Land and Hold Short

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.

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.

Here’s a statement from the U.S. Air Transport Association (ATA) — the airlines’ lobby group — about variable landing fees for U.S. airports (e.g. higher at peak times, lower other times):

“Unfortunately, [the policy] does nothing to fix the primary cause of delays - our nation’s increasingly antiquated air traffic control system,” ATA CEO Jim May said. “Additional fees . . . will only increase the cost of flying for the consumer.”

Yes, the U.S. ATC system is antiquated, and yes, higher peak-hour fees at big airports may mean higher ticket prices, but how is ATC the problem? Flights don’t get delayed because a controller has to use a voice line to coordinate hand-offs or stare at a cold-war era radar screen; they get delayed because runways at big hubs can handle only a limited number of landings per hour. The proof is in the fact that there are almost never delays flying to small airports. (Ever had a ground hold waiting to fly to Massena, NY? Didn’t think so.)

Let’s make it really easy for the ATA:

• Big airport (called “hub”) has one active landing runway.
• Runway can handle 40 landings every hour.
• Your members (airlines) schedule 50 flights per hour into the hub.
• Planes land late.

Give the FAA as much new shiny technology as you want, but if there aren’t enough runways, it won’t help. Do you really want to be flying heavy jets a minute apart or less? Fancy navigation technology won’t get rid of wake turbulence.

Pilots often already have their watches set to UTC, so this should be easy. At the exact minute of the winter solstice tonight, at 06:08 UTC, is the second annual Global Orgasm for Peace

To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible instantaneous surge of human biological, mental and spiritual energy.

The web site doesn’t specify that this has to happen in pairs — presumably, it helps the Earth’s [their capitalization] energy field just as well alone or even in groups.

If you need to be behind the controls of an aircraft at 6:08 UTC, however, you might want to substitute eating chocolate.

From a news story about a new U.S.-run military flight training school in Iraq:

The mission shift is particularly acute for [Lt. Col. Mark] Bennett, who flew 15-hour combat missions over Iraq in 2003 and now finds himself forming steadfast friendships with the Iraqi pilots he trains.

“The B-1 is a symbol of air power, and of weapon strength. Now I’m flying a Cessna — a symbol of training and guidance,” said Bennett, a 39-year-old San Antonio, Texas, resident who commands the 52nd Expeditionary Flying Training Squadron. “Frankly, I like this role better.”

This posting is not intended to make any moral statement, positive or negative, about the war in Iraq. I just want to share a nice perspective on flying, especially for people in small planes who fantasize about flying big military aircraft — it seems it can work both ways.

Cessna 172 photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Like pilots, flight attendants are highly-trained professionals; remember that next time you’re tempted to treat one like a waiter or bellhop (though you shouldn’t treat waiters or bellhops that way, either).

To see just how important they are, check out this high-res video of China Airlines Flight 120, the Boeing 737 that caught fire when a bolt punctured the fuel tank after the plane taxied to the gate at Naha Airport in Okinawa last August. The flight attendants had about a minute to evacuate 165 passengers and crew off the plane before the heat became so intense that it started warping the airframe (long before the firefighters arrived):

http://podcast.sankei.co.jp/movie/news/wmv/070820china_air.wmv

It’s terrifying how fast the fire can intensify and spread. It’s fortunate that they were already on the ground, and that the plane had already burned off some (most?) of its fuel during the flight.

Cheers to the flight attendants who got everyone out alive.

Jeers to the moron passengers who you can see carrying coats, carry-on bags, etc. with them on their way out — each item could have cost a fellow passenger’s life.

In the U.S., in an attempt to avoid user fees for general aviation, AOPA (the main G.A. advocacy group) worked with the FAA to outsource flight services (briefings, VFR flight plans, etc.) to Lockheed-Martin. AOPA didn’t realize that they were about to break the whole system.

The system broke badly — while some calls do get through, there are numerous reports of dropped calls, 30+ minute wait times, confused briefers, and more. For U.S. pilots, it’s almost as if flight services has ceased to exist, and judging from discussion on the mailing lists, they’ve pretty-much stopped filing VFR flight plans (which aren’t mandatory in the U.S.) except when required for ADIZ or cross-border flights.

Pilot, clear thyself

Things have gotten so bad that there’s now a new wiki, ClearanceWiki, devoted entirely to collecting information on how to pick up IFR clearances from small airports without having to call Flight Services — it lists radio frequencies or direct ATC phone numbers that are or might be available at each airport.

When I couldn’t close my flight plan

My own experience with Lockheed-Martin’s new U.S. FSS has been mixed. I appreciate that I can now call from a Canadian landline or cell phone to reach U.S. flight services (when the FAA ran the system, non-U.S. area codes were blocked), and most of the time I have been able to get through (do foreign callers get better service?), but I’ve had some bad experiences.

The worst was last week, when I landed at Alexandria Bay/Maxson in Upstate NY to clear customs. I had filed a cross-border VFR flight plan (as required by law), but Maxson has no RCO frequency, and I could not get through to anyone by phone to close the flight plan while my search-and-rescue time fast approached. I decided that my best bet was to take off and climb until I could reach someone (I also had to pick up an IFR clearance for the rest of the flight, but it was VFR in Maxson).

Once in the air, I explained the problem to Wheeler-SAC approach at Fort Drum, and they started trying to reach FSS for me on their own dedicated lines, also with no success (they were able to give me my IFR clearance quickly, though). Finally, I was high enough to pick up a Burlington RCO transceiver, and at the same time, Burlington had heard enough of a call from Wheeler-SAC (before the line went dead) to close my flight plan.

Not ideal in Canada, but better

While I’d rather not pay my ~$75 annual Nav Canada fee and the avgas tax, and I’m seriously p*ssed with the extra $10/takeoff fee coming up for using big airports like CYOW, we do get excellent FSS service here in Canada. I almost never wait on hold on the phone for a Nav Canada briefer, and when I do, it’s usually a few seconds at most; in fact, a couple of times I’ve called Nav Canada from the U.S. to get a briefing because I can’t get through to U.S. flight services — they’re always understanding and happy to help.

About three hours ago, a homebuilt Zenith 250 lost power after takeoff from Ottawa/Rockcliffe (my home airport) and made a forced landing in a wooded area a couple of miles east of the airport (CBC News story).

It’s a big flying club, and I don’t know the 68-year-old pilot, but the fact that he walked away uninjured suggests he did a good job getting the plane down. The news story says that the plane landed “nose down” — it might have settled nose down, but I doubt that it initially made ground contact that way when the pilot wasn’t hurt. Still, there was nothing annoying, obviously inaccurate, or sensational in the story, which is a good sign — no discussion of “narrowly missing” houses and schools only half a mile away, etc. Good for the CBC!

For pilots, the word “crash” generally means an high-speed, uncontrolled descent into the ground or similar collision with terrain (such as hitting a mountain in level flight), followed by total destruction of the aircraft and everyone in it. For the media, “crash” seems to mean any flight with a non-standard landing (such as a forced landing in a field, or a gear-up landing).

Now the bar’s just a bit lower: in this story, Reuters uses uses the term “crash” to describe a collapsed landing gear in a Dash-8, presumably during the landing roll after the plane had already touched down safely (the story isn’t big on details). They didn’t even bother calling it a “crash landing”; just a “crash”.

The online edition of Sports Illustrated (via CNN) has a story about the NTSB report on the Liddle crash. There’s nothing surprising in the report — the rough outline of the accident chain was obvious early on — but the story does mention an interesting side issue: Liddle’s Major League Baseball benefit package included USD 1M life insurance, but with an exclusion for an aircraft accident where the insured is “acting in any capacity other than as a passenger.”

The SI story talks about figuring out who was at the controls during the crash, but that’s not the point. Even if someone were to discover a photo showing Liddle’s instructor, Tyler Stranger, at the controls just before the crash, Liddle could still have been acting as pilot in command during the flight; if so, he would have continued in that capacity even when Stranger was at the controls. Likewise, if he were paying Stranger as his instructor during the flight, then he was acting in the capacity of a student, not a passenger, no matter who was at the controls or who was PIC.

I’m no fan of aviation exclusions in life insurance (my own insurer agreed not to put one in), and I don’t want to cheer the insurer on in the upcoming lawsuit, but there’s an important point to be made here about flying. As other aviation bloggers have pointed out, its the responsibility for a flight, not the physical manipulation of the controls, that defines a pilot in command. Two centuries ago Nelson’s Royal Navy, captains rarely, if ever, touched the wheels of their ships — that was the helmsmen’s job — but nobody doubted that they were captains, all the same.

This incident in Germany raises an interesting question about newer aircraft-engine designs. When the pilot(s) of a Diamond Twinstar arrived to find their battery flat, they started both engines using an auxiliary power unit. That’s not an unusual thing to do for a regular piston aircraft, since the alternator or generator will recharge the battery after a few minutes of flight (although it’s better for the battery’s life to trickle charge it); unfortunately, that turns out not to have been a good idea for the Twinstar, which suffered a double-engine failure on takeoff during gear retraction, and had to be belly landed in a field.

The battery was still flat when the pilots started to retract the gear. The gear retraction required enough power that it caused a brief electrical interruption to the Centurion 1.7 diesel engines, and that interruption caused both engines to reset. Now Diamond and Centurion are debating the issue: Centurion points out that operating procedures require at least one engine to be started on battery rather than APU, while Diamond points out that in tests, the engine fails after only a 1.7 ms power interruption, while it should be able to tolerate at least 50 ms.

Magnetos don’t need a battery

I’m sure that the companies will work it out, but in the meantime I’m happy that the 1940s-style technology powering my Warrior is a bit more robust. Once the propeller’s spinning, I could disconnect the battery and throw it out the window, and the engine would still keep running until the tanks are empty — the electricity for the spark plugs comes from a redundant pair of magnetos powered by the engine itself, and do not require a battery or alternator to keep working.

[Update: Boing Boing bought into the airlines' side on this and went even further, confusing airport development funds with ATC costs and somehow making it sound like 25% of the cost of each airline ticket subsidizes rich people in bizjets. To their credit, they ran a couple of follow-up corrections from readers. Thanks to Mark for the tip.]

In this speech, U.S. FAA administrator Marion C. Blakey defends a new, fee-based U.S. system on these grounds:

“Tell you what. If the FAA really wanted to kill GA, as our critics claim, we’d just sit back and do nothing. We’d leave the air traffic system just the way it is, and let congestion slowly squeeze them out.”

What pilots know (but the public doesn’t) is that we have procedures for handling every part of a flight without help from air traffic control (ATC), and that thousands of flights every day go from point A to point B without ever talking to an air traffic controller, just like car drivers can manage a four-way stop without the help of a traffic cop. We have rules for departing (landing traffic gets right of way for the runway), rules for enroute (different altitudes for different directions of flight), and rules for arrival (everyone joins a circuit or pattern and takes their turn to land). In the Canadian north, as Aviatrix can attest, we even manage IFR just fine without ATC help.

These rules work great, but they do require that everyone slow down and get in line, and that’s where ATC comes in. Sure, a 737 could slow down to (say) 180 knots, fly a wide pattern, and wait its turn to land, but the airline doesn’t want it to (gas is expensive, and passengers hate being late). When the weather goes down, the airlines don’t want their jets and commuter turboprops stacked 20 deep in a hold following the one-in/one-out rule for uncontrolled airports in IFR. They don’t want to have to slow down to near propeller speed in terminal airspace in VFR so that they can see and avoid other traffic reasonably.

Because of all that, we have a special system in place to help the big guys out. There are controllers at busier airports, terminal controllers, and enroute controllers to help them get in and out of airports faster, without having to get in line and wait (at least, not as much). Huge amounts of airspace are reserved so that only aircraft talking to ATC can use them, again, almost entirely for the benefit of the airlines.

Remember that the sky belongs to everyone, and all this special accommodation for the airlines this is a bit of a pain for us G.A. pilots (long waits for clearances around class B/C or long detours, etc.), but we can get used to it, just like drivers get used to bus lanes. And sometimes (rarely), we even get our own tower at airports with extremely heavy G.A. traffic, just to help things along. It really adds insult to injury, though, when airlines complain that G.A. is not paying its fair share of the cost of this system (even though we already pay a fuel tax on both sides of the border, and a small fee in Canada, to subsidize a system designed largely for the airlines’ benefit), and it’s even worse when organizations like Nav Canada or the FAA start acting as lobbyists for the airlines.

My 15 March (2007) editions of the Canada Flight Supplement (airport directory) and Canada Air Pilot (approach plates) just arrived in the mail, and they have a new look. Just before I started flying in 2002, the CFS had a green cover (I saw old copies lying around), then it switched to blue. Now we’re going to have to get used to grey with fancy gradients.

More seriously, Nav Canada sent a letter along with the new pubs promising significant changes beyond just the cover colours. I wonder what they have in store for us. Up-to-date information about landing fees? Better diagrams for airports without instrument approaches? We’ll have to see.

The city of Brantford, Ontario, about 50 nautical miles west-southwest of Toronto, is running a review to determine the consequences of closing Brantford Airport (CYFD), and Brant Aero would like you to sign an online petition of support for the airport.

Brantford’s official motto is “The telephone city”, because, according to the city, Alexander Graham Bell lived there in 1874 when he first came up with the idea for the telephone. Bell is also famous, however, for founding the Aerial Experimentation Association, which produced the Silver Dart, the aircraft that made the first controlled, powered flight in Canada (and the British Empire). Bell devoted a huge part of his life to aviation, and it would be a sad irony if the city who uses him as its main claim to fame were to close its only airport.

According to AOPA, the biggest issue facing general aviation in the U.S. is the risk of user fees. I agree with Phil Boyer that user fees could hurt GA, especially if they are per use (as in Australia) rather than flat fees (as in Canada, with one misguided exception); however, I think that there are even bigger issues facing North American general aviation. Here, on no scientific basis whatsoever, are my top five:

1. The end of AvGas: Almost nobody makes AvGas any more, it’s expensive to transport, and environmentalists rightly hate it because it’s leaded. Watch for it to get rarer and more expensive, with more and more shortages, over the next few years, at the same time as ethanol in MoGas renders it unsuitable for the few aircraft engines that could use it. The solution? Diesel engines, but they’re still expensive to install (nearly the whole cost of my plane), probably won’t ever be approved for all existing models, and do not yet have a significant North American maintenance network in place. Most old planes will have to be retired, and most pilots won’t be able to afford to replace ‘em, so they’ll retire with their planes.

2. (In)Security: It’s there, and it’s not going to go away. The general public has always been afraid of airplanes (I’ve posted in the past about how we exacerbate the problem by promoting air shows), and general aviation in particular scares them because it’s so lightly regulated. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of the candidates was a GA pilot and went out of his way not to cause problems for his fellow pilots; in 2008, we probably won’t be that lucky. And the next time something bad happens, watch for GA to be the scapegoat even more than in 2001: we could be regulated right out of existence on either or both sides of the border.

3. Airport closures: New residential neighbourhoods, either on reclaimed industrial land in the city or former farmland in the country, almost always mean bad news for general aviation. Airports are useful only when they’re near somewhere you want to go, so the most useful airports are typically also the most threatened: Toronto City Centre Airport is constantly under seige from nearby condo dwellers, for example, and even little Rockcliffe Airport struggles with community noise complaints (note that both of these airports have been there since before World War II). Airports aren’t the only ones who suffer from the soccer-mom onslaught: in rural areas farmers have to deal with complaints from new subdivisions about noise and smell, hunters have to go further away to hunt, and so on.

4. Maintenance: Most of the GA fleet is, and will remain, old — very few of us can shell out $300K-$1M for a new light plane, so we have to settle for spending $20K-$150K on something older. It would take only a couple of expensive Airworthiness Directives from the FAA or Transport Canada to knock a huge part of the fleet out of the sky by requiring a repair worth more than the planes’ resale value. Furthermore, the shops that maintain these planes for us often operate on a shoestring, billing much less per hour than an auto shop, and in the U.S. a few of them are starting to refuse to work on older planes for liability reasons (U.S. law protects manufacturers from being sued once the planes are a certain age, so the shop would be the only one to go after in a crash).

5. User fees: We’ve been paying these in Canada for a while now, and since they’ve remained low and fixed (thanks to COPA), they don’t seem to have had any impact at all on GA. However, that could change easily. If either Canada or the U.S. introduced a pay-per-use system, flying could quickly become too expensive and/or too dangerous for most GA owners. For example, if you had to pay $100 each time you filed IFR, scud running might become a bit more tempting; if you had to pay $25 for a weather briefing, you’d be less likely to talk to a specialist about icing. Realistically, I don’t think this is as big a threat as the others, but I’m still grateful that COPA and AOPA (I’m a member of both) are looking out for our interests.

[Update: see below.]

According to Snopes, this photo is legit — it’s a Cherokee 180 N6487J that crashed into a tree during a forced approach near Meadowlake Airport in Colorado last month after the engine lost power (the pilot, who was the sole occupant, had no serious injuries).

The picture is circulating around the Internet because of the funny juxtaposition of a flight school sign and a small plane crashed into a tree behind it. However, American Aviation uses Cessnas as its primary trainers (and a Piper Arrow for complex training), and the PA-28-180 in the picture is registered to a real-estate company, so unless it was on a lease-back, it really has nothing to do with the flying school or flying lessons. Still, it is hard not to come up with funny captions …

Some workers at Chicago/O’Hare Airport claim to have seen a UFO on the night of November 7, 2006 (CNN story): it hovered over the field and then climbed rapidly out of sight. The FAA talked a lot about low ceilings and airport lights creating optical illusions, but I found the explanation from controller and union rep Craig Burzych much more convincing:

“To fly 7 million light years to O’Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable.”

Next time you’re in an airliner landing at a major hub, don’t grumble if you’re stuck for 15 or 20 minutes because another plane is in your gate — it might just be saving the world from eternal servitude to a race of hyperintelligent (but impatient) cyborgs.

Update: I’ve just received a PDF of the new apron layout from the airport manager.

A few weeks ago, I had a coffee with Flyin Dutchman, a local professional pilot here in Ottawa (Dutchman flies a Pilatus PC-12 all over North America — check out his weblog for some excellent photos). He mentioned that there have been some significant changes at my favorite airport, Toronto City Centre. Starting from what he gave me, I’ve been following the news, exchanging e-mail with COPA and working the phones when I’ve had a chance, and here’s a summary of what I’ve been able to find:

[Update 2006-11-20: it looks like they've pulled even the small amount of Canadian data that they can get from the FAA database — there's nothing but US airports and navaids in there now.]

Well, the DAFIF — the free database of worldwide aeronautical information that used to be available free from the U.S. Department of Defense — has been gone for a few weeks, and it’s having repercussions that I hadn’t anticipated. It turns out that the most popular flight planning web site, Aeroplanner, was using the DAFIF for their non-U.S. data, so Canada has suddenly gone blank: aside from a few major airports and navaids that happen to be in the FAA database, and the segments of a few airways crossing the border, the airways, intersections, navaids, airports, terminal airspace, control zones, restricted airspace, and everything else that used to crowed their online maps is gone, leaving the site useless for anyone (Canadian or American) planning a flight that doesn’t stay entirely within U.S. airspace. The company graciously offered me a pro-rated refund for my subscription, though I decided not to take them up on it.

Lots of other people use the DAFIF for cheap or free flight planning, for controlling aircraft in flight simulators, and much more. In many cases, they can keep using the last public edition, which will slowly get more and more out of date, but that obviously wouldn’t be a responsible choice for a real-world online flight planning service like Aeroplanner.

Who’s the real villain?

So who should we be mad at? The U.S. DoD is an obvious target, since they’re the ones who pulled the data from public use, but let’s step back and think for a second:

1. In the U.S., the FAA still publishes a free database for American airspace, with a bit of Mexican and Canadian thrown in.
2. Almost every other country in the world refuses to release its air navigation data free to the public, period.
3. The U.S. military used to make up for that by publishing a lot of every other country’s airnav data as well.

No more charity

Sure, I wish they still published the DAFIF (and I suspect their reasons for stopping are silly), but the real villains here are the Canadian government, the British government, the Australian government, and every other government that refuses to release free information to their own citizens about their own airspace. We were lucky that the U.S. DoD was willing to help cover that disgraceful gap for so many years, and that they have given us a good starting point for a free,collaborative airnav database (we still have the last DAFIF edition to start from), but our years of living off American charity have now ended.

A new start?

Speaking of free, collaborative databases, Paul Tomblin has set up a wiki to start discussing life after DAFIF. Why not swing by and take a look. And don’t be surprised if, in the meantime, your favorite flight planning tool suddenly turns Canada into the huge, empty white space that the rest of the world always imagined it was.

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)