost 4 years experience with the airplane now, and they’re all extremely light packers and unfussy travellers. How many teenaged girls can pack enough for a week in a 10 lb suitcase? That alone is probably enough to justify the expense of flying.

Nav Canada has a whole bunch of proposed changes in its National Level of Service Report from last October (which I’ve noticed only now — here’s a link directly to the full 96-page PDF report). The report proposes revoking many approaches and decommissioning navaids (mainly low-powered NDBs), changing some hours of operation, eliminating some LF airway segments, changing weather reporting for many airports, and — perhaps least controversionally — eliminating VHF direction finding from more airports.

The beginning of the report summarizes the proposed changes, alphabetically by airport, then provides details, objections, etc. for each one. For example, here are the proposed changes for Montreal/Trudeau (formerly Dorval):

The only change of interest in the Ottawa area is the planned revocation of Ottawa/Gatineau NDB 27 (there’s still an NDB/DME 27 approach) — I don’t think that anyone uses the NDB 27 except for training, since the minima are so high, so that shouldn’t hurt. Sooner or later, though, with all these vanishing NDBs (in the U.S. even more than in Canada), I’m going to have to grit my teeth and shell out for an IFR GPS in my plane.

If you’re a Canadian pilot (or a pilot who flies to Canada), take a peek at the list and see if anything interesting is proposed at the airports you use, then leave a comment or mention the changes in your own blog.

U.S. airport diagrams for all airports with instrument approaches have been available online for a while, along with all U.S. instrument procedures (SIDs, STARs, approaches, etc.); recently, official PDF versions became available which do not go fuzzy when you blow them up and print them out, like the old scanned documents did.

Now, finally, Nav Canada has made the same thing available for Canadian pilots here (click on “CAMS”). Previously, to get free Canadian airport diagrams online, you had to go to the U.S. department of defense (seriously!) at their DAFIF site, and even then, only a relatively small number of Canadian airports were represented (note, however, that the DAFIF is still the only free source for actual Canadian approach plates).

So, how do score Nav Canada for this one?

• +10: made the diagrams available for free, even though it meant paying a government department (U.S. government publications are in the public domain; Canadian government publications are cost-recovery, so you have to pay to play)
• -1: invented a confusing new name, CAMS (Canadian Aerodrome Maneuvering Surfaces)
• -5: whole thing in one massive PDF file (this link will expire soon), instead of a separate PDF for each airport

Final score: +4, or “good effort; keep working to improve”. That last point is particularly annoying, not because of the long download (a majority of Canadians have broadband), but because it’s impossible to link to or bookmark individual diagrams — if I’m posting about an airport, I’d like to be able to make a link, but I cannot. This principle — that everything has to have its own, persistent URL — is called REST, and it’s the basic design that makes the web work. But now, I’m letting high-tech stuff from my other weblog spill over into this one, so I had best stop before I lose the few readers I have.

Kris Johnson, a student pilot, has a post about the lack of glamour in being a pilot. Instead of the soft leather jacket, silk scarf, and rougish smile, it’s a big, clumsy headset, googly sunglasses, and trying to find a dignified way to lower yourself bum-first into a Piper Warrior down off the wingwalk.

I’m not sure where Kris lives, but in colder latitudes, we also have the problem of dressing for survival in case of a forced landing during winter months — that means long underwear, thick socks, toque, big mittens, scarf, etc. Basically, you end up looking like one of the kids from South Park before you even get to the headset.

The U.S. Airport/Facility Directory consistently lists 1-800-WX-BRIEF as the phone number for any Flight Service Station (FSS). Unfortunately, the toll-free numbers don’t work for a Canadian cell phone, even when you’re in the U.S. — that makes life hard when you want to close a flight plan after landing at a non-towered airport (for example), or get a weather briefing while you’re in the taxi on the way to the airport.

Fortunately, I’ve just found this PDF list of local numbers for all U.S. FSS. Once I actually had to call Nav Canada’s toll-free FIC number just to have them look up a U.S. FSS number for me — I’m printing this out and putting it in my flight bag so that that doesn’t happen again. They’re also useful for getting a U.S. briefing from a Canadian landline.

Last week, I flew my first flight for Hope Air, a charity similar to Angel Flight in the United States and British Columbia. An icy, snow December is a strange time to start on something like that — many of the singles have been put to bed for the winter — but it was a nice, easy introductory baby trip from Ottawa to Toronto, and I had the benefit of knowing that Frank Eigler was waiting by his cell phone to charge to my rescue in his ice-certified Aztec if my little Warrior got stuck anywhere.

I’ve always wanted to help people with my time as well as money, but I had enough of stuffing envelopes during my teen years. Hope Air looked like a great opportunity, but only this year did I finally have enough hours to meet their requirements. They have a tough screening process, and I was happy to make it through and get my little baseball cap in the mail. The trip went well — I won’t print personal details about the patient or her escort, except that they were wonderful, friendly people — and I felt more like I was taking friends or neighbours for a ride than performing any act of charity. Frank was at the Toronto Island airport to meet me, and he gave me a city tour in his Aztec followed by some engine-out practice over Lake Ontario to celebrate my first Hope Air flight. I flew back late in the afternoon, and landed uneventfully despite a burned-out landing light (legal, as long as there are no passengers). My next flight will be to Kapuskasing in January, a much longer trip where the weather will have to be just right.

If you live in Canada, have the experience required, and are retired, self-employed (like me), or have an employer who is flexible about hours (like Frank, who works for RedHat), I highly recommend the Hope Air organization.

I recently ordered my first two CD-ROMs from John King and Martha King, who are very well known for their training down in the U.S.: Practical Risk Management for Pilots (USD 49.00) and Practical Risk Management for Weather (USD 49.00). Both require Windows (courses on Windows CD-ROM are sooooo 1980’s), but I won’t hold that against them. I have just finished working my way through both courses and printing out my certificates, and will share my opinions of both CD-ROMs (if you want to skip reading the rest, my conclusions are “definitely buy” and “don’t bother”). [Update: different opinion from Linda Pendleton on AvWeb.]

Practical Risk Management for Pilots

The first CD-ROM, Practical Risk Management for Pilots, is one of the best flying resources I’ve ever seen, and I tend to watch or read anything I can get my hands on. The production quality is clunky and the narrative and acting is downright horrible — to avoid embarrassment, I found myself working through the course mostly when no one else was home — but the content is very well though-out. The course is not about avoiding risk but about evaluating risk and deciding how much of it to take on; that’s the big difference between real risk management and the smug “what-an-idiot” accident-report analyses or trite sayings (”better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air…” or “a superior pilot uses his superior judgement…”) that usually masquerade as safety information for pilots, but actually do nothing to help us evaluate a flight and make decisions.

The Kings acknowledge that we have to accept a lot risk to fly at all — there is no such thing as a no-risk flight, and flying small planes is far more dangerous than driving — and their CD-ROM contains a series of videos, lessons, and exercises teaching us to analyze and classify risk the same way that we analyze the weather or our flight route. They sort the risks into categories, both pre-flight and in-flight, then offer the general rule of thumb that it’s OK to fly if the risks in only one category are marginal (i.e. if you’re just a little tired, but the weather’s excellent, the plane is good, and you’re under no pressure to complete the trip, then it’s probably still OK to fly). I like this kind of practical approach, and I’ve already started using it for my planning as icing season arrives here in Canada: learning how to manage risk systematically is like the difference between understanding weather reports and forecasts or just looking at the sky wondering if the weather’s going to be OK.

Practical Risk Management for Weather

I ordered both CD-ROMs at once, but even if I had not, after seeing how good the first one was I would have rushed out to buy the second one, Practical Risk Management for Weather. Unfortunately, this CD-ROM is an enormous disappointment. The vast majority of the material is rehashed from the first CD-ROM, including many of the same questions, scenarios, and videos. There are a handful of useful weather tips (i.e. choose an alternate along your route so that you can divert early; wind changes mean weather changes up ahead), but unlike risk management, this is common stuff available to pilots from many better sources: I think I remember that Richard Collins of Flying has a CD-ROM or DVD about weather. The only reason for buying this CD-ROM is that you’re a U.S. aircraft owner who insures with AVEMCO, because they’ll give you a 5% discount for completing the course. Those people should think of the second CD-ROM as a discount coupon; the rest of us shouldn’t bother.

Final Words

In the future, I expect much of the information in the first CD-ROM to become a standard part of every pilot’s training, so that analyzing risk systematically and properly is as important as calculating crosswind components or reading weather maps. That will be a good thing — perhaps the Kings’ biggest contribution to the aviation world — and it will more than make up for one bad CD-ROM. So I guess I don’t really begrudge them that extra USD 49.00.

Update: Linda Pendleton on AvWeb does not believe that King’s risk management courses are of much use, though she does not name them explicitly. She prefers what she calls “scenario-based training,” and also includes this little gem:

We take students to the practice area and drill them at length until they are able to do perfect turns around a point, s-turns along a road and lazy-eights. When was the last time a pilot was killed because the lazy eight was less than perfect?