Aviation

When you get in my airplane, part of your safety briefing includes me telling you where in aircraft the Emergency Locator Transmitter is installed. (It’s in the vertical stabilizer, marked on the outside with a sticker, and can be reached by tearing off a panel. You don’t need tools to get it off if you’re willing to destroy it in the process, and if you need it it’s an emergency, so you should be). You shouldn’t need to physically reach it anyway, as it’s supposed to start transmitting automatically in the case of a crash, advising the world of the need for rescue and the location of the accident. ELTs are required by law to be in almost all aircraft operating in Canada. (There are a few exceptions for things like balloons, skydiving operators, and delays in repairs). The problem is, the law no longer requires the ELT to transmit on the most useful frequency. It’s not that the law changed, it’s that the useful frequency changed and the law didn’t. Satellite monitoring of 121.5 was turned off over a year ago, leaving only the new 406 MHz frequency.

Below is an informative Transport Canada video on the advantages of the 406 MHz units, made somewhat entertaining by its “historical” character. Watch for the old-style green CFS in the tower. I love that the “typical Canadian pilot” is a while male in a Skyhawk. About right, really. The point of the video is to encourage Canadians to embrace the new 406 MHz ELT technology, because they are monitored by satellite and send information on the registered owner of the ELT. Without satellite monitoring, the old ELTs that transmit only on 121.5 MHz are useful only for informing people monitoring that frequency that there may be an airplane crashed in their approximate vicinity. Or maybe just a faulty microwave oven.

If that isn’t accessible (probably my bad html), but you can play a wmv file, click the check mark in the two-line table on this page.

The unchanged law wasn’t an oversight. It was supposed to change years ago, calling for the minimum legal ELTs to transmit on 406. There were handbills and videos and stickers and probably mousepads and t-shirts too, all promoting the new standard. But there affordable general aviation ELTs didn’t exist. Canadian advocacy groups said, “Hey, wait, these exceed 20% of the cost of some of our members’ airplanes!” Transport Canada funded a 2008 study into reducing the cost of 406 MHz ELTs. Aviation supplies are expensive enough to start with, but usually Canadians can rely on getting the best possible prices as a result of the competitive American market. There are so many GA pilots in the US, that anything they want to buy is available from multiple competing suppliers and innovation plus economies of scale bring the price down. But in this case Canada was mandating equipment that was not required by and was not particularly useful to most US pilots. Alaska is like most of Canada, but flying in the rest of the US being out of radar contact while enroute is so rare that the controllers point it out to you with some concern. Not only were the Americans not going to sell us cheap ELTs, but they were opposed to the regulation.

This US pilot group discussion typifies their concerns, back when Feb 2009 was the deadline. US pilots have three understandable objections.

• They don’t want to buy 406 MHz ELTs just to legally cross the border, but the regulation effectively imposes a three thousand dollar per aircraft fee for operating in Canada.
• The discussion demonstrates a national difference in philosophy with “If I waive Search and Rescue service, I shouldn’t have to pay for an ELT.” I think this is likely the same difference that makes people on opposite sides of the border feel differently about government-funded healthcare. Canadian SAR looks for everyone who is known to be missing, no matter how poorly prepared they are, so we don’t consider it out of line to require a level of preparation that will save all taxpayers a lot of money on UNSAR. And of course Americans can’t be expected to care about Canadian taxes.
• The pilots believe that having flown in the US, which is itself huge and has some areas of low population density, that they understand the barrenness of Canada. The latter has less than a tenth of the average population density of the former, and the population we do have is more asymmetrically distributed.

Government kept pushing the effective date of the new regulation forward into the future. A requirement to carry a 406 MHz ELT is still not in the current rules. They haven’t forgotten about it, but it’s dropped off the front page. The only FAQ question about ELTs on the TC site is about the angle you can put the antenna on, on a helicopter. It’s still pending.

Meanwhile there’s nothing to prevent Canadians from replacing the old ELTs with modern units that broadcast on 121.5 and 406 MHz. Relying on the 121.5 broadcast means hoping that someone hears it and can home in on it by reports of where the signal is audible at what strength.

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I saw this and had to share – this is an MU-2 doing a max performance takeoff, departing Port-de-Paix in Haiti. It rotates in about 500 feet. Watch it in HD for the full awesomeness of hi-def pedestrians walking along the runway.

We took this plane in and out of 3000′ ice-covered gravel strips in the north. The MU-2 is a magical, if unforgiving airplane.

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I replaced my venerable Blackberry with an iphone, and this is me testing out the capabilities on it. The picture quality is pretty good, and the video is decent, but I think I’ll stick with my little hd cam for cockpit vids.

Absolutely beautiful country here…

Guess the iconic Canadian landmark!

It came with this plaque bolted onto it. One does not mess with the Atlantic Ocean…

We were only in Halifax for a short time, but we drove all about and saw lots of things – Canadian Navy submarines in their pens in Halifax harbour, tall ships in port, and the bottom of a few pint glasses at the local pubs. It was nice weather, but hella windy.

We saw this on the way there…only the last 5 seconds of this video is cool.

Philosophy was never my strong point, but a man’s mind starts to wander and wonder while waiting for passengers to show up for a midnight departure…of course we made it safe home – that’s what Red Bull is for!

I’m pressed for time so I’ll cut this short – I have lots of blog ideas percolating and I hope to get the chance to write one down tomorrow, maybe after we meet with our company accountant to discuss how we did in fiscal 2009. Wish me luck!

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When you put cargo in an airplane, it needs to be tied down. Not so much so it doesn’t fall over and break, but so that it doesn’t move around and kill you, either by falling on you or by shifting the centre of gravity such that the airplane becomes unflyable. And kill you. Securing the load in an airplane is important.

When the load is people, the tiedowns are called seatbelts. Often the tiedowns are seatbelts when the load is not people, too, because seatbelts are easy to fasten, easy to adjust and certified for holding objects upwards of 200lbs in place. Humans don’t usually have 90 degree edges on them, and objects don’t usually have waists, so using seatbelts is discouraged for non-human objects. If your load consists entirely of non-human objects, then the seats and attached seatbelts can be removed from the equation (and airplane) entirely and dumped in the back of the hangar before the cargo is loaded and secured to tie-down rings.

A removable cargo tie-down ring consists of a square of metal with a ring attached to the top. It’s about the size of a stack of seven saltine crackers, with a ritz cracker balanced edgewise on top. There’s a channel in the bottom of the metal square so that it can slide onto the same rail that an aircraft seat attaches to, and a thumbscrew on the side to secure it in position once it has been slid to the desired location. Each tie-down ring, of course, costs over 0, about ten times more than a piece of metal with a ring and a thumbscrew on it ought to.

The law of tie-down rings is that there are never enough. One reason that there are never enough stems from the fact that there are often not enough, so captains learn to hoard them in their flight bags, exacerbating the shortage, and thus the hoarding. But even if you have a whole flight bag full of tie-down rings, you still can’t secure your cargo properly because you can’t put them in the right places.

You can only put the removable ones where there are seat rails. In other places you have to rely on the ones the manufacturer provided. You’re lucky if there are any tie-down rings installed in the cargo compartment. I have worked with people who have resorted to the “pack it so tightly it can’t shift” method. I suppose if you have literally packed the aircraft floor to ceiling with similar density cargo, and there is protection to prevent them from entering the cockpit, and you have forward emergency exits, you’re covered, but just packing things in the rear cargo tightly enough that they are hard to remove won’t cut it. Normal vibration or abnormal deceleration could still bring them down on top of you.

You have to plan the packing so you get the tie-down straps hooked into the tie-down rings before you bury them in cargo, and then just tighten everything down. The ratcheting cargo straps are nice, but I hate it when they get all jammed up in the reel.

Once I worked at a place that had truly awesome cargo nets that secured into custom recessed ports all around the inside of the cargo space. They still had mismatched parts on the empennage from repairs following a years-ago towing accident, but the customers were safe from their cargo and the pilots could work efficiently. Rare that a company gets that priority right.

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I started this post when I ran into this quotation.

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
— Bruce Lee

Commenter Frank Van Haste added this one.

“…there’s them that’s flown a thousand hours, and there’s them that’s flown the same hour a thousand times.”

It’s two different points. The first is that you have to focus, perfect one thing, gain complete mastery over your muscles, mind and reflexes. Continue consistent practice until you get it right. It refers to practice, training, which is what I’m doing when I hack at my flight simulator game.

The second is about breadth of experience. Different conditions, different aircraft, different crews, different places, different mindset, always adding what you learned last time to the new experience. And there’s something I’ve found in aviation, that every thousand hours or so, something happens. Inadvertent IMC, engine failure, smoke monster^*, icing, or something you thought you had mastered long ago that suddenly rears its head and becomes an issue again.

I don’t think I’ve practiced ten thousand approaches yet, either different or the same, but I keep practicing.

*My affectionate thanks to everyone who has been with me long enough to know I’m not talking about Lost.

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I probably blogged about this the first time I installed iTunes, but it makes me laugh every single time I see it.

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

Is there some way you can use Abba tunes to calculate an air position? Is there a way to stay on glideslope using country western lyrics? Is there some method of cross-connecting my iPod to the autopilot that will steer me clear of the Danger Zone? Should I turn off the iPod before making a course correction? I was given a POH to study once and the very first page of the manual, before the title page and the table of contents, the very first page warned me in all capital letters that I was never to put the propellers into reverse while in the air. The position and strictness of the warning told me immediately that (a) this has already had disasterous consequences, (b) quite a lot of people did it, so it must be pretty cool.

I’m clearly missing some vital function of the iPod shuffle, considering that I merely use it to listen to music during quiet moments. I hope it’s okay with Apple that I sometimes listen to my music while navigating?

Also, message to iTunes: contrary to what you think, it’s not all about you. You can stop putting up a “what should I do about this?” box every time I insert a CD ROM or add a peripheral. Your purpose on my computer is to manage songs on my iPod. You are not the operating system.

And I think it’s lame that the iPod Touch has a whole app for managing YouTube videos, but all it does is bookmark them and play them back. What’s the point if I can’t save them to watch when I don’t have an Internet connection? The Kindle is pretty cool, but I’m disturbed by the whole shift in the way published content is meted out to the consumer. Whole cultures have survived attempts at extermination because they preserved and hid their literature, in tangible printed form. Centralized control over access and content of publications is too 1984 for me. I don’t want a corporation to decide for me that something is no longer worth reading or listening to; I don’t want a seriously compromised server to wipe out a decade of literature; and I don’t want governments to have a means of determining who is reading what. Whether or not they are using it for navigational purposes.

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Recently I learned an air traffic control code that hadn’t known before. I saw some movement statistics for an airport that included the column “Runway 88.” This looks as odd to a pilot as a reference to th 21st hole would to a golfer. (Cue eleven readers telling me that some golf courses go past eighteen holes). Runway numbers correspond to the hunderds and tens digits of the bearing you are on while on or lined up for that runway. There is no compass bearing of 880 degrees, so what was this runway?

I knew they weren’t keeping statistics on bar attendance, a la the 19th hole of a golf course, so I checked and found that Runway 88 is the designation for an aircraft just passing through a control zone, but not landing at the airport there. You might pass through if the weather is too poor to go above, or if you’ve just taken off from another nearby airport and haven’t had a chance to climb above this control zone through yet.

Does anyone know how universal that code is, or if there are any more like that? Perhaps air traffic controllers have a black humour that includes a runway designation for runway excursions, or a speculative destination for pilots who don’t appear to have it sufficiently together to make it to their filed destination. Probably not, but it amuses me to think of a controller tagging someone up as “runway 73″ as a message to her colleague.

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Sorry, no blog today. I’m busy watching the Olympics. For the hockey men, I predict Gold: USA, Silver: Canada, Bronze: Slovakia.

I’m just watching the hockey women accept their medals. I hope Canada’s men win the gold, but I also hope they will be as gracious as the Americans women in defeat if they don’t. And the Finnish women made me love them, all proud to have a medal, regardless of colour, and making little personal gestures at the people they hoped were watching the TV coverage. Probably on the men’s teams neither the gold nor silver medalists will cry. I think I see tears on both sides for the gals.

The medals themselves are ugly, though. They look crumpled.

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General aviation hassles. This time it’s not security regulations, airspace restrictions, or exorbitant airport fees. It’s just small town council that doesn’t want to invest in public facilities. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened to small airports across Canada, and even one so large that it was a designated alternate landing strip for the NASA space shuttle, but this one includes a personal angle from a Cockpit Conversation reader.

Julian, whose story this is, passed the Transport Canada instructor ride in December and went out and applied everywhere, in person for the nearby schools and by e-mail for places further afield, like Kawartha Lakes Flight Center in Lindsay, Ontario. Julian describes the thrill of that first don’t-know-what-to-expect aviation job interview.

A few weeks later, I got a reply and I had my first interview! I wasn’t sure how to dress though because so many schools are so laid back in their attire, but I thought I’d dress to the nines anyway. When I got there I was way over dressed. The interview went well and we went for a little .5 flight. Then he said you got the job if you want it. I said, “There is only one thing: I have a volunteer job from the 12-28 at the Olympics in Vancouver.”

They were really supportive and said something like, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!” And it really is. So they let me have the time off whenever I wanted to leave. Cool.

So in January, Julian moved to Lindsay, a farm town of 17,000 people an hour’s drive north east of Toronto (assuming you’re not trying to leave Toronto in rush hour traffic). The school itself has four two-seater Cessna 152s two four-seater Cessna 172s and a twin-engine Piper Seneca. The school owners were upfront about winters being slow with little flying. The first week he did a bunch of rental checkouts and logged six hours of flying. He was so delighted to be flying at all, that he kept up his spirits through a few days of unflyable weather and then as much flying as he could handle for the rest of that week.

The first fine weather weekend brought Julian his most amazing sight ever: little Lindsey was swarmed by more airplanes than he had ever seen fly into an uncontrolled airport. Even a C130 did a low and over. People would fly in and go to the restaurant or come and talk to them at the school. His students were keen and doing well, with one scheduled to solo the weekend before Julian left for the Olympics.

The school had an instructor meeting, about an approaching Transport Canada inspection. These are regular occurrences at aviation businesses of all kinds. Julian had questions which were discussed and answered. The owner came and told him that he had flown more than all the other instructors despite not having any students to start. The other four instructors have second jobs and instruct only part time, but Julian is putting everything he has into it, and it’s paying off. As the only instructor there with an instrument rating he also has some multi-engine instrument flying to look forward to, a lucky coup for an instructor so early in his career. But every opportunity in aviation seems to have a stumbling block laid across its threshold. It’s not just my stories that read this way.

Julian came into school early the morning after a snowfall to prepare for for an eight a.m. flight. As he looked out over the ramp to see how much deicing he would need to do, he noticed pink ribbons on the props of the Seneca. “Geeze TC is here already,” he thought. He walked into the office and there learned that the City of Kawartha Lakes had put locks around all the propellers and were seizing the aircraft for unpaid bills.

You never know whose story to believe as a peon in this industry, but the school’s story is that yes, they do owe for rent and fuel but not anywhere near the value of the property seized, that the city has gone about everything illegally, as they should have only seized something of equal value not seven aircraft and the school’s only means of producing revenue. I can tell you that December and January are the worst revenue months for a flying school, and as this was the beginning of February with a quasistationary high was parked over the area, giving clear skies and perfect training conditions. Julian alone would have flown over twenty-five hours that week, bringing in revenue for the city, but the airplanes stayed parked.

The locks were supposed to come off Friday, but they didn’t. They were supposed to come off Monday. But they didn’t. As far as Julian knew while he was on the bus up Whistler mountain they were still on. The school is suing the city for damages. Word is that the city is trying to close the airport so they can put in a new subdivision across the street on the approach for runway 31. There is not a shortage of usable land in the area.

Julian managed to have a blast at Whistler, meeting athletes, celebrities and other young people. He said it was kind of a mood kill for someone spending money and enjoying the mountain scenery when he could and should be trying to find work. But it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. He still has a good attitude, as he wrote me offering an Olympic postcard (which I told him to send to Elizabeth) and I had to talk the tale of woe out of him.

It’s a typical ‘getting started in the industry’ story, unfortunately it’s typical right down to the setback just as the solos are approaching. (Solos are important for a new instructor, as he needs to teach three students to solo and three to licence before he can upgrade his instructor rating). I was going to make this into an ad for Julian’s services as a Class 4 instructor, but the school reopened and he’ll be able to go back to work.

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