At my OurAirports account, I’ve added the tag canpass for all of the Canadian CANPASS-only airports. You can use my more general tag customs to see all airports I’ve tagged with customs services (canpass, airport-of-entry, and landing-rights). Zoom in to see specific areas.
I’ve expanded my original OurAirports tagging to include all airports of entry and U.S. landing rights airports that I can find under Canadian or U.S. control. You can now use my tag “customs” to find either, for trip planning purposes. Here’s the map zoomed in on the Vancouver/Seattle area, showing only airports where you can clear customs:
Map of customs airports near Vancouver and Seattle
Zoom out and drag to see other parts of Canada and the U.S., or start with the full customs map.
Note that some airports have only seasonal service and/or limited operating hours, and that U.S. “landing rights” airports sometimes charge a fee for customs services. I have not included CANPASS-only airports on the map, because they are available only to pilots who have preregistered in the CANPASS program. I have also excluded unofficial (but frequently-used) customs airports like Maxson Field and Sanderson Field that are located near border crossings.
As I mentioned in a previous post, OurAirports now lets you invent your own tags for airports and view maps of the airports you’ve tagged. This morning, I made a map of 60 of the airports that were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP):
Map: http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/tags/bcatp/
You can drag the map around and zoom in to see specific areas (Eastern Ontario was especially dense). The map (which is still missing a few airports) shows how much the BCATP shaped aviation in Canada — while it used existing airfields when possible, many of the fields were built specifically for the plan, and most of those are still operational. Some still have original hangar buildings, and many maintain the original triangle of three runways that’s so typical of Canadian airports (often with one extended to handle light jets).
While Canada was chosen because of its safe distance from combat and easy access to fuel, wartime flight training was still a brutal business in the BCATP — you could expect at least one fatality in every class training in planes like the Tiger Moth pictured above. Little RCAF Pennfield Ridge, for example, lost 61 student pilots and instructors during its three or four years of operation as a navigational and operational school.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
I flew from Ottawa, ON to Washington, DC (400 nm) today, with a few pilot firsts:
Over central Pennsylvania: cruising in smooth air, under clear skies, watching the Susquehanna River wind back and forth across my flight path, eating a bagel and thinking “it doesn’t get better than this.”
Over Maryland: in cloud in the weather that was supposed to stay south over the Carolinas, rain pounding on the windscreen, checking the Stormscope every few seconds, and trying keep the LO chart (and my head) still enough in the turbulence to find VORs I’ve never heard of for my new routing, while staying roughly on course, at altitude, and level. No bagels involved.
The ADIZ is no big deal if you’re IFR — it’s exactly the same as any IFR flight, except that you have to turn around and exit instead of continuing to your destination if you have a transponder or comm failure. It was no different than flying IFR into, say, Philadelphia or Montreal.
Washington/Dulles is surprisingly GA-friendly for a big airport — there’s an $8.00 landing fee, a bit over $18.00/night for parking, and that’s it (they waive the $28 handling fee if you buy gas). The FBO is right beside the main terminal, closer than you’ll usually be on an airliner (where you have to take the @#$#@ people movers from a satellite terminal).
I was flying ridiculously slowly (80kt) at full throttle into a brutal headwind, but both Potomoc approach and Dulles tower were very accommodating, vectoring me parallel to the localizer until about six miles back, then giving me an easy intercept. I had no delay to speak of, even though I was sharing the approach with much faster jet airliner traffic. They gave me the runway I requested (close to Signature), and even gave me step-by-step taxi instructions (which I didn’t ask for, but appreciated after a long flight).
I think it’s great that I can fly from the Canadian to the U.S. capital on 38 U.S. gallons of avgas, in about the same amount of time as it would take on the airlines (when you include having to be at the airport early for security, etc.). Last time I took the airlines, the trip was actually longer than it would have been in my Cherokee, since the flight was delayed.
Here’s what it cost to own and operate a 1979 Piper Warrior II in Ottawa, Canada in 2007 with 80 hours air time (a bit more flight time, of course). Since the US and Canadian dollars are basically at par now, there’s no need to convert:
| Item | Total | Hourly |
|---|---|---|
| Fees: | $1,112.51 | $13.91 |
| Fuel: | $2,945.39 | $36.82 |
| Other consumables: | $247.79 | $3.10 |
| Insurance: | $1,458.00 | $18.23 |
| Maintenance: | $2,437.39 | $30.47 |
| Reserves | $1,600.00 | $20.00 |
| TOTAL: | $9,801.08 | $122.51 |
These are real costs, including sales taxes, not the BS costs you hear people throwing around at the airport. Reserves are $20/hour for engine and paint. I also pay about $500/year for charts and recurrent training, but I’d pay the same as a renter, so I don’t count those as ownership costs.
2007 was by far the cheapest year I’ve had with C-FBJO, and also the fewest hours I’ve flown (I’m usually over 100). I was parked at a less expensive airport and used less gas (flying less), but the biggest difference was maintenance — annual maintenance for a small plane like mine can be $2,000 one year and $10,000 the next, depending on what goes wrong (and even the simplest plane has a lot that can go wrong). I’m keeping a nearly 30-year-old plane operating, so stuff wears out and has to be replaced all the time, just as it would with a 30-year-old car; unlike with cars, however, buying a new plane isn’t a solution — I read recently that routine inspection and maintenance for an SR-22 runs $8,000-$10,000, and that’s without any problems coming up.
Fees include tie-down (and required club membership) at my home airport, transient landing and parking fees during trips, and the compulsory $75/year Nav Canada and $27.50 US customs fees. Consumables are oil (mainly), filters, fluids, etc.
When so many of the costs — tie-down fees, insurance, and (most) maintenance — are fixed, I can see the logic in taking one or two partners. You’ll still pay just as much for fuel and engine/paint reserve, but you slash the other overheads. I don’t think I’ll take a partner in C-FBJO at this point, but if I move up to something bigger like a Cherokee Six, I probably won’t try it alone.
So where did this money take me and my passengers (besides the Ottawa area) in 2007? In chronological order, Maniwaki QC, New York City (Teterboro), Drummondville QC, Pembroke ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville), Sault Ste. Marie ON, Toronto ON (City Centre), Brockville ON, Waterloo ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville) again, Sundridge ON, Sault Ste. Marie ON again, Toronto ON (City Centre) again, Burlington VT, Boston MA (Norwood), Alexandria Bay NY (Maxson), New Jersey and New York City (Caldwell), Montreal QC (Trudeau), Baie Comeau QC, Maniwaki QC again, and Burlington VT again. Not all that exciting a year, but it kept the rust off the wings (mine and the plane’s).
Any logged-in member can now add placemarks to the map for local spots at an airport (FBOs, visitor parking, fuel, restaurant, customs, or whatever), and more importantly, anyone — even Anonymous Flyers — can comment on those spots.
Take a look at Ottawa Rockcliffe or Teterboro to see some examples, then mark some of the spots at your local airport so that I’ll know where to park, fuel up, and eat next time I fly in.
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.
Cuba has a nice selection of small-town/rural airports, including many with good, paved runways, judging from the satellite views. When I zoom in, though, they are mostly sadly deserted, with sometimes a single piston twin parked in the middle of an empty apron. Who are they maintaining these airports for? The military doesn’t need so many so close together, and I doubt that many Cubans could afford to fly private aircraft even if they were allowed to.
Now that Fidel is pretty-much confined to writing OpEd pieces in the party propaganda rag and Raúl, who’s running the show, is making speeches about opening up the economy and talking seriously with the U.S., maybe it won’t be long until U.S. pilots are allowed to visit again. Cuba’s an easy flight from Florida, and it looks like it will still be able to offer some decent flying, with lots of nice, rural airports to go along with its friendly people. Cuba’s already a huge tourist destination for Canadians, though I don’t know anyone who’s flown his/her own plane down (it would have to be via Mexico).
Maybe change isn’t too far away …
By loud request, I’ve added Chicago Meigs, closed a few years ago by Mayor Daley, to OurAirports. As a special honour to the mayor, I’ve also arranged for Meigs to appear when you type “Daley” into the site search box (try “David Miller” also, just for good luck).
It’s not exactly crazy, but enough people have signed up for OurAirports that I’ve had to do a large amount of emergency coding to keep the site running at an acceptable speed — it’s hosted on a shared cluster (Mosso), a new-fangled kind of service which creates some pretty strange issues around database table writes and locking compared to running on a single host, and you don’t see the problems until a lot of people are trying to do things at the same time. If the site was too slow when you first visited, you might want to take a second look and see if it’s better.
Enough tech talk. You’re here to read about flying, and whether you’re a new student or a 20,000-hour airline pilot, I think you’ll enjoy reading the beautiful comments — mini-essays, really — that OurAirports member XingR has been contributing about his lifetime spent in and around airports on several continents, both in civilian life and through a long military career (he’s currently living near Clark Intl, the former huge U.S. military base in the Phillipines). You can read all of XingR’s comments (in reverse order) on his comments page, and follow the links to see the airports. Thanks, XingR.
I’ve written a web site called OurAirports that lets you make a map of the airports you’ve visited (either as a pilot or as a passenger, your choice). Here’s my personal map — note that you can share your maps with anyone, not just other members:
http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/
To make your own map, set up a free account (takes about 30 seconds), then just click in the “I’ve been here!” box on each airport’s page. You can also browse the airports of the world on The Big Map or drill down geographically. My favourite, though, is warping to a random airport.
This is just a web site, not a startup — sadly, there aren’t enough of us to build a real business out of this. But there’s no point spending any more time on it if the site’s not fun, so if you don’t do anything else please visit the site and let me know what I could do to make it more fun for you as a pilot, airline passenger, GA passenger, etc.
If you feel like helping even more, I’d be grateful if you could show the site to other people who like flying and find out what they think of it. The site lets you leave comments on airports, like AirNav.com does, except that it includes airports outside the U.S. and doesn’t force you to attach comments to a specific FBO. The more comments people leave, the more useful the site is.
Finally, if you’re really hardcore helpful (or you’re stuck in a long layover with nothing else to do), here are some of the things I’m thinking about for the next step, and I’d love to hear people’s preferences:
Let people categorize airport comments (FBO, wifi, fuel, food, ground transpo, etc.) so that it’s easier to find information.
Set up editing and moderation privileges, so that members can add and correct airport (and maybe navaid?) data to keep it current.
Add forums for organizing fly-ins, buying or selling used stuff (tools, GPS, plane, whatever), or even ride boards linked to individual airports, so that you can see what’s going on in your area.
Add navaids, fixes, and basic flight-planning support (draw lines on the map) — this would appeal only to pilots, of course.
Add bulk entry of airports, so that you can just type all the IDs of the airports you’ve visited into a textarea instead of going to each airport page and clicking.
Export airport data in GPX format, so that you can load it into your GPS.
Let members upload GPS tracks to the site, so that they can be displayed on the map and shared with other people.
Add the usual airport data that other sites have (runway lengths, frequencies, etc.)
Try to dig up information on airline schedules and link it to the site.
Give up on the whole idea and do something useful with my free time.
Let me know what you think, and please help me let other pilots know about the site. If you want to send me private email instead of commenting here, my GMail id is david.megginson, and the domain for GMail addresses is gmail.com.
Some of you (like Paul Tomblin, who manages navaid.com) have probably already run into this problem, but it turns out that there are at least three airports in the world that cannot safely be assigned to any country, at least not without causing a diplomatic incident. This is a problem for database architects as well as ambassadors, because the normal way to organize airports in a database is to sort them by country (and to assume that every airport has one).
Woody Island is one of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. The islands and reefs are surrounded by major fisheries and possible oil and gas reserves, and are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Most recently, China seized control of the islands from South Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War, but the other countries have not given up their claim, and China’s possession has not received international recognition.
China operates an airport (VH84) on Woody Island as part of its emergency rescue centre on the island.
Swallow Reef is part of the Spratley Islands, also in the South China Sea. Like the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands are surrounded by major fisheries and potential oil and gas reserves. In addition to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, each of which claims the entire chain, Malaysia and the Philippines claim some of the islands, and Brunei has established a fishing zone which includes one of the reefs. None of these claims has received international recognition, and all of the countries (except Brunei) maintain small military forces on various islands.
Malaysia happens to occupy Swallow Reef, and it maintains both a naval base and a tourist resort there, with an airport (RP10) to serve them.
Saving the most controversial for last, Jerusalem International Airport, aka Atarot Airport — which has been non-operational and controlled by the Israeli Defence Force since 2001 — is in the West Bank occupied territory near Ramallah. It actually has two ICAO codes: OJJR (OJ is the prefix for Jordan, which formerly owned the West Bank), and LLJR (LL is the prefix for Israel, which currently controls the West Bank).
We’ve done a better job dealing with our problem airports in North America. Piney Pinecreek Border Airport (48Y) in Piney, Manitoba, Avey State Field (69S) in Laurier, Washington, and International Peace Garden Airport (S28) in Dunseith, North Dakota all have runways that actually cross or at least touch the Canada/U.S. border (Dunseith’s runway actually ends at a highway border crossing, so there are both U.S. and Canadian customs booths onsite). They have U.S. identifiers, but we list them in the Canada Flight Supplement as well. No need to refight the War of 1812.
If you were building a mapping application that could show only (say) 20 airports on the screen at once at any given zoom level, how would you decide which airports are most important, using only publicly-available data sets? Here are some possibilities:
These are all easy to measure, but I’m not sure that they capture enough of what makes an airport important for mapping purposes. Really big airports often cluster around urban areas — think of JFK, EWR, and LGA around New York, or LHR, LGW, and LCY around London. These are all busy airports, but they’re very short drives from each other (traffic permitting), so perhaps they don’t have the same kind of importance on a map as the main airport in a smaller country, the only airport serving an isolated community or an island, etc.
I’ve done some experimenting trying to measure isolation: for example, I’ve tried limiting the map to one airport in each 30×30 deg square (world level) or 10×10 deg square (continent level), but the map still ends up with huge clusters of airports in the U.S. and Western Europe and none in most of the rest of the world, and even a 10×10 square means that Toronto’s and Montreal’s main airports won’t show up (same square as JFK and EWR). What would Google do?
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:
June 17-18, 2003. I had just finished giving a long evening seminar in the financial district in lower Manhattan, I was exhausted, and it was very late. My original plan had been to fly home to Ottawa the next day, but bad weather was going to be arriving early in the morning and staying for the next few days, and as a VFR-only, 150-hour private pilot (my license only 9 months old), I had to fly out that night or stay the rest of the week. I got a lift with someone out to Caldwell Airport in New Jersey, my eyes heavy and drooping on the drive. I found an open gate, preflighted, and started my plane just as the control tower was closing for the night at 11:30 pm.
This sounds more like the beginning of an accident report than a good experience, and it’s even worse when you consider that JFK Jr. set out on his own fateful night flight from this same airport. I had a tiny handheld non-aviation Garmin GPS with me, but it wasn’t an aviation GPS, so my primary navigation that night was VOR/DME, and the whole trip was hand-flown (I still don’t have an autopilot). As soon as I started my engine, I was wide awake, and since I was hand-flying, I stayed that way for the whole flight — after a bit of an awkward time crawling under NY airspace, I climbed up high in a clear sky, and for the next two and a half hours I watched the lights of rural New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario slowly roll away under my wings. As I approached Ottawa Airport at 2:00 am, there was no one else around, and tower told me just to approach the airport from any direction I wanted and pick any runway. A woman from customs was waiting to meet me — I had to pay a call-out charge of about $40, but it was well worth it. I’ve had a lot of wonderful flying experiences, but nothing compares to that early, dream-like night flight, that I never should have tried.
I’ve had a few bad experiences actually flying, but for me, the hardest stuff has been what happens on the ground. Even a small, private plane requires a lot of attention, to the keep the plane safe, the paperwork legal, and the costs under control, and then there’s the problem of my own recency. If you don’t fly for a living, those stresses are in addition to your job (instead of being part of it), and they made for some bad nights and big bills early on. After four and a half years of ownership, I now enjoy my plane and don’t have to spend nearly as much time or money on it, but I could go back in time, I don’t know if I’d go through all that again to get to this point.
I’ve heard some pretty strange things over the radio, and always enjoy the sight of my Warrior parked on a ramp beside a row of bizjets or even military fighters, but for the weird part, I’ve decided to pick something that will seem bizarre to pilots outside Quebec and the Ottawa region: bilingual radio calls.
In Ottawa and Quebec, air traffic control and FSS is required to operate in French as well as English, and at uncontrolled airports, pilots will often make position reports, etc., in French. I’ll announce in English that I’m joining the downwind, a pilot will announce in French that he’s taking the runway, someone else will do a radio check in English, the Unicom operator may attempt to give me an advisory in English and then give up (at small Quebec airports, many Unicom operators speak very little English). Somehow or other, we avoid each-other, but it must be a terrifying experience for a unilingual English or French pilot, hearing radio calls and not knowing what they mean (especially if the caller’s voice is urgent).
My flight instructor was francophone but didn’t think much of the bilingual system in the air, and I agree — the air is a place that safety should trump politics. Make all pilots learn to speak English, French, Mandarin, or whatever, but please make sure we’re all speaking the same language up there, whatever it is.
On the way home from Teterboro Airport after a March break family trip to New York City, after 2.6 flying hours mostly in IMC with light to moderate turbulence. My older daughter in the copilot seat whipped out her camera and took this shot on short final on the ILS 32 at Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier Airport.
We had been racing down the approach at 110 knots to get in ahead of an approaching level 2 cell (though we’d been through a few of those already), and tower turned the lights up to maximum to make sure we wouldn’t have to go missed. The airport was reporting RVR 4000 ft (in other words, you could see less than a mile forward on the runway), but the approach lights were bright enough that I made them out at 800 AGL and started to slow the plane. The runway itself popped into view at 600 AGL, and my daughter took this picture a bit after that.
As ominous as this looks, it would not count as anywhere near a low approach for an ILS. However, it’s worth mentioning that Ottawa was forecasting 3,000 ft ceilings and 5 miles visibility when we left Teterboro.
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.
There is one really, really, REALLY important rule about winter flying near the Great Lakes:
Remember which way the wind’s blowing.
Even if there are blue skies everywhere else, a cold wind will often pull streamers of lake effect weather off the Great Lakes, so if you’re downwind from (say) Lake Ontario or Georgian Bay, expect long streams of clouds with significant icing, snow, and low IFR conditions underneath, topping out somewhere around 6,000-8,000 feet (unless they hit hills like the Adirondacks, in which case the tops can shoot way, way up). This evening, the new photo of the day at Wikipedia (originally from NASA) is a beautiful colour satellite photo of streamers coming off the lakes (click on it for a much larger version), caused by what I’d guess is a low-pressure system centered in northern Quebec a bit east of James Bay. Notice the long fingers reaching out into central Ontario (off Lake Huron and Georgian Bay), Michigan, Ohio, and upstate New York.
My normal flying route from Ottawa to Boston or New York takes me across the St. Lawrence River, and depending on the wind, I can usually expect to have to overfly lake effect weather somewhere along my route. If the wind is from the west, I can expect to find it over Watertown, NY and the relatively flat area of NY state, possibly as far as Lake Champlain; if the wind is from the southwest, it will blow straight up the St. Lawrence towards Montreal, possibly boxing in Ottawa as well; if the wind is from the northwest, it will head towards the Adirondacks, and may throw up cloud too high for me to fly over; it will also blow off Georgian Bay across my route from Ottawa to Toronto, so even if the TAFs are CAVU for Ottawa and Toronto, it might be unflyable in between.
The trick in every case is to make sure that I can stay above the cloud, because it’s pretty nasty underneath it (not to mention inside). For emergencies, as you can see in the photo, there are usually clear spots between the streams for an emergency descent. If the streamers are over your point of departure or destination, on the other hand, forget about it. People on the U.S. side have it a lot harder in the winter, since the cold winter winds usually come from the northwest and blow over them on the southeast sides of the lakes. Aside from central Ontario near Georgian Bay, the Canadian side is usually clearer.
(Source: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.)
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:
Assuming that you’re visiting Toronto for two nights, you can either pay a total of $80 in extra fees to park and fuel up at Porter, or $40 to park at TransCapital, and then stop to fuel somewhere on your way in or your way home (such as Peterborough for me). Once TransCapital sells fuel again, you’ll probably be able to get away with only $20 for two nights’ parking, if they go back to waiving the first night’s charge with a fuel purchase.
If you’re just visiting for a few hours, I’m not sure if TransCapital will charge you the $20 or not (since they’re not making money on fuel right now), so it would be a good idea to call first and check. By spring, I hope that everything will be back to normal, more or less.
I’m flying to Boston on Sunday for the week to chair the XML 2006 conference. When I fly to New York City, I usually land at Teterboro Airport and park at Atlantic Aviation — the gas is expensive, but my Cherokee doesn’t use much, and since U.S. customs is located right at Atlantic I can fly non-stop from Ottawa, shaving 45 minutes from the trip.
I thought about trying the same thing with Boston this time by flying into Laurence G Hanscom Field Airport (aka Bedford), just west of the city. The Signature FBO is typical for a big city — expensive gas, $25 handling fee waived if you buy a minimum amount of fuel — so that’s not a problem. MassPort, who runs the major Boston airports, also tacks on a $10 landing fee and $12.75/night parking charge, but again, that’s not too bad.
After that, it starts to get strange. For example, some busy airports offer reduced landing fees at night where there’s not much traffic, but MassPort goes the other way: there’s a $49 surcharge for each landing between 11pm and 7am, and it doubles to $98 if you do it more than 5 times in a year. I guess that’s for noise abatement. MassPort also requires a prop lock on all parked planes, and there used to be a $10/day rental fee for them, but Signature now loans them out for free. Finally, the kicker is a $65 user fee for the privilege of clearing customs at KBED in a four-seat plane.
So much for that. I’ll add 45 minutes to my trip, clear customs for free (in Massena, NY or Burlington, VT), then land at one of the airports just outside MassPort’s ring of control and ride the commuter train in, as I’ve done three times in the past. Check out the MassPort fee page to see how easily bad government can take the fun out of flying — it makes the forthcoming Nav Canada big-airport user fees look tame in comparison.
Since I moved from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier International to Ottawa/Rockcliffe at the beginning of this month, I’ve had a chance to take only two flights, but with two drastically-different results.
One fine evening I decided to drive to the airport and fly some night circuits to stay night-current. I usually love night circuits: the air is still, the visibility is excellent, the frequencies are quiet, and it’s very easy to spot traffic. This time, though, nothing went right. The area where my plane is parked is extremely dark, and the path through the parked planes is entirely unlit. To make things worse, the dome and map lights in my plane weren’t working. I ran through my checklist using a flashlight, started the plane, taxied gingerly to the runway in the dark (trying not to knock off anyone’s spinner with my wing tips), took off, and then realized that I hadn’t set my altimeter.
At my previous home airport, I always set the altimeter when I listed to the ATIS, but of course, there was no ATIS at Rockcliffe. I’ve flown from many other untowered airports without forgetting to set my altimeter to field elevation, but because I thought of Rockcliffe as my home airport now, I was following my old home procedures. I had last flown in fairly low pressure, so the altimeter was so far off that it was effectively useless, and without the overhead map light I was forced to use a flashlight to see the tachometer. I could have radioed Gatineau for their altimeter setting, but that would have meant digging out the CFS to get the frequency and then reading with the flashlight, when I already had enough on my hands. I just flew my best estimate of circuit altitude, glanced at the altimeter to see how many hundred feet it was off when the wheels touched on my first circuit, then adjusted it when I was safely back in the downwind. After a couple of circuits, my setting was fairly accurate.
The second challenge is the runway lighting. Rockcliffe has no VASIS or PAPI approach-slope lighting, so you’re entirely on your own, and to make matters worse, only 1.700 ft of the 3,300 ft runway is lighted for night operations. Normally, landing and taking off on a 1,700 ft runway in a Cherokee or Skyhawk is no big deal, but at night, with no approach-slope lighting and trees hiding somewhere under me in the dark, it required some fine-tuned flying — more importantly, I tried to imagine coming home at night after a family trip in MVFR and landing, and it didn’t seem like a fun prospect.
By the end of the evening, I’d decided that I’d move the plane back to Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier as soon as my three-month committment was over, extra cost be damned.
Before my next flight, I drove to the airport, opened the lighting dome, reattached a loose ground wire, and restored cockpit lighting (I also put on my canopy cover, to help keep the plane dry in all this rain. Then, in nice VFR weather, I went to the airport last Sunday morning and just flew: no flight plan, no talking to ATC (but a lot of attention to airspace), but just a little tour over the Gatineaus and around within the 25 nm no-flight-plan circle.
I actually like talking to ATC — I learned to fly at a busy airport, and feel no stress around it — but it was a surprisingly relaxing experience flying around entirely on my own, without a fixed plan. After an hour of slow, low-altitude (I do most of my flying cross-country at 5,000-10,000 ft) flying around hills, lakes, and rivers, circling small towns and a covered bridge, and admiring the fall leaves, I came back in along the Cumberland-Rockcliffe VFR corridor, crossed for the midfield downwind, and landed.
My only complaint is that the people at Rockcliffe don’t seem particularly friendly compared to people at other small airports I’ve visited: almost without exception, people on the porch or in the parking lot glance away awkwardly if I smile, nod, or wave, instead of waving back. The people in the clubhouse are mostly tired and/or tense flight instructors, though the dispatch and line staff were friendly enough. I guess you can’t have everything.
I’m still deciding what to do in January, but I might give Rockcliffe a full year so that I can see all its different faces.
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