Land and Hold Short

I had my first experience flying partial panel in IMC on Monday, coming home from Boston. It wasn’t the classic partial panel — a vacuum failure — but a failure of the attitude indicator instrument itself, followed by the airspeed indicator while I was on an ILS approach. The AI had been sluggish for a while, but I had told myself that it was still usable as long as I allowed for a few seconds’ lag. In IMC and moderate turbulence (with a bit of light icing to distract me), however, it was totally useless, and I ended up relying on the turn coordinator to keep the wings more-or-less level, with the heading indicator as a backup.

I’ve heard that partial panel in a slick plane with retractable gear can be a nightmare, but the Cherokee is so slow, draggy, and spiral-resistant that it wasn’t more than an irritant. I’m not sure that simulated partial panel under the hood does anything to prepare you for it, though, because the hardest part is recognizing that you have a problem in the first place (I’m also not convinced that flying under a hood does much to prepare you for flying in actual IMC, but that’s another posting.)

Losing the ASI wasn’t a big deal, since I was already on the glideslope and had a 10,000 ft runway ahead of me, so I just kept a generous power setting on the tachometer and burned off the extra speed in a long flare.

The plane is grounded until the pitot system is cleaned out and tested, the AI is fully overhauled, and new wiring is installed for the intermittent landing light.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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: The ELT is back and recertified with a new battery, but the forecast tomorrow calls for cloud and ice from about hilltop level to 9,000 ft, so the Hope Air flight is canceled.

UNSAR is the Transport Canada acronym for an UnNecessary Search And Rescue alert. In addition to publicising the problem in a newsletter article, they have produced a poster that’s shown in most FBOs and flying clubs with rescue aircraft circling a delivery van, a (perfectly OK) float plane, etc., while in the bottom right panel a real crash goes unattended.

I was on my way home from a family breakfast Sunday morning when I noticed a message on my cell phone. The SAR centre picked up an ELT signal from the vicinity of Rockcliffe Airport, and after a line check, they determined that it was coming from my plane. I was out there within 45 minutes, and determined that

1. The signal was coming from my plane (strong enough that it spilled over onto other frequencies).
2. The cockpit ELT switch was set to “arm”, not “on”.
3. Turning the switch to “off” stopped the ELT for a minute or so, then it started again.

It would have been better, of course, if I’d been in the habit of turning the cockpit switch to “off” whenever I parked the plane, but in this case, it wouldn’t have helped — after a couple of weeks of constant rain, my guess is that some moisture got into the side panels and shorted the switch, since the ELT was intermittently activating with the switch in any position. With freezing, fumbling fingers, I grabbed a Phillips screwdriver (always keep a multi-head screwdriver in your plane), opened the access panel in the tailcone, shoved my hands through the tiny, sharp-edged access hole (we don’t pay mechanics enough), turned the main switch on the ELT unit from “arm” to “off”, disconnected the antenna and wires, and figured out how to remove the unit.

Just as I was finishing, a SAR person walked up to the airplane to talk to me. He was very friendly and reassuring about the whole thing as he copied down the details from my ELT box (recertified May 2006) and confirmed the time that I shut down the unit, so that the SAR centre could close the file on the activation. I also learned a couple of interesting tidbits:

• In the case of an UNSAR, standard procedure (if the owner or pilot couldn’t be located fast) used to be to get access to the plane as fast as possible causing as little damage as possible, but after complaints, SOP is now simply to wait for the battery to die.
• Further to the first point, the equipment used by the SAR satellite monitoring centre is now good enough to distinguish the idiosyncracies of the crystal used in each specific radio, so that one ELT signal won’t prevent them from distinguishing another one (though it must make it no fun for airliners, and FSS and ATC units that have to monitor 121.5 continuously).

It also turns out that this weekend there was a survival training camp at Rockcliffe hosted by the SAR people, so my UNSAR gave them a chance to practice homing in on a real ELT signal on 121.5 (usually they have to use separate training frequencies). While I’m very sorry for all the hassle caused to so many people, I’m glad that some tiny good came out of it.

Today I’m taking my ELT unit into the avionics shop to have it reinspected (I expect that it’s fine) and to have the battery tested, since I don’t know how much it drained during the activation. After that, I’ll reinstall it in the plane, but won’t reconnect the cockpit switch until I can have it inspected as well (I’ll placard that the script is U/S and will write a snag in my Journey Log to cover the legal bases). I’m also going to remove the pilot-side panels to see if there is water getting in there somehow.

I could legally fly the plane for 30 days without an ELT as long as I put a placard in the panel, but I have a Hope Air flight coming up across hundreds of miles of nothing (the kind of area where every building is shown on the map, and there’s enough room for a small U.S. state in-between them). The ELT activation was an accident, but flying across wilderness in winter weather with no ELT would be just stupid.

So, for those of you considering becoming aircraft owners, are you still interested? Even with a simple plane like a Cherokee or 172, you can expect 2-to-5 unexpected minor crises like this every year, though most don’t involve anyone but you.

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’m writing this posting from the courtesy computer at the Esso FBO in Toronto City Centre airport (CYTZ). I just finished a Hope Air flight from Sault Ste. Marie (CYAM), my fourth consecutive day of flying. Fortunately, I was able to fly in along and through today’s cold front before much CB developed, and what there was, I dodged with the assistance of my eyeballs, ATC, and my StormScope.

Coming into City Centre from the north, in and out of scud at the cloud bases, I had a chance to pull out and dust off a rarely-used tool: the contact approach. I flew a contact approach in anger two years ago, after blundering into and escaping a small storm cloud — I had no desire for any further IMC that day, so I dropped low and followed the St. Mary’s River into Sault Ste. Marie. This time was much more benign: after turning over the lakeshore heading towards City Centre, I was still unable to accept a visual approach due to restricted visibility (I got out of the scud by descending to 2,000). To make both my life and the busy controller’s easier, I offered to fly a contact approach. I could see the Scarborough bluffs clearly below me, so I simply followed the shoreline in until I saw the runway about 3-4 miles back.

This is exactly the situation that a contact approach is designed for. The arrival controller was able to hand me off earlier to City tower, easing his workload. Visibility underneath was adequate (>3 SM), and the landing was a complete non-event. I knew the shoreline (and the two big smokestacks) well. In marginal river, a full approach would have been much more hairy, since I would have had to fly about 5-10nm out over the lake.

Controllers aren’t allowed to offer a contact approach, but it’s a useful thing to ask for sometimes. This afternoon, unfortunately, there’s a line of severe thunderstorms conveniently extending from here to my home base in Ottawa (CYOW), so I guess I’ll spend a couple more hours checking e-mail and refreshing the radar page.

[Update: I made it home late in the afternoon, by picking my way along a wide corridor that opened up between two storm lines.]

There’s really only one thing that air traffic controllers spend a lot of time worrying about, and that’s separation. Separation means that each aircraft has an invisible bubble around it. When a controller is required to separate aircraft, she has to make sure that neither aircraft enters the other’s bubble. If she messes up once, she’s in big trouble; if she messes up a couple more times, she’s fired.

When a controller is not required to separate two aircraft from each-other, he’ll probably still point out traffic and do his best to keep you apart, but if you come too close to each other it’s usually the pilot’s responsibility, not the controller’s. As a result, if you want to get in trouble, the most effective way to do it is to do something that causes a loss of separation — the controllers will let you get away with almost any other bonehead move while you’re in the air, but it you cause a loss of separation, they will have to turn you in to Transport Canada to save their own behinds.

Of course, there are worse ways to get in trouble than with Transport Canada. Even with a fine and penalty, and you’ll probably fly again; get into a midair collision, and the outlook is a bit darker. As a result, it’s very important to know two things:

1. Is the controller providing me with separation?
2. If so, what is she separating me from?

To figure out the answers, it’s important to know what kind of airspace you’re in (note that this applies to Canadian airspace — US airspace has some important differences):

So if you’re flying VFR on an airway at 14,500 ft, you’re in class B airspace, and ATC will be separating you from all other aircraft. On the other hand, if you’re flying IFR into Oshawa airport (class D), ATC is not responsible for separating you from any VFR aircraft in the zone, even though they probably will give you advisories, so keep a sharp lookout when you break out from the clouds.

Note that I haven’t gotten into the other kind of separation here, separation from terrain and obstacles. I think that’s normally both the pilot’s and controller’s shared responsibility, except when the plane is on vectors, but I haven’t double-checked (I always assume it’s my problem anyway).

The U.S. government has released its 2005 Federal Radionavigation Plan [PDF, 74 pages]. Here is what they are proposing for each type of aviation-related navigation aid:

GPS

Will be the primary federally-provided radionavigation system for the foreseeable future. Will continue to work on augmentation, both through initiatives like WAAS, and by providing two new civilian signals, L2C and L5, to support special operations (like lifesaving).

Loran-C

Will continue to operate until the end of 2006, while evaluating long-term need. Promises at least six months notice if the system is going to be shut down.

VOR

Will phase down the VOR system (enroute and approach) beginning in 2010, based on anticipated decline in usage, but will still a “minimum operational network” (MON) of VORs as a backup to GPS.

DME

Will maintain the existing DME service to support RNAV systems. Plan to install more low-power DMEs to support ILS precision approaches.

TACAN

Will keep the air-based TACAN system until all military aircraft are properly integrated with GPS for national and international controlled airspace (not sure if this applies to all NATO aircraft, or just the U.S.). Sea-based TACAN will continue indefinitely.

ILS

Will reduce the role of Cat I (regular, 200 ft DH) ILS approaches as GPS precision approaches come in, beginning in 2015. ILS will still be available at major terminals.

MLS

Not installing any more systems. Will phase out existing installations beginning in 2010.

NDB

Most NDBs will be phased out, except for those that serve International Gateways, and those in Alaska (for LF airways, similar to the airways in northern Canada). Some may be kept for missed-approach procedures. Phase-down began in 2005.

Marker Beacons

Will be phased down, replaced (in many cases) with published DME distances, navigation waypoints, etc.

So, I’ll be good for IFR in my Warrior for a few more years without an IFR-certified GPS, but I’d better start a savings fund if I want to do precision approaches after 2015. It looks like the DME receiver in my panel will be useful for a while longer, though.

Some related postings

• Fogged in without an ILS
• Upcoming changes to Canadian airspace
• Do you like your ADF? (Not as much as these guys.)
• Thumbing it: Playing with the Rule of 60

NAV CANADA is proposing additional fees for small aircraft using Canada’s eight largest airports — these will be per-departure/day fees (i.e. a fee for each day that an aircraft departs from the airport). Here is NAV CANADA’s proposal, and here is COPA’s view. This posting contains a copy of my own written response, sent to NAV CANADA today. If you are interested in responding — pro or con — you still have until Friday 10 February to do so (for contact information, follow the COPA link).

NAV CANADA
P.O. Box 3411, Station “D”
Ottawa, ON K1P 5L6
Attn: Assistant Vice-President, Revenue and Performance Indicators

Thank you for giving us an opportunity to respond to NAV CANADA’s Notice of New and Revised Service Charges. I understand that NAV CANADA is in a difficult situation, caught between pressure from carriers frustrated at paying the majority of fees for air traffic services, and pressure from the general aviation (GA) sector anxious to avoid fees that might force them out of aviation completely. I can see that a great deal of careful thought went into your plan, and that it is an attempt to balance both of those concerns in a fair way.

As a private aircraft owner, however, I believe that there are several points that raise serious questions about both the effectiveness and the fairness of the plan:

1. The plan aims to be revenue-neutral by raising fees for GA flying from Canada’s eight major public airports while reducing fees for carriers; however, the plan also aims to discourage GA traffic from using the public airports that would generate additional fees. If the plan is successful in reducing traffic, however, you will receive less money than expected from GA daily usage fees. In this respect, the two goals conflict.
2. The plan does not take into account the different natures of the airports listed. For example, Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier is the home base for many small aircraft that, for the most part, operate from a separate runway and a separate part of the field; it should not be treated the same way as a congested airport like Toronto/Pearson. These differences suggest that reducing traffic at airports is not a reasonable goal for NAV CANADA – that should be left for individual airports to deal with, for example, by requiring landing slot reservations or imposing landing fees. Individual airport authorities are in a much better position to know their local needs.
3. The plan is designed to encourage GA aircraft to use reliever airports in the cities listed, but at present, unlike in the United States, many of the cities listed do not have GA relievers with ILS approaches for low-weather operations. In line with NAV CANADA’s responsibility not to set fees that affect aviation safety, it is likely that the company would be obliged to commission at least one fully-operational ILS approach at an alternative airport for each of the cities listed (where one does not already exist). Ottawa and Halifax, for example, have no alternative GA airports with ILS approaches, while the ILS approach at Toronto/City Centre is extremely restricted (it requires RNAV, and does not allow jet aircraft).
4. The primary purpose of air-traffic services in terminal areas is to allow air carriers to maintain their schedules — terminal air traffic services bring only limited benefits to light aircraft, who can easily function without terminal control units, ground control, or tower control, so it is not reasonable to require light aircraft to pay more than a small fraction of the fees.

Thank you for reading my comments. If you have any questions or require further information, please feel free to write, phone, or to send me e-mail.

Sincerely,

David Megginson

Hamish has a posting that mentions how much easier DME arcs are with an RMI display.

Sometimes I feel lucky that I was never taught the official way to a DME arc during my instrument training. We have one nearby, but it just never came up. I flew my first DME arc alone in the plane in actual IMC, and because I was never taught to be stressed about it, it seemed like a simple maneuver. Here’s all I do in the arc itself (assuming that the DME and VOR are already tuned and identified):

1. turn perpendicular to the DME source (so that it is off one of my wingtips)
2. fly my heading until the DME hits about .2 to .3 miles more than the DME arc distance;
3. turn 5 or 10 degrees towards the DME source, and repeat (to allow for winds, turn more if the DME doesn’t start decreasing; less if it decreases too much; don’t let it get less that .2 to .3 miles less than the DME arc distance).

I have one VOR set up as a fence to tell me when to turn inbound, of course. Sometimes I twist the other one to see what radial I’m on, just to relieve boredom, but it’s really not a necessary part of the procedure. I guess that I use the DME as a kind of a digital CDI, and I’ve been happy with the results so far. With my technique, an RMI wouldn’t make much difference, but I can see how it would help if you wanted to track your radial all the way through.

I’ll guess that 80% of my flying is done in continuous radio contact with ATC, either IFR, VFR in class B/C/D airspace, or VFR with flight following in class E/G airspace. This kind of flying has its own challenges, but one of the biggest ones is learning to read controllers’ minds (I’m sure that they’d tell you the same about dealing with pilots). If you can figure out what the controller is thinking — what her or his plan is to get you to the approach or the airport, why you’re being vectored, what traffic he or she is worried about, etc. — you can anticipate what’s going to happen next, and sometimes you can even help out a bit, especially if you can tell that the controller’s getting overwhelmed (again, just as controllers do with pilots).

Mind reading is also sometimes necessary, though, simply because of sloppy terminology. Here’s what happened to me yesterday — I was returning to Ottawa VFR, and a few miles from the airport, terminal control passed me to tower with a minimum altitude restriction of 2,000 feet still in force. Here, as far as I can remember, is what the tower controller said:

Tower: BJO, I’m going to have you follow the downwind for 25 first, then bring you around for the left downwind on 22 [my intended runway].

This is pretty normal when arriving at the airport from the southeast — they want to keep me out of the departure path of 25 and have me cross the middle of the jet runways at circuit altitude. But what about my altitude restriction? When you’re cleared to any leg of a circuit (in Canada, anyway), you are automatically cleared to descend to circuit altitude, but was I cleared for a downwind leg? I didn’t hear any clearance in the controller’s communication — feel free to leave a comment if you disagree — but my amazing powers of telepathy told me that because the tower controller used the word “downwind”, he thought he had cleared me; unfortunately, if I had acted on his assumption and ended up with a loss of separation with an IFR aircraft, the tapes would have shown me in the wrong. I decided to help things along a bit a couple of miles from the airport:

Me: Tower, BJO has an altitude restriction of 2,000 feet. Is it OK to descend to circuit altitude now?

Tower: Sure BJO, descend to 1,500 feet. For future reference, a clearance to downwind lets you descend to circuit altitude.

Yep, I read that one correctly — he thought he’d cleared me to downwind. I thanked him (no point wasting radio time on a long discussion), and counted myself lucky that he wasn’t wearing a foil hat to shield his brain waves.

[Update: after a night's rest, I've gone back to the approach plate to get the threshold elevation, and have tried to remember the exact reports I gave North Bay radio; as a result, I've revised all altitudes up a little.]

On her blog, Aviatrix has been running an interesting series on Canadian runway and approach lighting systems (here’s the first article). Approach lights figured big in my own flying today — after a long and difficult IMC flight, I had planned to take the LOC (BC)/DME 26 approach into North Bay Airport, since the ATIS was reporting a ceiling of about 1,000 feet. Toronto Centre talked to North Bay Radio and decided to vector me the long way around for the ILS 08 instead, because of fog near the end of 26. Then a PIREP (pilot report) came in reporting a 100 foot ceiling.

It took a long time to circle around over Lake Nippising and join the ILS — I had glimpses of the city of North Bay below me, but no airport ahead. At 400 500 ft AGL and almost at the field, I still saw nothing. At 250 or 350 feet AGL (I no longer remember) 430 feet AGL, I saw the approach lights cutting clearly through the fog, but no ground or runway. I knew that in theory it was legal to land seeing only a few approach lights, but it sounded terrifying, and I never imagined I’d try; however, it was actually a fairly simple thing to do, no harder than setting up for a runway, and certainly not stressful, at least not in a slow plane like a Warrior. I lined up with the lights (I’ll admit that they didn’t appear straight ahead of me, since I was drifting and bouncing a lot in the turbulence) and planned to touch down just a bit past them. Somewhere around 50-100 feet 130 feet AGL, just before I crossed the threshold, the runway suddenly popped in below me, and I made a normal (if slightly long) landing.

Aviatrix: they were AN — I don’t think you’ve covered that yet. It’s amazing how they can punch through the fog and let you make a legal (and fairly safe) landing when the ceiling is under just over 100 feet.

When you’re looking at the weather around a specific Canadian or U.S. airport, the METAR (current observations) includes surface temperature and dewpoint, while the TAF (forecast) does not. Why?

It’s true that pilots have to worry about more than just the surface temperature. We move in three dimensions, and need to know the forecast temperature thousands (or tens of thousands) of feet above the airport as well as on the ground — we get that from the FD (digital winds/temperatures aloft) forecast, as well as the freezing level in the FA/GFA (wide-area forecast). Any risk of temperature-dewpoint convergence (i.e. mist or fog) is already taken into account in the TAF.

Still, surface temperature has value. For example, it can tell me whether I’m likely to find frost on my wings when I arrive at the airport, and it can tell me whether the forecast includes an inversion (which might not show up in the FD if it’s low level). It also gives us a good indication of where forecasters expect local variations from the area forecast. The main proof that surface temperature forecasts are important is the fact that FSS briefers routinely look up the surface temperature from the general public forecast and read it to me (it has limited value, though, since it’s only the high and low, without time information).

It turns out that the international TAF format does include an optional surface temperature group that looks like this:

T17/20Z - forecast temperature of 17° C at 2000 UTC
T08/21Z - forecast temperature of 8° C at 2100 UTC
T00/18Z - forecast temperature of 0° C at 1800 UTC
TM10/07Z - forecast temperature of minus 10° C at 0700 UTC

(I took these examples from a U.S. web page, INTERNATIONAL TERMINOLOGY AND FORECAST GROUPS NOT USED IN NWS TERMINAL FORECASTS.)

Why not include temperature? Does anyone know the history of this one?

The weather might be marginal somewhere along your route. You’re instrument rated, but you’re concerned that filing IFR will result in a much longer trip, or maybe you’re worried that you’ll hit ice at the required IFR altitudes. Assuming that you don’t cancel the trip (possibly the best choice), what do you do?

1. file IFR, because you can always cancel and finish VFR if the weather’s not IMC; or
2. file VFR, because you can always get a pop-up IFR clearance if the weather closes in.

I’ve seen both of these pieces of advice many times on aviation lists, and have sometimes heard them from other pilots, but I know from personal experience that they’re both wrong.

If you’re trapped under a lowering ceiling, you can’t always get a pop-up IFR clearance. First, you’re probably well below the minimum IFR altitude and have no way to climb VFR; even worse, you’re probably too low for ATC to see you on radar or even to hear your radio call. The only option is to cross your fingers and climb (illegally) through the cloud until you’re high enough to get into the system. That’s a scary option, especially near high terrain.

If you’re IFR, you might just as easily be trapped on top. Maybe there is a safe amount of VMC below you, but you have to have a way down to it before you cancel and continue VFR. Maybe you can shoot and approach and break off down low, depending on where you are, but it will frequently happen that once you start IFR, you find yourself effectively trapped in the system, maybe with ice-filled clouds below you.

So you can’t, always. As with much of flying, the pat answers aren’t that helpful, and pilots of small, piston planes are left with difficult choices that flight instructors (who rarely fly long cross-countries) and turbine pilots might not understand.

Michael Oxner has a posting about the weather capabilities of Canadian ATC radar, and mentions that many pilots do not have weather radar on board.

That’s true — weather radar is pretty expensive — but a lot of us do have on-board lightning detection through a Strikefinder or a Stormscope. A mature thunderstorm cell will produce a lot of electrical activity and a lot of moisture, so either lightning detection or radar will help you avoid the real killer weather. The differences have more to do with comfort and convenience.

For example, weather radar can detect heavy rain showers without associated electrical activity. Heavy showers typically have moderate turbulence associated with them, and while that’s not very dangerous, it can make a serious difference for passenger comfort (and for yours, if you have to spend an hour cleaning up vomit after the flight). My Stormscope gives me no warning at all of embedded ACC or TCU without electrical activity. While I have no commercial experience, I imagine that if you are flying passengers in a charter or commuter air service, weather radar is a pretty obvious choice. Weather radar also allows you to check different angles — I’m not sure how easy that is to use, but at least in theory, it should be possibly to figure out how high up the weather goes. Lightning detection is strictly two-dimensional.

On the other hand, lightning detection works well even on the ground when the plane is surrounded by buildings, trees, or larger planes, so it’s possible to switch on the masters and take a peak at the weather around the airport before starting the engine. Weather radar can give a lot of false positives, since it cannot distinguish heavy rain from a thunderstorm; with a Stormscope (and a strong stomach), you can avoid some unnecessary diversions. Finally, a Stormscope can detect electrical activity in the early stages of a developing thunderstorm cell, when the cell might not be producing strong returns on a radar — again, this would be a case of avoiding moderate turbulence rather than preventing an in-flight breakup.

In an ideal world, you’d want both. For passenger comfort, I think I’d do better with radar, but the Stormscope is at least enough to let me fly in summer IMC, when I’d be uncomfortable relying solely on ATC (here’s why). Given that it would be fairly straight-forward to overlay Environment Canada’s weather radar on ATC displays, I find it interesting that Michael reports that Nav Canada has decided to show lightning strikes instead. I guess the rain-vs-lightning debate isn’t over yet.

[Update: tentative settlement.]

The Canadian Air Traffic Controller Control Association (CATCA) has served notice of strike action beginning tomorrow, Wednesday 20 July 2005. As far as I can tell from reading the CATCA bulletins, there is no intention of withdrawing air traffic services; instead, the controllers seem to plan to stop training new, unlicensed controllers.

That sounds like a reasonable action. It puts pressure on Nav Canada without stranding millions of summer travellers, though it may be that CATCA (local 5454 of the Canadian Auto Workers) does not have the legal right to stop providing services anyway — I don’t know the background. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that Nav Canada management does not react by doing something stupid like locking the controllers out. Hopefully, if the controllers are not allowed to withdraw air traffic services, then management is not allowed to lock them out either.

Update: Friday 22 July

Aviation.ca reports that the union and Nav Canada have reached a tentative settlement, after the union postponed the strike action for a couple of days.

I flew my 24-month renewal IFR flight test on Wednesday morning. It was a very different experience from my PPL flight test in 2002 and my initial IFR flight test in 2003. Back then, I had been in nearly constant training (PPL, night rating, IFR) and had many more dual than solo hours in my logbook — I was drilled up to my eyeballs in procedures, and probably recited them in my sleep. Now I’ve had two years of real flying to pick up bad habits and forget all the little things teachers like to see (like doing a weight and balance even when you’re flying alone 500lb under gross), so I was quite nervous; moreover, I haven’t flown a hold for real since I got my rating.

I was nervous for nothing. The examiner, a 20,000+ hour instructor who’s seen and survived every stupid thing a student could possibly do, threw me a curveball in the ground part with an unusual lost-comms question (lost comms at the start of an IFR training flight in low IMC, where I’d filed for a hold and several approaches) where there was no single, correct textbook answer, so I just ran through the options and said what I’d do in real life, basing it on the rule of least surprise for ATC. I must have bored the poor man almost out of his mind in the plane before takeoff, running through every possible post-startup check in slow motion and excruciating detail as if I were a 50-hour student pilot (”now I’m verifying the ADF ident on the terminal chart; now I’m swerving left to see if the needle tracks; now I’m turning on the pitot heat and looking for a jump on the ammeter … excuse me, are you still awake?”). In real life, I can get my plane rolling quickly, safely, and efficiently, but exams aren’t real life, and this wasn’t the day for a 30-second runup.

I flew my original IFR flight test two years ago in IMC with 400 foot ceilings. This time, I was in VMC under foggles, but a squall line had just passed through and there were small cells all over the place in its wake — I flew into a tiny wake cell like that last summer and never want to repeat the experience. The examiner was watching closely outside the window to keep us away from the darkest stuff, ATC was vectoring us all over the place, and I was keeping the stormscope in my scan, but we all knew what we were doing and the flight and procedures all went calmly, smoothly, and (dare I say it) professionally.

I used to wonder how airline pilots could stand the stress of checkrides and fear of failure every few months, but I think I get the idea. Two years ago, I was being tested on what I had just learned and barely practiced; this time, I was being tested on what I do every week or two and can handle almost by reflex. I didn’t fly perfectly by any measure, but I flew a bit better than I normally do, and that was a nice feeling. Hopefully, when my next IFR renewal exam comes two years from now, I won’t worry as much beforehand.