In The Overshoot

New Faces

2011-10-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

After almost a week-long maintenance episode we're back flying. A couple days ago we tackled the complicated job of flying over the largest and busiest airport in our grid, which also serves as a military base. It takes some coordination with ATC to go bombing over a busy airport at 200 ft AGL. As we crossed over the field I could see a row of six Mirage fighter jets parked on the ramp, and there were numerous green military hangars as well. Something about it felt really wrong - buzzing over an airport that had military establishments. Our flight yesterday was still in the vicinity of the airport and more than once we spotted fighter jets screaming past us at low level as well. We haven't been shot down or arrested yet though, so that's a good sign.

We also have some additional faces here on the job, as our geophysicist has arrived for the last couple weeks of the job to help wrap things up and review the data with the client. We also had the client here visiting for a couple days to review data with the geophysicist.

And finally a couple nights ago my boss arrived here for a visit for a couple days. This is our 3rd time in France working for this client now - they have all been very big projects - and from what I hear through the grapevine this has been the most successful project yet, so its good for the big man himself to show his face and make an appearance for the client. From what our geophysicist was saying was that our boss was really just looking forward to coming here to congratulate us in person. When my boss arrived the Captain and I had just landed from a flight and I was finishing up some post-flight operator duties out at the airplane when I saw the boss walk up. We greeted each other and made some small talk, and then he looked me in the eye and squeezed my shoulder and said "Good work." That was all he needed to say. I could tell he really meant what he was saying. Its really great to work for someone like that. The last couple nights he's also taken us out for dinner and drinks - all on him. I really do have a great boss, he is such a pleasure to work for. Its those kind of people that really motivate you to do a good job for them.

It turned out that he really doesn't have a whole lot to do here, but its good that he came anyways for the client. The client's family also owns a winery (oh yes we ARE in France, haha), so he brought some of his own Champagne to share. My boss was making the joke that usually he comes over to France to solve problems - but this time there aren't any so he has nothing to do!

We're so far 80% done, so we should be finished the main part of the flying within the next 10 or 12 days, and then there will probably be another 5 or 6 days to finish up any re-flights and pack up and ship out.

Acceleration

2011-09-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

These last few days I've been indulging my nerdy streak and experimenting with Accelerate-Stop distance calculations. A while back I wrote a blog (found here) regarding Accelerate-Stop distances and the balanced field length of the Twin Comanche. That exercise came about as a result of a lack of Accelerate-Stop distance charts in my Twin Comanche flight manual, so I made my own. An Accelerate-Stop distance chart simply a chart that the pilot can use to determine the total distance required to accelerate to Vr (rotation speed), and then retard the throttles and stop using maximum braking. This distance changes depending on the field elevation, temperature, weight of the aircraft, and winds. These charts give a good indicator of the length of runway one would need to safely stop if they experienced an engine failure during the take-off roll.

I have recently been tinkering with an application that allows me to develop Apps for my Android Phone, called App Inventor. Its really quite fun, and while it does have some limitations on designing the user interface, it is really quite powerful on the functionality side. So I set out to design an Accelerate-Stop distance calculator for the Navajo. The Navajo does have proper Accelerate-Stop charts, but the challenge was in the ability to create a formula based on the variables present in paper chart in the flight manual. It ended up not being that hard, and after a day I managed to find a formula that produced results within +/- 50 ft of what the flight manual charts spit out. It took another hour to design and code a really simple app on my phone that makes use of the formula, allowing the user to input density altitude, loaded aircraft weight, and headwind component, and it makes the calculation. So now I have an app on my phone that can calculate Accelerate-Stop distances for a Piper Navajo.

I can't leave it at that however. That's way too easy. So here is the problem to solve: Accelerate-stop charts give a good reference, but they don't really have the flexibility of real-world operations. At least no more than just giving you a good idea. It still leaves room for ambiguity. In real life usually we're operating out of runways much longer than what is needed according to the Accel-Stop charts. For example here in France the runway is 5000 ft. So lets say for example that for the given day I check the accel-stop distance, and the chart (or my phone app) tells me the Accel-stop distance for that particular day is 3100 ft. So that means we can have an engine failure at Vr, and still stop with 1900 ft to spare. So if an engine quits on takeoff, up until Vr our go/no-go decision is a no brainer - we cut the power and stop. BUT, what if the engine fails AFTER Vr?

In theory we would clean the airplane up, continue climbing and return for a landing. But isn't that a waste of some really good extra runway? What if we still had the space to land and stop? Wouldn't that be a safer option than trying to climb out and fly an entire circuit on a single engine? Remember this is a light twin - climb performance will be extremely crippled on one engine. So how do we know if we have the space? An Accel-stop chart can't give you that answer, and that's a pretty tough decision to make in the chaos and confusion of a failed engine on takeoff.

This tough decision at a critical time is EXACTLY what every aircraft manufacturer and operator is trying to eliminate. In fact this is why manufacturers of large transport category aircraft do things a little differently than an Accel-Stop distance chart. Rather than using a chart that is only good up until one specific airspeed, they use charts/computers that do things the other way around. In addition to the normal variables like winds, temperature, and weight, the pilot will also input the length of runway he has to work with, and the computer program (or chart) will output an airspeed specific to those conditions (V1 - or takeoff decision speed). Below that airspeed, the pilot will have enough space to reject the takeoff and stop, above, he can be confident he has the space to fly away. There is no ambiguity with this method as its not based on one specific airspeed. If the runway is longer, takeoff decision speed (V1) increases to account for that extra length.

So that is the challenge for me. Create a computer program that rather than OUTPUTTING a distance like the Accel-Stop chart, it allows me INPUT the length we have to work with, and OUTPUT the takeoff decision speed that corresponds to that runway length (and the other variables). Easier said that done. I'm still working on it, but it has been a fascinating exercise so far. This is where math comes in, so I may lose the interest of a lot of my readers here, but if you're the kind of person who finds joy in applying math to real life, you'll LOVE this. The key to this whole solution is the kinematics formula of:

V = √2DA where

V = velocity (or our magic decision speed - V1)

D = distance

A = rate of acceleration

I get so excited when physics can be applied to real world scenarios!!

D is of course user-inputted, but A is going to be the magic value I need to figure out. This formula is for constant acceleration, so it doesn't COMPLETELY work out in the real world. In the real world as our velocity increases, so does air resistance to the square of velocity. This means that as we go charging down the runway, our rate of acceleration is actually diminishing as our speed increases - so how do we fit a changing rate of acceleration into the equation? The answer is to find our AVERAGE acceleration (from the point of stationary to our decision speed V1), and plug that into the equation - but how do we find that?

Well this is the fascinating challenge. I started by going to the Accel-Stop chart provided in the flight manual. This chart gives us two variables that we can use to find our average rate of acceleration - it gives us the distance of course (depending on the conditions), and it also defines the speed at which we accelerate to - which is 89 mph. The distance however is distance it takes to accelerate to 89 mph, and then decelerate back to 0, so we have to separate those two distances. There's an easy way to do this - the flight manual also provides a takeoff performance chart which gives the ground roll distance to accelerate to Vr. This is perfect, it gives us our acceleration distance right there, and we can get our deceleration portion by subtracting that from our Accel-Stop distance. Now we can calculate our average rate of acceleration for the acceleration portion, and the same for our stopping portion. We do this using this formula:

A = V^2/2D

Its the same formula as above, just solving for A instead of V. Simple. Now we have our value for rate of acceleration - so we've made some progress! Except we're not quite there because this acceleration value is only valid for one speed - the speed defined in the Accel-Stop chart. Because as you remember our rate of acceleration is going to change depending on our speed and the corresponding wind resistance. If we make our V1 speed higher than 89 mph, our average acceleration value will be less, if we make our V1 speed lower, our average acceleration will be higher. This is where it gets REALLY interesting, because some experimentation is in order, and this is where I haven't figured everything out yet, so I'm really enjoying it as a good brain challenge.

I know that I can calculate acceleration by using:

A=V/t

where t is time. So when we take-off I can time how long it takes to accelerate to a number of different speeds to get a good range of data (for example take the time as we pass through 60 mph, 70, 80, 90, and 100) and then we can plot that as a curve and extrapolate/interpolate as needed and calculate our average acceleration based off of that. OR......

I can download an app on my Android phone that records measurements using the phone's accelerometers! I found a neat app that does just that, and charts the measurements as G's on all 3 axis. 1 G equals 9.81 m/s^2, so that's easy enough to convert the G measurements into acceleration. I've been playing with this feature for the last couple flights, and I must say, it works amazingly!! The app allows me to export the data into a spreadsheet. I can then calculate velocity from the raw G readings and graph it in excel.

Check THIS out:

This is a graph of today's takeoff taken from the data collected by my phone's accelerometers, and charted as speed (mph) over time (seconds) in excel. Isn't that a beautiful curve!?! Who would have thought I'd be able to produce such a beautiful curve from real world data collected by a smartphone!! Amazing. I haven't doctored the data at all except to delete everything after the point where we were airborne. Note the takeoff roll doesn't start until 6 seconds in, because that's the time between when I started recording data and when the Captain started the takeoff roll. So our takeoff roll took roughly 27 seconds, and we were airborne at a speed of around 110 mph.

Also note the sharp increase in acceleration at very beginning (probably due to the throttles being advanced and more power being added), and then the gradual decrease in acceleration (shown as the slope of the curve) as we picked up speed and air resistance became a bigger factor. I know the phone's sensors are kicking out accurate readings because the results I achieved were bang on the money with our airspeed readings (it was a calm day). I never imagined in a million years the data would come out this clean.

Using this data I can calculate our average acceleration at ANY airspeed, which I can then use to find our distance traveled (with I think a fairly high degree of real world accuracy). Voila! We have the brain behind our computer program.

The only problem is that these acceleration values are only good until we become airborne. After which there's a whole new set of kinematics in play that I still have to figure out, but I'm fairly confident with a few more data-recording sessions in the airplane and some math I'll be able to nail it down. Once I do, its a matter of writing the computer program to process the math and solve for velocity, and bingo, we can figure out exactly what decision speed corresponds to our given runway length.

I know, I'm a nerd, but seriously, isn't it amazing when you can use math, an android smartphone, and computer programming to make something useful?

Procedures Pay Off

2011-09-22T05:02:00.001-07:00

I am happy to report that I totally greased my two subsequent landings after my last post. One of which was in a light crosswind. I think I've finally got the feel for this airplane now. Now we'll start working on nailing the touchdown point.

Our last flight lasted 8 minutes, and now we're grounded waiting for parts. An engine driven fuel pump that is. I was PNF (Pilot Not Flying) for that flight, so my duties involved monitoring engine instruments on take-off and making the required cockpit calls (Full Power Confirmed, Gauges Green, Airspeed Alive, 95 mph, Rotate, etc) and completing the after-takeoff checklist.

We took off, everything normal, and I started to complete the after-takeoff checklist on our climb through 500 ft. As I turned off the left Emergency fuel pump I watched the fuel pressure gauge to make sure the pressure didn't drop out (which would indicate an engine-driven fuel pump failure, and an immanent engine failure). Except this time as I flicked off the overhead switch the pressure DID drop out. Huh, didn't expect that.

At about the same time I watched the drop in fuel pressure, the Captain saw the Low Fuel Pressure light illuminate on the enunciator panel. I quickly flicked the switch back on just as the left engine started to cough. We turned around and landed without incident.

This is a very good example of why emergency fuel pumps exist, and why we employ the good practice of turning them on for take-off, and then then turning them off one at a time after takeoff. And also in a broader sense of how airplanes are designed so that stuff can break, but the airplane can still fly just fine.

Just like a Twin Comanche, the Navajo is equipped with an engine driven fuel pump, which does just what its name says. Normally the engine driven fuel pump is what provides fuel to the engine in normal flight, but if it were to fail, the engine would stop producing power. So we have a set of emergency fuel pumps, which do the same thing, except they are powered electrically as a back-up system. Without the emergency pumps turned on it would be a real bummer if the engine driven pump failed during takeoff, because that would mean the engine would quit, and we'd be stuck troubleshooting a failing engine during the most critical and time-sensitive phase of the flight. So its good practice to turn the emergency pumps on for every take-off we perform. That way if the engine driven pump fails, it will only affect the performance of the engine when we go to switch the emergency pump OFF.

So that's what we do. We only switch OFF the emergency pumps after we're a certain height above the ground such that we have time to troubleshoot potential problems without immediate action being required. Furthermore its good practice, for obvious reasons in light of our last flight, to turn off each fuel pump one at a time, and watch for any changes in fuel pressure. If we were to flick off both pumps at the same time, it would be far less intuitive to correctly identify which engine was in the process of failing.

On Tuesday all the cautious procedures paid off, and our fuel pump failure was a non-incident. Had we not been exercising good practice it is very possible we would have had an engine failure during takeoff.

The system works.

Landin... wait... ok Landings

2011-09-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

*CHIRP*...................*Chirp* Dang it. I bounced it again. But I know exactly what I did wrong. I'm having trouble nailing down a good landing in the Navajo. I haven't really gotten that much practice lately. The Captain and I usually alternate Pilot Flying duties every flight, but the last two flights that were supposed to be mine the Captain ended up doing the landings because it was fairly gusty with a bit of a crosswind. I'm not complaining, I still don't feel perfectly at home yet in the airplane, and would rather get my practice in on calmer days. Part of it has to do with the fact that I've never flown an airplane from the right seat before, so I have to develop some new muscle memory skill sets. What used to be my throttle hand is now my flying hand, and my flying hand is now my throttle hand. Its also quite a bit bigger airplane than I have experience in.

This time the the reason I bounced all tied back to not having a stable approach. Normal approaches in the Navajo are done at 120 mph, and as we cross the airport fence we pull off the power slowly and let the airspeed bleed off so we're around 110 mph crossing the runway threshold. I'm finding that the Navajo is fairly sensitive to power changes, and it builds speed fairly quickly and doesn't lose it easily. Initially as I turned base I had the airspeed pegged at 120, but I found myself a little high, so I pushed the nose down and pulled off a touch of power, but apparently not enough, and soon enough I found the airspeed way up past 130 - way too fast. I spent the rest of the approach trying to work it back down, and ended up crossing the threshold carrying way too much speed. We floated for a long while in ground effect waiting for it to slow down, until the Captain eventually called me to chop the power cause we would be running out of runway soon. I pulled the power back to idle, and then that resulted in a bit of a firm landing with a small bounce.

That was a couple days ago, and today it was my turn again. This time I made sure I had the airplane properly slowed down and the approach speed and glideslope pegged with lots of time to spare. I made sure I stayed much more aware of my airspeed during power adjustments, and made a decent landing this time with no bounces. Still room for improvement, but we'll get there.

On a separate subject I saw a Twin Comanche doing touch and goes at our airport a few days ago. I couldn't help but stand and watch for a bit. It brought back memories, and made me wish for a few moments that I still had mine. It was just so much FUN.

Flight Planning

2011-09-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

Part of the requirements of our permits that allow us to overfly small communities at low altitude is that we have to notify each town when we'll be overflying them. Part of that involves faxing a map of our flight path off to each town hall as well. So far I've compiled a database of over 100 small communities in our survey block that we've been notifying when our flight for the day takes us over them. Its tedious work to determine when exactly we'll be overflying each town, and which ones. So why put up with tedious monotony when you can write a computer program to do it for you?

I've gone over almost the entire map now, and recorded in a spreadsheet the names of the towns and the line # that runs over top of them. Every flight line in our grid is numbered, and the company geophysicist, who processes our data keeps a spreadsheet list of each numbered line, and how long it is. So after obtaining that, I've written a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) excel program, and now I can specify the line # we're going to start our flight on, and the time we're going to begin surveying, and my VBA program will chew through my database of communities and the geophysicist's spreadsheet of survey lines, and spit out a list of each town we'll be overflying for that particular flight, and the start and end time of each line we fly. I send that list over to the Captain, and he sends out faxes to each community with the calculated time we'll be flying overhead. Done and done.

Now I don't have to spend hours pouring over the map calculating what towns and when we'll be flying over them. It just takes 10 seconds to get the program to spit me out a list, and if we change our flight plan I've only wasted 10 seconds and not an hour. Its also useful to find out how many lines and line kms we can expect to fly for the day. Its always fun when a hobby like computer programming becomes useful.

Traffic Awareness

2011-08-28T11:54:00.001-07:00

Today was our first day we managed to get two flights done in a single day. Yay for us. Being a Sunday and a beautiful clear day it was also quite busy in the air around the local airports, and we had our hands full tracking all the local general aviation traffic that was up for a Sunday joy-ride.

Despite the heavily populated countryside our survey lines still dictate that we just plow right over top of any local airports in our survey block at the usual 200 ft. The less times we have to break line and go around things the better our data is. Unfortunately overflying airports at 200 ft can provide for some unique safety issues if the airport does have local traffic flying around, so its important to keep in radio contact and keep other traffic informed, as well as have both sets of eyes scanning for traffic.

The Navajo is also equipped with a Zaon PCAS (Portable Collision Avoidance System) unit, and it got a pretty full workout today. I have to say I'm impressed with it. I've seen them before in Aviation shops before but never got to use them, but have always been intrigued by the idea but have been a little skeptical. But I can honestly say this thing is an excellent piece of gear for what you would pay for it.

As far as air-to-air collision avoidance systems go, there a few different levels, all with a different levels of features, and different levels with which they will drain your bank account.

All of these systems are dependent on potential conflict aircraft being equipped with a functioning transponder that will send out return signals after it receives an "interrogation" signal from either a ground radar site, or a special type of transponder (Mode S) from another aircraft. If the other airplane that is about to cross your path doesn't have a transponder, or its not turned on, no system is going to see it - unless of course you're flying a military jet that's equipped with air-to-air radar. The good news is that the vast majority of airplanes do have transponders.

A PCAS system like the one we have in the airplane is entirely passive. It doesn't have the ability to send out its own interrogation signals, but merely listens for the reply signals of other airplanes, and it can plot their position relative to itself that way. Like I said I'm quite surprised how well it works. The major disadvantage to it being passive however is that it is depending on ground radar stations or third party Mode S equipped aircraft to send an interrogation signal and trigger the target aircraft's transponder reply. That means that PCAS is basically useless up north where there is no ground radar coverage. If an aircraft doesn't have its transponder triggered, the PCAS can't see it. For use in medium to high density airspace however, where there most likely is ground radar coverage that can trigger transponders, it has been excellent. The model we have does give relative direction, distance, and altitude with reasonable accuracy. And I've been able to visually spot targets in about the same amount of time it takes me to find traffic when its vocally pointed out by ATC for me.

We happened to buzz by a para-glider who was floating around in the updrafts of some hills, and the PCAS didn't pick him up (no transponder) but his big parachute was easy to spot nonetheless. We probably scared the pants off of him though, haha.

Rock & Roll!

2011-08-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

Well finally after a painfully slow and troublesome start we have had our first actual production survey flight! Surveying in France is not like going up to the Northern Canada Bush and doing a survey job like I have been used to in the 206. The airspace here is incredibly dense.

Surveying in the north involves little more than setting up at the nearest airport, and going flying. Up there you can fly at 200 ft all day every day and no one cares because its just wilderness. Here in France its a little different. We're buzzing towns at 200 ft agl, blowing right over top of local airports, criss-crossing military airspace and even working around a nuclear generating plant. Part of the reason of the slow start was getting all the government permits to do this. Even though we're allowed to fly over top of small towns, we have to notify a half dozen different agencies and organizations every time we fly. That's the boring part.

The exciting part is the actual flying. To be a honest I was wondering if I would be of much use as co-pilot/operator, considering this kind of flying is usually done single-pilot with an unlicensed operator. But after today's flight I felt like I contributed to the flight considerably as co-pilot and not just "operator". The navigating is intense! The entire 4 hr flight I served as navigator while the Captain flew the lines. In Canada if we're surveying and we see a road, that's been an eventful flight. Here, there's so many things to look out for; airports, airplanes, power lines, towers and restricted airspace that we were both kept on our toes. I never thought that anyone would let us fly over built up areas at 200 ft agl, everything about flight training says its not allowed, but surprisingly our permits basically (with lots of fine print) allow us to fly over everything but the larger towns. The flight planning and flying is quite complex, and its going to be a great learning experience. I would never know how to even attempt a job like this on my own, so its fascinating to be involved in the planning and thought process of a pilot who has done this before.

There's lots to see scenery wise as well. We flew past about a half dozen great big French castles, and some cathedrals, and just in general French countryside is very beautiful.

Usually I don't bother to share photos on this blog, but these ones are worth sharing for sure.

Its incredibly warm here though, over 30 degrees C, and one thing I forgot about Pipers is that there isn't nearly enough ventilation for them. Cessnas have those big ol' overhead vents that you can direct at your face, but the Navajo only has little tiny ones like you'd find on an airliner, and then the side storm windows, which give good airflow but are really noisy to open. We're thinking we might buy some flex hose to stick one end out the window into the airflow and the other end down our shirts to keep us cool. I'll report on how that works out if/when it happens.

Navajo Checkout

2011-08-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

So I got a little more than half of my Navajo PCC done today in a beautiful warm, calm day. I still need 1.1 hrs more flight training to be considered complete.

I am SO glad to be back into multi-engine flying. Its just so much more fun. We started out with a briefing on the things we planned to cover - all the typical air work stuff like turns, steep turns, slow flight, approach to stall, etc. and then fired the ol' girl up and taxied out. The first take-off went ok, it was both fun and challenging to get back into the swing of a busy take-off roll and climb-out. The biggest error I made was getting distracted after we were airborne with retracting the landing gear and flaps and setting climb power and letting my airspeed decrease too much. Airspeed should always be maintained during the climb-out after takeoff. But that will come as I get more accustomed to the airplane.

Up at altitude most of the air work was a piece of cake, and most of the multi-engine emergency procedures came back to me fairly quickly as well. I was obviously no multi-engine master, but I think I did represent my experience fairly well and looked like someone who didn't have to be taught all over again how to fly a twin.

We went back to the airport for a couple circuits, and although my approach was fairly good, the first landing attempt was pretty ugly. This is no Cessna anymore! Actually the Navajo behaves very similarly to how the Twin Comanche behaves on landing, it just sits much higher off the ground. I think I overcompensated for the high stance and ended up flaring too high, didn't have enough power on into the flare and ended up stalling it onto the runway. Nothing too jolting, but still it was one of those "oh crap add power" moments just as we were touching down.

Unfortunately a few months ago back in the spring, the Company tried to hire a pilot for the Navajo, but unfortunately he couldn't really get the hang of the airplane and during training he put it down hard and did many thousands of dollars of damage to the landing gear. I think that is still in the back of everyone's mind and is still a bruise to the company wallet, so the pressure is on both for me, and for my training Captain not to let the same thing happen again.

My second approach I was feeling that pressure. In mind its acceptable to not grease your first attempt at landing a new aircraft, so there's really not a whole lot of pressure there as long as you don't panic and over-control and do something stupid. But the second attempt you had better have learned. I was feeling the pressure on final for our second landing. My approach was perfect - nice and stabilized, my target airspeed was pinned, and I had a good power setting and glideslope going in. Even still I had a moment where my heart started beating and I was thinking "Don't screw this up!". I actually don't remember when was the last time in my professional career that I felt the pressure like that. Luckily I did have the advantage of a perfectly calm day, and I managed to overcome any anxiety and make the touchdown a pretty good one (of course there is much room for mastery yet). The Captain seemed happy, so we taxied into the fuel pumps and shut down. He didn't say much about anything, which I interpret as meaning I did a good job, and I was fairly satisfied with my performance. You always have to be sparing with the praise when you're dealing with pilots, otherwise our heads swell and it makes it difficult to fit into the cockpit.

Ego's are a difficult thing to manage when two pilots are working together. Unfortunately I have almost zero experience working side-by-side with other pilots. My jobs prior to now have been single-pilot affairs, so I pretty much got to be the one and final authority in the airplane. If I made a small mistake, no one would notice and I wouldn't look stupid to anyone. But also I didn't have the advantage of spending mass amounts of time watching a more experienced pilot do his thing. All my experience up until now has been born out of personal lessons I've learned and experience from being Pilot-in-Command and I've had very little influence from watching more seasoned pilots. This is one thing I'm actually really looking forward to - getting to tag along as First Officer with a high-time pilot to see how he does things. Its also going to be a challenge as well though, because now there are two ego's in the cockpit, and a first officer has to walk a fine line between challenging the Captain's ego, and safely managing his human side (that can sometimes make mistakes) to contribute to a safer flight. Its going to be especially challenging because this is the first time the company is implementing two-crew SOPs (standard operating procedures) for the Navajo, so up until now my Captain has been accustomed to flying the airplane all by himself (as have I in the airplanes I've flown), so giving up a little bit of control and trusting the guy next to you is going to be a bit of a change for both of us.

Happy Days!

2011-08-14T06:48:00.000-07:00

Well since my last post I have trained a new pilot to replace me on the 206, gone on vacation to visit The Lovely Girlfriend in the merry old land of Auz, and now I'm once again deployed - to France this time! France is quite beautiful, I just wish I could speak the language a little better, as we're located in a fairly small town and not many people speak English. My French is improving though.

HOWEVER, I mentioned I trained a pilot to replace me on the 206 because I am finally being promoted to co-pilot on the company Navajo! Finally a twin job! Whoo hoo!! Part of the deal with the upgrade is that I also have operator duties, so I've been trained on that already, and I'm now in the midst of writing the PA-31 type exams for the Navajo. Let me tell you in comparison to all the other aircraft I have flown since now, the Navajo is like a REAL airplane. It has a very detailed Flight Manual (which I've been buried in the last couple days), lots of power with the ability to go really high in the form of two 325 HP turbocharged piston engines (More than double the power of any other airplane in my logbook), an air-stair door, copilot flight instruments, and an overhead switches panel (I've always thought that to be one of the defining aspects between "real" airplanes and "little" airplanes.

The Twin Comanche being the only other Twin I've flown before the Navajo, naturally I have some comparisons of the two airplanes: In one sense they're very similar. They have the same wing shape, the engine positioning is the same, and actually looking out the side window at the wings and engines is very much Deja Vu to the Comanche. The engines and wing have the same proportions, the Navajo is just scaled up a little bit. The engine start procedures are basically the same between the two airplanes, so I'll be at home there, and the approaches for landing are even made at the same airspeed (110 mph). The Twin Comanche, although a slightly slower and less powerful airplane, actually has a slightly higher Vmc (minimum speed at which the airplane can be controlled with a failed engine), and that is mainly what dictates what speed you can fly the approach at. The only thing I think may take some getting used to is the stance the Navajo has on the runway. The Navajo sits fairly high in comparison, while the Comanche was a true low-rider. I'm going to have to develop a new sense for when to start my flair for landing and touching down. But, realistically I'll have lots of chance to develop that because most of the takeoffs and landings will still be done by the Captain. I am just the co-pilot after all. In the other sense of comparison, the Navajo is built and flown like a transport category aircraft. Its solid and the engines need to be operated in a very precise, by the book way otherwise cylinders start cracking and things wear out too fast. The Twin Comanche on the other hand is really just a small private airplane with two engines. It doesn't have a proper flight manual, and other than some of the flight characteristics that were a little bit tricky in comparison to other private airplanes (due to the wing design and high Vmc), the engines were still just your typical Cessna 172 engine. A simple little 4-banger. Overall the Navajo is definitely a step up, but I think my experience in the Twin Comanche will go a long way in helping to prepare me for flying the Navajo.

Hopefully in the next couple days we'll get the flying portion of my Navajo checkout done, and I can officially call myself a Navajo pilot! After that, because of the mass amounts of PIC flight time I've already accumulated and my Twin Comanche multi-PIC time, I'll be eligible for the upgrade to Captain as soon as I get 250 hrs on type.

When I get my checkout done, I'll post again on my experiences in learning to fly the Navajo, because until now I've only flown a few times in it as an Operator, and I have to get the exams finished first before I start the flying portion of my checkout.

Crosswinds & Rudolphs

2011-06-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I laughed when my new-to-fixed-wing-ops operator had a chance to cut his teeth as a small aircraft passenger and had a moment of sheer terror on takeoff. These last couple days the winds have been fairly strong and blowing pretty much across the one gravel runway where we are. Yesterday's flight was no exception. I pulled out onto the runway and started my takeoff roll with a 16 knot crosswind from the left. Just before I rotated and lifted off he lowered his head to look down at something on his display screen, when he looked up a second later, I had just gotten airborne and let the nose of the aircraft weather-vane into the wind, and was skimming the runway 10 ft off the ground while I accelerated in ground effect to my climb out speed. For the non-pilots, with a strong crosswind like that the result is the airplane tracking straight down the runway, but pointing sideways in a crab angle. My operator looked up out his side window to look straight down the runway with it scrolling beneath him. For that one second he thought we were about to crash and start cartwheeling down the runway. It was a bad sense of timing on his part to look up if he wasn't familiar with how the airplane reacts in a crosswind takeoff. I had to laugh at his moment of terror. I have to give him credit though, other than that short moment of terror he hasn't expressed any other moments of terror, and has just trusted me and let me do my thing.

**Disclaimer: These next paragraph's may be tedius and uninteresting to those not interested in the technical side of aviation, but I have more non-technical stories coming. Scroll down to the line of # signs to skip my technical babbling.

Personally I've been enjoying the crosswind landing practice. The winds have stayed pretty much around 15 kts at 90 degrees to the runway, so they haven't been strong enough to make the takeoff's hairy, but just strong enough to keep it a challenge and make me work for a smooth departure and arrival. Normally between takeoffs and landings, a good landing is more of a challenge, but I've found in strong crosswinds its actually reversed. I find crosswind takeoffs more difficult to accomplish smoothly than crosswind landings. On strong crosswind takeoffs good rudder pedal control is key. On the initial acceleration when most of the weight is on the wheels, I find the airplane has a tendency to be pushed by the wind to the downwind side of the runway. Proper aileron position on takeoff is to start turning into the wind and then slowly neutralize the ailerons as you accelerator. However since ailerons are an aerodynamic control, on the initial acceleration there's not enough airflow over them to affect directional control of the airplane. Therefore to counteract the wind pushing the airplane to the downwind side of the runway, you have to steer into the wind with the nosewheel (controlled by rudder pedals).

As you accelerate however, and aerodynamic control increases with the increased airflow, steering into the wind with the nosewheel/rudder begins to work against you, because the weight on the wheels lightens, which reduces the effectiveness of the nosewheel, and the effectiveness of the rudder increases with the increased airflow. Now with the rudder turning you into the wind you're now compounding the problems you start to have with weather-vaning, which is the effect of a crosswind exerting force on the tail and causing the nose to pivot TOWARDS the wind.

So as the airplane accelerates and you're fighting the crosswind trying to push you downwind, as you accelerate and airflow around the airplane starts to increase, the airplane starts to weather-vane which starts to pull you upwind, in the OTHER direction. This change can catch you by surprise if you're not ready for it. At the point where this change starts to happen, which can be very quickly, you have to REVERSE your rudder pedal input from steering the aircraft upwind, and start counteracting the weather-vaning effect by steering with the rudder DOWNWIND. Its at this moment the ailerons really start coming into play. This whole time you've been steering with the ailerons into the wind, which hasn't really had an effect until now, but now this causes the airplane to want to bank. This is a good thing, because without banking into the wind, your rudder control, which is counteracting the weather-vaning, would cause the airplane to drift back downwind and off the side of the runway.

So now that aerodynamic control is in effect, you have to counteract weather-vaning with rudder to the DOWNWIND side, but you have to counteract your rudder steer with aileron to the UPWIND side. This in effect puts the airplane into what we call a "slip", which is essentially flying sideways. We want the airplane to fly sideways at the exact opposite angle that the wind is trying to push the airplane sideways. In theory these two sideways effects cancel each other out and we end up tracking perfectly straight down the runway without the wheels skidding along the runway surface.

So in effect, when we're taking off, we start steering with our feet one way, and at a critical point reverse that steering in the opposite direction, and at the same time begin to balance that steering with aileron control with our hands. What actually ends up happening, while we're in our slip maneuver but still not fast enough yet to become airborne, is we end up going up on one wheel and rolling down the runway perfectly balancing on that single wheel, with the nose wheel and downwind main wheel lifted off the ground.

This "wheelie" is a side effect of a slip manuever, which is straight flight that is "banked" or leaning into the wind. We're only in this state for a few seconds, between the point the airplane is sufficiently aerodynamic to cause a bank, and the point where we're going fast enough to actually leave earth altogether. Despite the brief time, is quite fun to go rolling down the runway in this balancing act. Once we're airborne, we're free of the burden of making sure the wheels are tracking straight, and we can then neutralize all controls, at which point the airplane yaws sideways, weather-vaning, and we accelerate to climb out. Even though at this point the airplane appears to be flying sideways (and may be very scary looking for new-to-fixed-wing-ops operators), from an aerodynamic sense its actually flying straight (not in a slip), and thats a more efficient way for the airplane to fly, which is a good thing when we're trying to generate lots of lift and very little drag as we climb out.

My experience has been that even in very strong crosswinds the wheelie effect is an experience unique to high-wing airplanes that have narrow-stanced landing gear. Low wing airplanes like a Cherokee 6 or Twin Comanche that have a wider landing gear stance don't typically do this because the aerodynamic force required to lift the one wheel is much greater when the stance is wider, so usually they end up just rolling down the runway and then lifting off, without the whole "wheelie" phase. Its not nearly as dramatic, but sometimes it can be just as challenging to make a smooth and safe crosswind takeoff.

The same "wheelie" maneuver comes into play during a crosswind landing as well, for the very same reasons, although its much easier to hold it for longer periods during landing, because we're not in a mad dash to accelerate, but more in a slow, controlled deceleration back to earth. I remember one of my old instructors used to make his commercial students do a crosswind touch and go landing and takeoff, while only ever letting one wheel touch the ground. We had to land in the wheelie, and balance it there while we accelerated again to takeoff.

I remember way back in flight school, before I had even soloed, and before I fully mastered the muscle memory required for the right input at the right time, I had a few scary moments practicing takeoffs (even in light crosswinds fit for a student). I'd start to drift off to side of the runway because my control inputs weren't correct, at which point I would freeze, because I wasn't grasping what was happening. Thanks to my instructors who were always vigilant and quick to take over and provide instruction. Primary flight training is filled with exciting moments of terror, when you know things are going quickly wrong, but you're not quite skilled enough to recognize it and correct the problem, lol. Kudos to all the instructors out there who bail their students out like that and are still ready to get into the airplane again for the next lesson.

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Ok, so some stories now of a different nature. Today we started work on the survey block we were flying before my break. When I came back the clients were anxious to finish the other one first, so we flew that one, but now we're back to our original one. This second one is further inland... and HOLY CARIBOU BATMAN!! I've never seen so many caribou in my entire life. Apparently the migration has just finished, so they're all just chilling out. Up until today I can count the total number of caribou I've ever seen on 1 hand. After today the number is in the triple digits. Before it was the highlight of the flight if we saw one. But after 10 minutes into our flight today, we stopped counting, and didn't even bother to point them out anymore. They were all over the place. There were 2's and 3s all over the place, a number of small herds numbering between 8-15, and then we even flew over a herd that probably numbered between 30 and 40. It was quite the site, the sheer vastness of the open land with caribou spotting the landscape everywhere you could look.

Also, I've come to realize that there are differing opinions amongst the caribou over what should be considered imminent danger. It was pretty funny actually. Most of the caribou we flew over we hear us coming and kind of hustle out of the way. Others would half heartedly get up if they were laying down, you know "just in case" I guess. While others would run like it was the end of the world. I laughed out loud when I saw a small group of 5 that we flew over. Four of them were laying down on the tundra, and didn't even bother to get up when we flew over. The fifth in the herd was convinced we were death from above. He went running for dear life (pun not intended), just blasting right past the other 4. The rest didn't budge, but just watched him run past like he was an idiot. I could just imagine the dialogue:

Blitzen: "RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!! RUUUUN!!"

Comet: "Relax you idiot, they've been flying over us all day"

Blitzen, who now stops running: "Oh."

It was quite comical to see the different reactions. There was another one who panicked just a little too late, and got up to run, but he wasn't sure which direction to go because we were directly overhead. He just ended up deeking back and forth until I lost sight of him behind us.

It was also interesting to watch them run flat out on the tundra. The tundra surface, although generally flat, is incredibly rocky and uneven. Yet the caribou would goose step around all the stones and rocky ground and splash through the puddles like nothing. I consider myself fairly athletic, but if I tried to run flat out on that terrain, I'd end up tripping on a rock and smashing my teeth out or rolling my ankle in no time flat. It was quite impressive.

We also saw many young colts, some probably less than a month old. They stuck to their mother's heels like little ankle-biters as she hustled away from us. It was interesting to note that all of the young ones are a much darker colour than the grown caribou, which are kind of an off-white tan colour. My theory is that calves are born in the spring, when there is no snow and the land is brown, so they blend into the summer terrain. Grown caribou camouflage better in the snow with their lighter colour. Any expert's opinion welcome.

We should be finished up here soon, and then we have another very short job in Ontario again on our way to Northern Quebec.

Soggy

2011-06-08T09:01:00.001-07:00

Well I'm back from a couple weeks of glorious time off. My medical is renewed for another year, my recurrent training is complete, and I'm ready to get back at 'er.

We left the airplane at a maintenance base just north of Winnipeg, where they had a grass strip that I flew into. After a Westjet flight to Winnipeg, and then a long taxi ride out to the airport, I had a chance to meet my new operator, who meets me there after driving out in the van.

Our plan was to meet there Monday afternoon and fly out to Thompson for the night, but as always plans never go as planned. Southern Manitoba had a couple days of rain a few days ago, and the grass runway was very soggy. We loaded the airplane up and taxied out to the runway. I always love flying into private airstrips. This one has the long gravel driveway doubling as a taxiway that goes out behind the two houses and the shop hangar out to the runway. I taxi past a row of evergreen trees/hedges on one side and a car graveyard on the other side. There's a narrow culvert bridge crossing a drainage ditch that takes me onto the runway. I make a mental note of a spot on the runway that will serve as my go/no-go decision point.

As soon as I get into the grass and on the runway I can feel the airplane nose-wheel sinking into the muck. I add power to keep a fast paced backtracking taxi down the runway to avoid getting stuck. Even with 20 degrees of flap set and pulling fully back on the controls to keep as much weight off the nose as possible, I can feel the wheels just bogging down. I look out the window and the main wheel I can see is splashing through water and tall grass. Getting to the end of the runway I do my final takeoff checks still rolling, add more power and swing around to line up on the runway, and then add full power. The acceleration is lethargic. At a third ways down the 2500 ft runway I'm still barely faster than a fast taxi, but the acceleration is getting better as the weight slowly comes off the wheels. Two thirds behind me and I finally have an indication on the airspeed indicator at 40 mph. Even with the Robertson STOL (short takeoff and landing) kit I need a bare minimum of 55 to get airborne, and then I still need to fly in ground effect for another several hundred feet. I pass my go/no-go point and am still bouncing along on the ground - no good. I pull the power off and abort the takeoff. There's no need to use the breaks, I slow down and sink into the boggy grass almost instantly.

I tell my operator we'll give it another attempt, and hopefully we can find a path along the runway that isn't quite as boggy. I wonder what he's thinking. He's very experienced with survey operating, but all of his flying has been in helicopters. This is his very first flight with me, as well as in a light fixed wing piston aircraft. He seems calm and lets me do my thing. What an introduction to fixed wing flying though!

We line up again, and the runway is wide enough that I shift to the left just a bit, hoping to catch some higher ground that is less saturated. Throttle in, confirm full power, gauges green, and off we go crashing through puddles and ruts as I keep the controls back and the nose out of the muck as best I can. The end result is the same, and we taxi back in. I never thought I'd get to be a swamp boat driver. Its very close, we're very light on our toes as I pass the abort point. If I was ballsier there'd be a decent chance that I could have gotten airborne and clear the bushes if I continued with the takeoff. But the risk outweighs the reward. I'm confident that I could get the airplane airborne no problem if we empty our gear out. There's a paved runway a half hour down the road, but its too late to go there today and still make the 3 hr flight north before dark. We pack it in for the day and go check into a local hotel for the night. The underside of the wings and the side of the fuselage are splattered with mud being kicked up from the wheels, and the back door step has collected a pile of wet grass blades.

The next morning I'll go swamp boat driving again with an empty airplane - with better results.

Flight Planning

2011-05-09T20:24:00.000-07:00

We have finally finished our first job here, finally. We had a long stretch of bad weather, and then a broken airplane so we had to wait for an AME to arrive with a replacement part, but after 3 weeks of sitting we finally finished the job. We have another job in Nunavut that is an hour flight south. We're still tecnically waiting for authorization from the client to demobilize, so in the meantime we've been making the 50 minute ferry flight south to survey the blocks on the next job.

We might have a job coming up on the other side of Hudson Bay in Eastern Northern Quebec, so they asked me to plan a flight from our current location so they could do a cost estimation. It was an interesting problem to solve.

First of all the most apparent problem is that a direct route would take me directly across Hudson Bay. Obviously in a single engine airplane that's out of the question, so the question became whether to take the northern route over the top of the Bay, or go south all the way down around Hudson and James Bay. The northern route is almost 600 miles shorter - 900 nm vs 1500 nm. That's a huge difference. The problem, there are only a small number of communities where I could potentially land and refuel. I looked all of them up, and none of them had Avgas except for Iqualuit. The flight from here to Iqualuit would be a grueling 6 hrs. The airplane could do it, but that's almost a full hour longer than I've ever done in one leg. Furthermore, the northern route would require crossing a number of stretches of water between the islands that would be well beyond gliding distance. Legally it could be done if I brought along the proper survival equipment, but even with a liferaft onboard and a maritime survival suit I'm not sure I'd want to have to swim in Arctic water. The southern route was longer but it seemed safer and better.

Even heading south I can't just pick the most convienent place to land and expect they will have fuel. A lot of airports up here are little more than a stretch of gravel and a small terminal building with limited operating hours, so you have to do your research if you expect to land and just pull up to the pumps.

At the end of it I came up with 2 stops, one in Gillam, MB, and the next in Moosonee, one airport I know VERY well...

I'm not sure if we'll even get that contract out east, or if we do I'll be flying from where I planned it from, but it was a fun scenario to plan out.

The Far North

2011-04-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

Well we have made it to the far north. I flew up on Monday, while my operator made it up by Airline the next day. We managed to get our FOM flight done with our last day of great weather, and then one survey flight. And then we spent the next couple days sitting. With springtime comes bad weather. The fog here rolls in quickly without warning, and then just like that clears out a couple hours later. I'm going to have to keep a close eye on the temperature/dew-point spread. When the temperature is close to the dewpoint, that means the relative humidity is high, and therefore so is the possibility of fog.

Yesterday afternoon the snow and low cloud seemed to have cleared enough that we decided to try a flight. We got out to the airplane and by the time we got it ready for flight it had started lightly snowing again. We started up and taxied out, and I called for a weather report before taking off. It was still calling 7 miles visibility, ceilings 1500 ft, so off we went. Well the flight didn't last long. We got out to the block and it was terrible conditions, fog on the ground with multiple other cloud layers below 1000 ft. It was an easy decision to turn back. By the time we got back to the airport, it was snowing heavily and we landed with visibility around 2 to 3 miles. I have a feeling this will be a common scenario for the next few weeks.

Today we finally got up for a couple hrs survey in the afternoon, and it looks like the weather is going to be decent for the next few days, so hopefully we can get some work done. My operator and I weren't prepared for how cold it turned today however. It was close to 20 C below. Up until now the heater knob in the airplane has hovered somewhere around the quarter to halfway out position. Today it was full on the whole flight, and still the cockpit stayed JUST warm enough. By the time we landed it was almost 8 pm. Fueling the airplane and putting it to bed was miserably cold. We are fueling out of barrels, so its a huge process to refuel the airplane. We have to unpack the fuel pump, assemble it, roll a barrel over from our cache, set the pump up, fuel one wing, slide the barrel over to the other wing, fuel it, and then disassemble the pump and put it away. And then we have to put the wing covers on, and engine blanket, and make sure the space heater is plugged in to keep our survey equipment in the back warm. We both ended up putting on our winter overalls that we keep in the back of the airplane. I even broke out a couple hand-warmers, and my fingers were STILL numb. Holding a metal fuel pump nozzle with sub-zero temperature fuel flowing through it can suck the heat out of your hands insanely fast.

Welcome to Nunavut I guess. Tomorrow I'll be sporting the long underwear and an extra sweater, along with my overalls standing by. Being a pilot is so glamorous.

The town itself isn't bad to live in. Its comprised about 50/50 white people and Inuit, and everybody seems friendly enough. Its quite a difference to some of the reserves in Northern Ontario where there is almost hostility against us "whitey's". There are a few restaurants here as well, so we have a bit of variety, although much of the selection is still your typical diner style food. There are a few good dishes I have discovered however that are reasonably healthy and a good change from greasy food.

Don't Blink You'll Miss It

2011-03-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

We finished up our second small job, and quite quickly. Luck was on our side this time and everything in the airplane is working beautifully, and we've had almost a week now of fantastic blue sky weather.

Now we're back in Thunder Bay. Today we both started and finished a third small job that popped up here. It only took us one flight, and we continue to have great weather. The Thunder Bay job was very small as well, we finished it in one flight today. We didn't have to do an FOM (calibration flight) for it because the one we did on the last job was geographically near enough to count for this job as well. The survey block was small enough to bang off in 4 hrs even. Tomorrow we finally head to Rankin Inlet.

I enjoyed flying out of Thunder Bay, if only for a short time. Thunder Bay while not a large city by Southern Ontario standards is a large city for Northern Ontario, and is therefore a major air carrier hub. Its quite a busy airport, complete with its own control tower and all the fixings of a major airport. Its been a while since I've flown out of a busy towered airport, and it was good to get back into that fast paced environment of busy airports and clean the rust off of those skills. I do really enjoy the fast paced atmosphere and wish I could spend more time here. But oh well, duty calls.

My next task for the moment is planning my exact route up to Rankin Inlet, and also look into how my operator is going to get there as well. I'll probably do it in a couple days. We're not going to drive the van all the way up there, and we have too much gear to bring it all in the airplane, so my operator is most likely going to have to fly commercial air service up there, along with much of our gear.

To the best of my memory, the trip up to Rankin Inlet will be both the furthest north I have ever been, as well as be the longest continuous cross country trip I will have taken. Only by a few miles though.

Headset Swap

2011-03-22T20:28:00.000-07:00

We spent 3 nights hanging out in Thunder Bay waiting for the airplane to get out of maintenance in Sioux. Finally after some relaxing, and a little bit of adventure (we went and climbed a nearby "mountain" outside Thunder Bay), my operator headed off to our next spot, and I took the 5 hr bus back to the Sioux, and then flew the airplane in. Most of the 2 hr flight was spent at 800-1000 agl running along under a low cloud deck. You really get a sense of the terrain you're flying over at that altitude. I never tire of watching cliff formations and little steep rocky terrain scroll by under the wings.

The weather has since turned turned great. A nice big High Pressure system has moved in from the North which means blue skies and light winds. It also has turned very cold. Today we got up and set up our base station, and then got up to do our FOM flight. So far from what we hear everything worked out well, and we should be able to get out tomorrow and start AND finish the survey. Its a very small job here.

Today for the flight I forgot to bring my headset from the hotel, but we happened to have a spare in the back. My headset is only a passive David Clark model. Nothing fancy on it. I've had it for almost a decade now, and it still works flawlessly unfortunately. The only thing I've done to it is replace the mic muff, put some fat new gel ear pads and upgrade the headband pad on it. I keep eyeballing all the new fancy ANR (active noise reduction - a feature that emits a tone that cancels out the sound of the engine to make it quieter) headsets that my operator's use (purchased by the company). The extra one we had was a Lightspeed brand (20xl or something like that I think). I was impressed with the noise cancelling - it did make the engine noise much quieter, but the speaker sound quality I found was far less impressive. My Davie headset was much clearer. I also found my headset to be more comfortable, even if a little heavier, but maybe thats just because its what I'm used to. Despite the lower engine noise, I'm not so sure I'm ready to trade in my headset just yet.

On a side note the takeoff caught me by surprise. When you fly an airplane almost every day you don't realize how much your ears tune into the tone of the engine to listen for any anomalies. Wearing the ANR headset made for a totally different engine tone as I pushed in the throttle, and it caught me by surprise. My instinct was telling me "The engine doesn't sound right! Something's wrong!" and I had to consciously tell myself it was the ANR headset. It was quite a different sound. It was an interesting feeling though, accelerating down the runway and not being able to trust your sense of hearing as an additional engine monitor. I'm sure if I wore the headset regularly my ears would tune into what normal sounded like.

Touring the North

2011-03-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

Well I have changed towns again. Quite the story. Due to a huge hockey tournament going on, I could only get a hotel room in Sioux for that first night. Then I was out of luck. Thursday morning I stopped by the AMO shop to drop off some paperwork, then spent the rest of the morning trying to devise a plan to find somewhere else to stay for the night. All the hotels were full, so I tried the Bed & Breakfasts. Those were full too. I looked into maybe taking a bus to nearby Dryden, but there was no such thing. The lady at Greyhound tried to sell me on bus ride that got routed through Thunder Bay, making for almost a 16 hr trip just to get to Dryden which is only an hour and a bit drive. I'm pretty sure the booking service was based probably down south and the lady obviously had no geographical knowledge, otherwise she would have seen the ludicrousness of her solution. I'm not impressed with people who out of their own ignorance of the industry they work in cannot at least point me in the right direction to find a practical solution. Granted not a whole of people in souther Ontario know exactly where Sioux Lookout and Dryden are, but you'd think that at least someone working for Greyhound booking bus routes would have a working knowledge of where all these towns were that they served. I pointed out that Dryden was only an hour and a bit drive from Sioux, so I wasn't going to go all the way to Thunder Bay (5 hrs one way) and then all the way back to Dryden on the bus. She didn't seem to grasp the sillyness of the routing, so I said thank you and hung up the phone. I could probably take a taxi for less, or even rent a car. Besides, if I was going to go to Thunder Bay I might as well just stay there and meet my operator there, who was at that time en-route in the Van.

So I tried the one car rental place in town. Nothing available. Looked like Thunder Bay might have to be an option. It wouldn't be that bad if I made it there anyways. Its a nice big town, and thats where my operator would be anyways. I looked up the bus line in town and called them. It was just an answering service with scheduled times and rates, but there was a bus running. I touched base with my operator to let him know my plan as it stood at that moment, and then called a cab and off I was to the bus station/convenience store. I was chatting to the cabby on the way there, and he mentioned that last night he had driven a guy who was in the same boat as me to Dryden, and then elsewhere as there weren't even any rooms in Dryden. Crazy.

I got to the bus stop about 2 hrs before the bus was scheduled to leave, and I was lucky to get there when I did. I got the LAST ticket available on the bus, which was actually just a big van. Soon enough I was on my way to Thunder Bay for the 5 hr drive. Just to find a place to sleep for the night, sheesh. But now I am successfully in Thunder Bay, with a place to sleep, and have rendezvoused with my operator - and we are chilling for the next couple days until the airplane is finished inspection. After that, onto the next job. Never a dull moment.

Next!

2011-03-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Well after having to do a quick flight to re-fly one line that we somehow missed, we got the ok to move out. Next stop, Sioux Lookout for maintenance, which is where I am now. It was a long 4.5 hr flight with headwinds, but the weather was great the whole way there.

This was my first time at the Sioux airport, and the runway sits at a lower elevation than the main ramp, and there's a taxi-way that winds its way up the hill almost like a mini mountain road. It was kind of fun going up. I imagine it will be even more fun going downhill, its almost like a go-cart track. Hopefully the winds are such when I depart that I'll get to use it going downhill.

After landing and parking I couldn't find my wallet for the life of me. It was not a good time. I had already called the cab and had my bags loaded, and after searching my bad a dozen times and tearing apart all the nooks and crannies in the airplane that it might have fallen, I still couldn't find it. I had to tell the cabby that I was going to go walk the parking area where I had been walking around after landing to see if I could find it, and told him I'd call him back. He didn't seem happy but didn't say much. What could I do? I couldn't pay him.

The owner of the AMO (Maintenance Shop) came by as I was looking around on the ground for my wallet. It was after-hours but he knew I was coming so I guess he swung by to see if I made it. He asked if I needed a lift into town and I gratefully accepted and told him of my predicament. When I got to the hotel thankfully when I booked the room I gave them my credit card, so I still got to check in and had a place to sleep for the night. I wasn't sure how I was going to get dinner though, I hadn't really eaten all day as we were in a bit of a rush after our morning flight to get out of there.

After calling my operator and have him tear apart the van to see if I left my wallet in there, I found it - stuffed behind a flap in a pocket of my flight bag. I felt dumb, I don't know how I didn't find it the previous 12 times I searched my bag, but also I felt relieved. Losing your wallet while you're in a strange town 1000 miles from home sucks. It probably took 2 years off my life with the stress, lol. But all is well again. Happy ending.

On a side note, I ate dinner at a place called Dick and Nellie's Bar and Grill cause I heard it was wing night. The wings sucked. They were nice and saucy, but very small and overpriced, especially for "wing night". On the plus side their nachos were huge, and loaded with cheese and stuff. That made up for the disappointing wings. I couldn't even finish the nachos. They'd be a full meal in themselves for 2 big eaters. Just sayin'

And they're off!

2011-03-14T20:30:00.000-07:00

Finally. A good day of production. It took a few more days of snow, another test flight, and one false start where we had to turn back, but we've managed to sort out the technical problems and start biting into the survey grid.

And oh ya, that hangar that I said we put the airplane into? It didn't end up doing much. The wind ended up blowing in the right direction to send the snow right into the hangar door opening and our poor airplane was covered in snow despite being under a roof. It took me the better part of an hour of brushing and scraping and washing the remaining ice off, but I finally got it cleaned up enough to go flying for a test flight. That was a couple days ago. Its been fantastic weather since. My only complaint is that the temperature is hovering around the threshold that requires the winter fronts be either installed or not installed. The winter fronts are basically sheets of metal with slits in them that you screw onto the engine cowl intake to impede airflow into the engine cowl.

The engine is cooled by the air that flows into the front of the engine, but on cold winter days the air can actually be cold enough to do too good of a job cooling the engine so that the engine can't properly warm up. In aviation fashion the high-tech solution (yes that is sarcasm) is to screw some sheet metal onto the front of the engine intake to block a good portion of the intake air and thus impede cooling. I dislike installing and removing winter fronts. There are two pieces (one for each side of the engine) and each piece requires 10 machine screws to fasten it to the engine cowl. That's a lot of screwing and unscrewing by hand. We generally don't like to use power drills on airplanes because they have the ability to cross-thread the screws and then mangle them, in case anyone was wondering.

Today we finally completed a successful FOM (calibration) flight in the morning and then we went back and flew survey lines in the afternoon for a good 2 and a half hours. We're almost halfway done the job now, and provided the equipment behaves we should finish up tomorrow in either one long flight or two shorter ones, depending on how we feel. I love surveying in this area. We were in almost this exact spot back in the fall, and we're back again doing a block that is directly adjacent to the one we did then. Its very hilly, and keeps my interest even though it makes for very fatiguing flying. The hills add a dimension (literally) to the number of variables I have to manage to stay on-line and at the proper height. Actually two new dimensions. In addition to staying within horizontal limits, I am constantly pitching the airplane to follow the contour of the hills as best I can. The pitch changes introduce the second variable, which is maintaining a relatively constant speed which we do with power adjustments. Its constant roll, pitch, and throttle adjustments for the entire flight, and its draining! I haven't had to focus this hard in a while! Up until now this particular contract has mainly composed of fighting off boredom in between short test flights/attempts. The time of boredom is over.

After we finished the flight I got back to the hotel room and sent off my daily reports back to the office and then ended up passing out on the bed. I woke up sprawled face-down with my phone ringing (my operator wanted to go to dinner). I will neither confirm nor deny that I may or may not have been drooling...

We'll go for an early start tomorrow, finish the second half of our survey block, and then we're off to the next destination on the list.

Cockpit Organization

2011-03-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

Well we managed to get our calibration flight in (technically called a "Figure of Merit" flight, or FOM for short) yesterday, but there have been technical problems with the data, and the techies don't seem to know exactly what went wrong, so we're into some troubleshooting.

In the meantime its been snowing quite heavily, so we're grounded anyways until the weather clears. Apart from the occasional medevac flight that comes and goes, the airport here is pretty dead. There is a lone hangar with no door that houses a small number of private ultralights, and I've convinced the airport manager to let us tuck the airplane into that as best as we can. The tail section of the airplane is sticking outside of the hangar, but we have the wings under a roof and out of the snow for the most part. It'll saves a lot of brushing/scraping snow and ice and it also means we won't need to put the wing covers on, which are annoying at best to put on and remove due to the wing pods and STOL kit (short take-off and landing).

Back in Markham I purchased a knee-board (a foldable pouch with pockets and a clipboard which straps to your leg), which I am quite happy with after having a few flights to try it out. Until now I've never flown with one. The Twin Comanche and Cherokee 6 aircraft I used to fly had room to stick my flight back in between the front seats so I had access and a place to store everything I needed for the flight right beside me. The Cessna 206 does not have the room between the seats so I've been stuck stowing my flight bag behind the pilot seat, which makes it difficult to retrieve maps and notebooks from it during flight. Until now I've just resorted to placing my maps, notebooks, and checklist on the floor in between the seats, but that has been disorganized at the best of times. In addition to those things, the engine will be going to an On-condition maintenance program soon which means I now have to fill out trend-monitoring forms during flight which record and track engine gauge readings such as oil temp, oil pressure, cylinder head temperature, exhaust gas temperature, and a number of other things to track subtle changes in engine performance. This extra piece of paper in the cockpit has finally caused me to surpass the threshold of the number of pieces of paper I can keep track of in the cockpit without an easy to access pocket.

Enter the kneeboard. I love it actually. Its a tri-fold design and carries everything I need for the flight in a handy little kit that's strapped to my knee. Its like a mini flight bag. I made up paper sheets that fit on the clipboard to record flight times, crucial flight plan information, weather, fuel log, and all the trend monitoring parameters. I also re-wrote the aircraft checklist, formatted it and had it laminated in a size that will clip to one side of the fold out flaps of the kneeboard (thanks to my oodles of free time down south waiting for the airplane in maintenance). And there's also room in another pouch to hold my map. I am proud to say that I now have every piece of information and form I need for the flight at my fingertips and I don't have to feel around on the cockpit floor for the map or piece of paper that has slid out of reach.

If I had a choice I would still prefer to keep everything in my flight bag beside me in between the seats, because I would rather not have something strapped to my lap, but the kneeboard is a close second alternative, and far superior to having to reach behind me or grope for things on the floor.

Tomorrow despite the forecast being as bleak as it was today, I remain hopeful that we'll get to go flying.

One small step for me...

2011-03-08T17:50:00.000-08:00

...One giant leap towards finally making the company some money.

I've finally made it to our destination. We had another 2 days of mechanically-related delays, but now we're finally up and running and I landed early this evening. Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be beautiful still so we'll fly our calibration flight, and providing that is ok we'll hopefully have time to fly a few survey lines.

After living in Limbo for the last few days constantly checking out of my hotel and then checking in again and having to eat out I'm glad to finally be somewhere that I know I'll stay in for at least 3 or days. I didn't know if I could handle many more meals at the three restaurants I've been rotating through that were near my hotel down south. Tonight after I had dinner with my operator I stopped by the grocery store which just happens to be next to the hotel and picked up some milk and cereal and plastic bowls for breakfast, as well as some sandwich meat and buns for lunch. Finally I can stop eating out, at least for 2 meals of day. It saves money too.

Mostly I'm glad to be back "on the job" and feeling like I'm getting something accomplished. Technically we haven't gotten anything accomplished yet, but considering the last few days of nothing but delays, just GETTING to where I'm supposed to be counts as a big victory. Tomorrow I will go ply my trade with which I'm being paid for and we'll hopefully get some REAL work done.

Waiting to Depart

2011-03-05T11:09:00.001-08:00

Well I was finally ready and was supposed to depart yesterday, but a low pressure system bringing freezing rain, low visibility and low cloud is sweeping across the province leaving me grounded probably until Sunday in Toronto.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to get a working fuel transfer pump (for fueling the aircraft out of barrels) together. I had initially thought we had one ready to go in the back of the shop, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. We did have small number of pumps and parts to go with the pumps, but they were all either worn out, the wrong voltage, and/or missing pieces.

Finally we decided to just go buy a new one, and then I spent much of the remainder of the afternoon assembling and making sure I had all the correct fittings and pieces for it. I can proudly say that at the end of the day I did indeed have a working fuel pump with all the correct pieces to fuel an airplane.

Today has been spent killing time. Right across the street from my hotel is an outdoor themed store, which is really fantastic to walk through if you're an outdoorsy person. They have some packages of freeze-dried food by Mountain House made for the purpose of camping/back-packing/survival and the like. The kind where you just add boiling water. We keep several meal packages in our survival kit. I've never had them before, so I decided I'd try a package and see what they're like and if they'd be any good for taking with me on camping trips. They were around $9 per package, which are supposed to serve 2. The "Chicken Teriyaki with Rice" that I tried, contained 580 calories per package, which seems low if you're planning to feed 2 people from it.

I took it back to my hotel room and microwaved the required amount of water to add, poured it in, and let it stand for a few minutes as directed.

It was actually pretty good, relatively speaking. I ate the whole thing, so it definitely couldn't feed 2 grown adults, at least if one or both of those adults was a man. I ate the whole package for lunch and am already starting to feel hungry again only 2 hours later. For a survival food it would be good. Tasty enough to maintain my morale if I was sitting around by a crashed airplane waiting for rescue. As a camping or backpacking ration, its easy and convenient to prepare, isn't heavy and doesn't take up TOO much space, but its not tasty enough that I would use it as a main meal source. I can imagine growing tired of eating them very quickly, so would probably only take enough for perhaps one meal on a "bush style" camping or backpacking trip where space for food was minimal. All in all, its not bad considering its freeze dried food that needs to be re-hydrated - but its still freeze-dried food.

Back at it

2011-03-01T11:47:00.001-08:00

Wow, its been a while. I wonder if anyone out there is still reading this haha. The fall and winter was pretty slow for survey jobs. I spent most of it working construction to pay the bills. But it looks like this upcoming spring is going to be solid with work until mid-summer.

I've spent the last few weeks commuting to the office in Toronto for a few days each week to stay busy helping with some recent office work, and also to conduct some test flights for a new piece of R&D we're installing in the 206 I fly. The new technology is supposedly a "holy grail" for survey flying. It doesn't really mean much for me as a pilot, except that I have to spent more time on the ground before each flight doing taxi calibrations, but it is somewhat interesting.

When you're young and in flight school, or still dreaming of starting flight school you imagine being a pilot is mostly just showing up a few minutes before the flight, hopping in and taking off to your next destination. Thats only natural to assume that. Flight school trains you purely in the operation of an airplane, so thats what you spend most of your time doing. In reality however, at least in my experience, a vast majority of your time is spent in the less glamorous aspects of aviation for a pilot - lots of waiting. Pilots stand around a lot. We stand around a lot while we wait for our airplane to finish inspection and be put back together, we stand around and wait for passengers, or we stand around while the technicians wrestle with a piece of survey equipment that has decided to do something unexpected.

As soon as we get this R&D project out of the way, we'll finally be off again on some new contracts. First will be a couple days back in Kirkland Lake, and from there we MIGHT do a few weeks in Moosonee - the birthplace of my professional career, haha. I'm looking forward to going back actually, it will be fun to see that place again. After that we have a contract signed for Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. I'm looking forward to that as well. I've never been north of 60 yet, so I'll be able to check that off my list soon. Hopefully I'll see some polar bears as well.

Fires

2010-07-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we started our first day of actual surveying. The day before that was spent setting up our base station (read that as my operator "W" setting up the base station and me mostly standing around assisting as needed and fanning bugs away from my face). I'm still fascinated by all this mysterious technology.

Later in the day we did our calibration flight which involved climbing to 10,000 ft and performing a series of maneuvers over a pre-selected area of land that is relatively free of mineral deposits. The problem was there was a lot of cloud in the area and we couldn't do our flying over our area at 10,000 ft and still remain clear of cloud, so we tried to improvise a bit and use the readings in the airplane to find another suitable area nearby to do our maneuvers. It was a bit of a crapshoot, but we tried it anyways since we we were already out flying, and the worse that could've happened was that the calibration wasn't up to standards and we had to go out and do it again. To our surprise our processor back in the office actually passed it and gave us the ok. Credit goes to my operator.

The survey flying has been equally hit-or-miss. Not because of weather however, but because of the raging forest fires in the area. Our morning flight yesterday was cut short after only a couple hours because smoke from fires burning nearby were both obscuring visibility and making it difficult to breath. I was doing ok for the most part, but my operator was starting to get headaches from the smoke. The afternoon flight we went to a different survey block which was a little more free of smoke, but once again cut it short as the fires burned closer and the air got thicker and thicker. We got some fantastic pictures of the fires and smoke. There was one spot where the flames were licking up WELL above the tops of the trees. I estimated they must have been at least 40 ft high at the tallest spots. You can look out over the landscape and just see hundreds and hundreds of square miles of burned out forest, as far as the eye can see. Apparently these fires have been burning all summer, and won't go out until wintertime. Fire crews are working here and there to contain what they can near the communities, the rest will just burn. This morning in our survey area most of the first seem to have died down for the most part, but there was still thick smoke in both our blocks, so we had to turn around and didn't get anything done.

I will say that the terrain we're surveying over is fantastic. Its very rocky and hilly, and lots of fun to survey, but also far more challenging then our last job, which was mostly flat swamp. There are big hills, canyons, and cliffs with differences in elevation of 100 ft or more in some places. Its beautiful. One of our survey blocks is in a bit of a valley, with big rocky hills on either ends, and a flat grassy wetland in the middle.

Another plus I like about this job is that Stony Rapids is served by an MF radio service (one step below a true Air Traffic Controller) out of Regina. So I get talk to someone when I'm coming into land and take-off, which is nice so my radio procedures don't get rusty.

Long Trip

2010-07-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

All right, so big update. We've started our second job after a couple weeks with time off. After 5 days on the road and in the air we've finally made it to Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan, where our next job is. Its a very small job, only about 4 flights worth. The time its taken us just to get here has literally been double the the time its going to take to finish the job. But that's how it goes sometimes I guess. I don't mind, it was pretty cool to make the trip actually.

From the last job we left the airplane in Geraldton, which is a couple hours by car to the Northeast of Thunder Bay. There the airplane had its 100 hr checkup done. So we had to drive up from London again to get to the airplane. I left on Monday, spent my first night on the road in Toronto, then we spent two days driving to Geraldton. Our first flying leg took us 4.6 hrs Northwest to Thompson, Manitoba where we crashed for the night, and finally another 3 hours this morning onto Stony Rapids. That's 5 towns, 3 provinces, and 3 time zones in 5 days. A lot of miles. I was looking on a map of Canada today and we're actually closer to the Yukon now than we are to Toronto. Kind of funny. If anyone's counting thats 1300 km by ground, and 1600 km by air.

Tomorrow we stop being hotel hoppers and start getting actual work done.

Pushing the Limits

2010-06-24T04:57:00.000-07:00

The end is in sight. We figure we have about 12 hrs of flying left, two 3.5 hr flights on separate blocks, and then a long 5 hour flight to finish off the block we're currently working on.

We did a 5.1 hr flight yesterday, our longest flight yet, and man was my butt sore! I think that may actually pass as the longest time I've ever spent sitting in one place, let alone flying, lol. We're trying to push the flights as long as possible, because we're in a bit of a race against time to finish because our 100 hr inspection is coming up due, and its gonna be REALLY close whether we run out of air time or not. So the long flights cut down on unproductive ferry flying to and from the blocks. The one block we're currently working on is almost a 20 minute flight out, so if we can fly longer flights and reduce the number of times we have to fly out there, we might be able to pull off finishing the whole project before inspection. It looks like we'll make it so long as nothing drastic happens. It'd be a bummer to have an hour or so of flying left to do but having to fly the airplane south and wait around for two days of maintenance.

From what I hear my boss is really happy with my work. So far we've only had to re-fly one line due to not flying accurately enough, which is apparently pretty good for even seasoned survey flyers, and as far as quantity goes we're going to finish 20 days ahead of the time originally alotted for the project. My operator and I broke the company record a couple weeks ago for number of line kilometers flown in a single day, which was due in combination to long grid lines which mean less time-wasting turns, and flying our butts off. I heard through the grape vine that my boss mentioned he'd never seen somebody catch on so fast. So thats something I'm proud of, it looks like I may have found my niche.

Speed-bumps

2010-06-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

We're once again sitting on the ground waiting for the weather to clear up. This is not ideal, because the client has for a third time added more work onto the project. The good thing is we've been flying more kilometers than the office anticipated we would, so it still may be possible to get out on our planned exit date of the end of June. But not if we keep sitting around waiting on weather.

Another speed-bump is that they're going to be doing maintenance work on the runway on Saturday and Sunday, so we're going to be limited to the times we can go flying. Saturday the runway will be closed from 0700 to 1200, but we're going to bite the bullet and try to be airborne before 7 AM and do a 5 hour survey flight - our longest yet. The longest we've managed so far is 4.8 hrs, but I'm fairly certain I can hold my concentration together for a full five hours before I start to go off the deep end. And hopefully we can hold our bladders as well.

I've also got word where we'll be going next - Northern Saskatchewan, right on the border of NWT. That one's just a short job, probably no longer than a week and a half. It'll be cool to go that far north, and also cool to not have to stay there for very long. That probably won't be until mid-August however. We should be finished this job by early July, and then I'll have the rest of my time off until we head up there. I'm happy with that, it should work out pretty good, cause that'll give me some time off for fun summer things which I didn't get to do much of last summer.

So far though the goal is to be out of here and home by July 7th, cause I have a camping trip on the 9th with some friends which I'd very much like to be a part of. Come on sunshine and light winds!

New Block

2010-06-13T08:30:00.001-07:00

We started surveying a new block today. Its more west from the airport than the other survey blocks are, and you can really notice a change in the terrain. We are right on the edge of where the Hudson Bay lowlands start to end. The other survey blocks are very flat and swampy like typical Hudson/James Bay lowlands, but this new block which is about 60 miles west of the other ones is much more hilly and rocky, with much clearer water and more defined lakes. Beautiful wilderness, very much like the Muskokas, except totally uninhabited.

It made it interesting as it was my first real time flying survey in a hilly area. The hills make it a little more challenging than flatlands because you have to concentrate much more on flying the "drape" (following the contour of the land as best as possible).

I also spotted a Moose and she had 3 small calves with her. It was quite the sight. Our survey lines took us over top of them and past them a number of times, so we got several good looks - it was fantastic! They were out in a clearing by a small lake, presumably to get a drink, and our first pass directly overhead scared the mother, so she started herding her little calves back into the protection of the forest, hurredly nudging them from behind. You could tell the calves weren't quite sure what was going on. Quite the sight. They didn't go too far though, as by the time we made our next pass on the next line over they were still there just at the edge of the forest.

I have a cool job.

Cat and Mouse with the Weather

2010-06-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

The weather has been teasing us the last two days. Yesterday it was a little on the windy side, but we decided to go and try anyways. Survey flying can't be done in winds that cause the aircraft to fly with too much crab angle, or produce too much pitch or yaw motions from the turbulence because it disturbs the sensors, nor can we fly survey through rain, because the noise created from the impact of the rain drops on the sensor pods also interfere with proper data collection. On our flight yesterday we went out to the block, flew 4 lines (about 30 minutes), and decided we had to call it quits. The winds were just too strong and producing too much crab angle.

Today we were expecting a storm to blow through by early morning, but when we got up it still wasn't looking too bad, so we thought we'd give it another try and take advantage of the calm winds before the storm came. We took off and headed out to the block, hoping the the scattered showers in the area wouldn't be over the block we wanted to fly. They were. My operator suggested we head north to another of our survey blocks that has all the regular lines completed but still needs the tie-lines done. Tie lines run 90 degrees to the regular lines, and are spaced much further apart. Judging by the name you can deduce that they're needed to "tie" the whole grid image together - they allow the processors to properly compile the map image out of the linear data the airplane collects. Or something like that. What do I know, I'm just the driver. Tie lines are spaced much further apart so it only took us about an hour of flying to get those all done before we were out of work. We at least managed to get SOMETHING done to show for our day though. Still moving forward at least.

Hopefully we'll have a semi-good day of flying tomorrow, and then I head south for the airplane's inspection, which we're both waiting for. Due to all the weather days we had at the start we've gone longer than we expected, and we're running out of groceries. We try to buy as much as we can down south where the prices are normal and there's more selection, but the last couple days we've been forced to duck into the Northern Store and bite the bullet on some groceries that cost over double the price of what it costs down south. Nine dollars for a small block of cheese, $4 for eggs, $4 for a bag of potato chips, $1.75 for a can of pop. Craziness. We get a per diem from the company, but whatever we don't spend goes straight into our pocket, so we do like to be frugal.

10 Minutes in the Life of a Survey Pilot

2010-06-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

I exit the survey grid. The music playing through the ear-buds tucked inside my headset is rock'in away. I'm in a groove. My operator hits a button on his nav-tracker unit to select the next line over to fly. Immediately I start a climbing turn 45 degrees to the left up to 400 ft agl - away from the next line. Wait for 1000 metres lateral displacement from the new line. This is my time for a quick breather to relax my concentration, check the engine gauges, maybe make a quick radio call to advise other traffic in the area of our presence, or switch fuel tanks if needed. I have maybe 10 seconds before I have to start my turn back in. Radio calls have to be done outside the survey block where it doesn't matter that our transmissions affect the sensor data collection.

I start into my banking right turn all the way back around, trying to keep the bank angle close to 35 degrees - any less and I won't complete the turn in time. I could give myself more space, and take more time turning, but the turns burn up enough valuable time as it is. I watch as the readout for my lateral displacement starts quickly winding down - 900 metres, 800 metres, 700 metres... I've now got another 90 degrees to go to intercept the new line. Six hundred metres, 500 metres. By now I know if I'm going to overshoot or undershoot the line and can adjust my turn rate as needed. I try not to pull too steeply of a turn however; steep turns at 400 ft agl are risky business, and the high G's don't contribute to keeping my operator happy and feeling well. Smooth flying does wonders to stave off fatigue on long 4 hr flights.

Three hundred... 200... 100 metres. I start rolling out level as I approach my intercept. Eighty metres, 60, 40, 20. I roll the airplane level and start a descent back down to 200 ft agl as I fine tune my intercept of the next grid line.

Now I'm pretty close to wings level, flying on-line, and pretty close to the 200 ft I need to be above the ground. Its just a matter now of watching the distance display count-down to entering the grid as I try to perfect my altitude and line intercept. We cross the grid boundary. Time elapsed since exiting the grid on our last line - 2 minutes.

Now its a matter of staying as close to the survey line as possible, +/- 15 metres at the greatest as I count down the distance to exiting the grid on the far side. If I wander more than 15 metres off the line, we have to re-fly it. Today is not too turbulent and I challenge myself to stay within +/- 4 metres. This particular line is 12 miles long so it'll take roughly 6 minutes to get to the other side and start another turn. Once again I'm counting down the distance to exiting the grid again on the far side. I exit the survey grid. Repeat process.

Weather Waiting

2010-06-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been a lot of sitting around waiting for weather. A couple days ago we managed to get up in the morning to do our calibration flight at 10,000 ft, which involves flying a box pattern with a number of pitches, rolls, and then yaws on each cardinal heading. Don't ask me what this does. Something along the lines of allowing the computer system to compensate for the movement of the sensor along the 3 axis of flight. But anyways we got that done, and then we had to send that data back to our processor at the office before we got the okay to start the actual survey flying.

Well it turned out my flying wasn't quite good enough (not uncommon apparently for new survey pilots on their first try), because the result data wasn't quite as precise as it had to be, so we had to go up and do it again. Unfortunately some bad weather had moved in, so we spent two days sitting and waiting for it to clear up. In the meantime we got kicked out of our hotel rooms for a night. There's only 6 rooms in the motel, and for last night it had been booked before we got up here, so we ended up sleeping in the common kitchen area.

There's a group of Caribou surveyors who came up here last night. Today they've headed out into the bush for a week to check up on the Caribou they've tagged. One guy we ended up chatting to and he was explaining to us what they were studying and stuff - he showed us a map of Northern Ontario with all the Caribou movements on it - pretty fascinating.

Anyways today we get our rooms back - hopefully. Its not a very well managed motel. Anybody who has spent time up in the north will know what I mean. Some of the rooms were even triple booked but it worked out because some of the Caribou team didn't make it up last night cause the weather was so bad. Its beautiful today though. We managed to get our second try for the calibration flight done, and it went much better this time. We just got the call from the office as I write this that our calibration flight was acceptable. Finally things are looking up. Calibration flight was a pass, weather is blue skies, and we can finally start survey flying.

Final Destination

2010-05-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

So Friday morning we got up early again and went out for breakfast. We got word from the office that our GPS tracking system, which continually uploads the aircraft's position so the office can track us wasn't working properly, so after breakfast the three of us headed out to the airport to do some troubleshooting. My operator fiddled around with it for a while and then the Chief and I took the airplane up for a quick test flight to check it.

After that we were pretty much good to go. I finished off the last bit of paperwork I needed done for my PCC (Pilot Competancy Check) and then we were good to go. I shook hands with the Chief before he headed out to go back to civilization. After that the two of us took off and flew north. It was an uneventful almost 2 hours. My operator is interested in getting his pilot's license (no suprise considering he spends so much time in an airplane) so I let him fly most of the trip up.

Once we landed we checked into our motel which is connected to the local northern store... and that's about all there is in this town other than some houses, a small school, and the native band office. On the plus side the motel is not luxurious obviously but its clean and well kept. There's only 6 rooms and we all have a communal kitchen to share. There's not a whole lot of other people using the kitchen here, just a lone police officer and occasionally a couple ground workers for an air service that flies out of here.

This morning we got up to go set up the survey base station, which is a radiomagnetic sensing unit that sits on the ground to provide a baseline for the readings we get from the airplane in the air. We can't start surveying yet. For one we're waiting for the the office to send us up new nav files because the client made some changes to the survey blocks. Also we need to perform a calibration flight first too, which requires that we climb to 10,000 ft and do a series of turns... but the weather isn't quite good enough up here to do that yet. So we're in a bit of a waiting game at the moment, which isn't all bad. We still have some equipment to get sorted out and things to get organized, so we're staying fairly busy at the moment.

Training and Vacation-On-The-Job

2010-05-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

So We finally made it to what will be my home for the next 4 weeks or so. After leaving North Bay in the morning we spent another almost 8 hours driving to the small mining town where the airplane was. We got there by late afternoon, and checked into our motel, which was actually a quaint little lakeside cabin resort.

The plan was for the Chief and I to spend the required 3 hrs getting checked out in the airplane, and then another 5 learning how to do actually fly the surveying.

I also had a bunch of exams to fill out - again. Before I left London I was sent all the exams, and I had them all filled out and ready to be signed off, but it turned out they were the outdated versions, so I had to spend some time completing the proper exams.

All told we were there for 2 days, and it was actually a very relaxing time. The lakeside cabins were beautiful, and we had gorgeous warm sunny weather. The cabins all had fully equipped kitchens, so rather then going out for breakfast, lunch and dinner the three of us went to the grocery store to stock up on enough food to cook for ourselves for the next two days. The first night after dinner the Chief and I hung out by the little resort beech swapping aviation stories and watching the sun go down. I snapped a few pictures, and also eyed up a paddle boat that had been pulled up on the sand. I got the okay from the front desk and went down to push it into the water and hop in. Other than getting a wet butt when sitting down it was great to be out on the water with the fresh air and evergreen smell. I could get used to this.

The next morning the three of us were up early to go out for breakfast and then the Chief and I started my flight training. The first 3 hours consisted of the typical stuff - slow flight, steep turns, stalls, the different types of landings, and finishing off with our emergency procedures. It didn't start so well. We started our takeoff roll with about a 10 knot crosswind and 10 degrees of flap set. As we taxied out I asked what speed I should rotate with, but the Chief said he wanted me to feel the airplane off the runway. Fair enough, I recall the 206 I used to fly to have a tendancy to just rise off the runway on takeoff. This time it didn't quite happen as I remembered it. We began our takeoff roll well enough, but as we approached takeoff speed and the weight came off the wheels I pulled back ever so slightly. Nothing happened. I pulled with a little more pressure, but we were still rolling along, now at significantly higher speed. By this time the crosswind started to force the airplane to drift to the side of the runway, and it was clear I was starting to lose control of the airplane. The Chief reached up to take control at about the same moment I found the proper amount of brack pressure on the controls to bring us off the runway. Great first impression. I could just imagine what was going through the Chief's mind at that moment - this knob can't even get us off the ground without screwing something up! I did my best to shake it off and move on.

It didn't take long after that for me to get my flying legs back under me again, and I managed to shake the rust off of my skills quickly enough to avoid making a further fool of myself. We ended up doing the 3 hours of basic training all in one flight, and then took a break for lunch. We went back to the cabins where the operator was putting lunch on.

After lunch I got my first taste of actual survey flying. The guys at the office had put together a sample survey block for us so I could get a feel for what its like to do a real survey flight. We fly the block in a back and forth grid pattern, like plowing a field, with IFR style hockey-stick procedures turns to turn around and set up for flying the next line at each end of the block. Flying the lines with precision is critical, so the airplane is equipped with a special digital course deviation display on the top of the dash right at eye level which shows me how far off the line I am, down to less than a meter. Sitting next to that is the radar altimeter so I can follow the slope of the terrain as closely as possible. The lateral limits for flying the line are typically +/- 15 meters on either side of the line. Our drape altitude, which is the term for how high above the ground we follow the terrain, is 230 ft, meaning we have to try to follow the rolling hills of the earth as close as possible to 230 ft above ground. My first line I got a taste of how precise those requirements really are. We set up the tracking device, and I started into flying my first practice line. I intercepted the line, noting the display showing 900 meters off the line, then 800, 600, 400, 300, 200, 100, and then I blew right through it as the display showed 50, then 100, then 150 meters out the other side. I corrected slightly to re-intercept, and once again blew through it by 100 meters. And that is how my first line for the next 5 minutes went, as I'm thinking "holy moly, I have to stay within 15 meters?!!".

Luckily I quickly improved. In 15 minutes I had my track nailed down to within +/- 40 meters, with the odd excursion out to 60 or 70, and then soon it was within +/- 30 meters, until by the end of the first hour crossing back and forth over the wilderness at 230 ft agl I was finally starting to get my limits for the most part within 15 meters. But that was about as good as it got. As time went on I started to wander a little bit again. My hand was sweaty, my neck stiff and sore from staring so intently at the displays, and my brain fried. This isn't anything like normal flying, it takes it out of you really easily. The Chief likened it to flying an ILS for hours on end, and thats exactly what its like. It takes that much sustained focus. Every couple minutes during the 180 turnaround to start the next line I get a chance to climb up a few hundred feet and relax a bit before heading into the next line. Its a welcome mini-break. During our turns we climb up to 400-500 ft agl, which is normally considered extremely low for most other types of flying, but after you come up from skimming the tree-tops at 230 ft, 500 ft seems plenty high!

After just over an hour and a half I called uncle. I was toast, and any more practice wouldn't do much good, I needed a break. This is very challenging flying, also REALLY cool. Its far more challenging and far more demanding than flying freight back and forth up the coast. Everyone is patient and are stressing the fact that I don't have to worry about performing perfectly right away. The Chief said my boss isn't expecting a whole lot of production out of me right away, because there is a fairly steep learning curve to it. I lasted about an hour and a half flying the lines, before I started to lose my will to live, but eventually I'll be able to work my way up to about 4 hours flights without wandering outside the limits.

We landed and taxied in to secure the airplane for the night. The next day I assumed we'd go up again for more practice, we had initially planned for 5 hours of survey practice on top of the 3 hours of basic training, and I felt a little bit that I could still use more practice, because I was still wandering outside the 15 meter limit every now and then, but I guess the Chief is confident enough in me that we're not going to bother.

Today we finished up a little bit of paperwork still needed, and then the operator and I headed north to the work site, where I am now, checked into my motel room. More blogging to come later on our trip up.

And They're Off!

2010-05-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

So I'm in North Bay for the night tonight. My day started with a 07:55 train departure out of London to Toronto, to meet up with the equipment operator who I'm driving up with. The train ride was pleasant and relaxing. From the train station I took a GO bus a little further north, where my coworker picked me up to start our drive. Its hot outside. The cargo van we're driving up with all our gear doesn't have A/C, which makes for a sweaty ride. Lots to talk about though, I don't know much about survey flying yet. As for right now however, I'm sitting in a nice cool hotel room, after a refreshing shower, out to dinner in a bit.

Tomorrow it'll be an even longer day driving to finish the trip up to where the airplane is sitting. The chief pilot will be meeting us up there, and I'll spend a couple days in training with him before I fly the airplane up myself to the site location to start the actual surveying work.

The operator I'm driving up with seems pretty chill. I think we'll get along pretty well, which is good, considering the amount of time we're going to be spending together.

Thats all for now, just thought I'd fire off a quick blog while I had the time.

A Good Problem to Have

2010-05-16T14:08:00.001-07:00

So my second bit of news, on a much happier note than my accident is that I found a job again! It kind of happened right out of the blue actually. I had applied to a number of places back in the early spring, and had a job interview for an aerial fire patrol position, but I only made it to their second-pick list, meaning I didn't get the job but if someone didn't work out they'd give me a call. I wasn't about to hold my breath.

Other than that it appeared that I had struck out for flying work this year, and I resigned myself to finding a job in construction again, which I have several years experience in, and has always been my fallback, even though I don't really enjoy it.

All of a sudden about a week ago I get an email from an aerial survey company I've been sending resumes to every few months for the last year, and they're hiring now. Next thing I know two days later I'm on my way driving down to Toronto for a job interview. The job interview went terrific. I liked the sound of the job, I got a warm and fuzzy feeling about the owner and business, and I thought he was impressed enough with me as well. It turned out he was, because later that night I was offered the job! It seemed like it all happened about as fast as you just read it.

THEN all of a sudden the next day I get another phone call - the fire patrol company. Someone on the primary hiring list didn't work out apparently, and I'm next in line. So in the span of 3 days I go from no real prospective flying jobs this summer and working construction to deciding between 2 offers! A nice problem to have. Both companies seem like great companies to work for, with advantages to each, but I decided to stick with the survey position. It was a tough decision, and some people may think I'm crazy because I just gave up a multi-engine flying job for a single-engine flying job, but I'm pretty happy with my decision. For one, aviation is a small industry, and I didn't want to burn bridges by bailing on one company in favour of another, I already made a commitment and I'm going to stick with it. Secondly, the survey job pays better, and I think its going to be more interesting work overall, and more flexible with time off, which is appealing to me. The job is actually a low-level surveying position flying a Cessna 206, which means that most of the flying will be done at 200 ft agl - pretty intense. I'll be away for 4-6 weeks at a time, and then I get to come home for some time off before heading off to a new location.

Even though I won't be logging multi-time, I'm pretty comfortable with my decision, I think it just may be a job that I'll enjoy enough to stick around for a while, rather than just taking it to build time and move on. We'll see what happens however. As for now, I don't start for another week or so. I was supposed to start right away, but the airplane is down for maintenance, and waiting for parts, which is good cause it won't be such a scramble for me to get packed and gone. Nonetheless I'm itching to get going! Looking forward to more adventure!

Update

2010-05-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

So its been a few months since I've written. I can truthfully say that both a whole lot has happened since and not a whole lot has happened, and both are the reasons for not really writing.

Up until last week its been a rough couple months as far as my flying career was concerned. A big reason being that I was in an airplane accident. Ya, you don't have to re-read that, you read it right the first time. Rather then give you all the details upfront I'll make you read the story.

My instructor and I were doing an IFR practice flight in the Twin Comanche to polish off some things for my upcoming flight test. We had done a number of approaches already, and were just flying over the city finishing up some DME holding patterns. During the course of our flight the sun had set and it was now dark. We were on our inbound leg heading towards the airport, and I was just getting ready to make my turn for the last hold outbound before calling it a day. Suddenly the right engine started surging, like it does when I run the auxiliary fuel tanks dry before switching to a full tank. I checked the fuel selector - it was on the main tank just like it had been the whole flight. For training I kept the rest of the tanks empty cause you can only use them for level flight, but I filled the mains which were good for over 3 hrs of flying. I checked my watch and did the easy math in my head, we had been up for an hour and a half, should have lots of fuel. The fuel gauge also showed just under a half a tank, not that airplane fuel gauges are accurate in the least, but it confirmed what our flight time and fuel load indicated. "It looks like we have a real live engine failure." I said as I double checked the gauges, the fuel selectors. I finished up my checks by pushing all the levers forward, and turning on the fuel pumps.

"Do you want me to declare an emergency?"

"Yep, you have the radios."

My instructor called the tower and told them he was declaring an emergency and would like to return to land immediately. ATC acknowledged.

At that point there was very little doubt in us that this would turn into anything but a single engine landing. We were lightly loaded, had the airport 5 miles away directly in front of us and were at 4500 ft. It'd be no problem to fly it in on one engine. Then all of a sudden the left engine sputtered out. In the business of the cockpit I almost didn't notice, there wasn't much change in engine sound since the props were still spinning like mad. Also the Manifold pressure gauges on both engines still indicated in the high 20's, just like they would indicate if we had the engines at full throttle. RPM was indicating around 2000, which was low for what the prop levers were set at. It was only the fuel flow gauges and the fact that we were descending that indicated both the engines had quit. Not what I had expected a real engine failure to be like.

As we glided the airplane in on our long final, you could hear ATC redirecting traffic to clear the way for us. It was a warm and fuzzy feeling in contrast to the frusteration of losing TWO engines. I tried to rack my brain to figure out the problem. I double checked and triple checked the fuel selectors and pumps, played with the magneto switches, and cycled all the levers again. Nothing changed anything. I couldn't imagine what would cause both engines to give up on me.

I mentioned we were 5 miles from the airport at 4500 ft, which is just about 3500 ft above airport elevation. For those that haven't already done the math that requires a glide ratio of just under 9:1 - that is for every 9 ft forward we get a 1 ft drop in altitude. Glide ratios aren't listed for light twins, but 9:1 is pretty close to what a slippery airplane like a Twin Comanche should be able to handle. It was gonna be close. Unfortunately we had almost a 20 knot headwind against us.

I tried to settle on what airspeed to fly it in on. Being a light twin, best glide speeds aren't published. I decided that since the best rate of climb speed typically is in the range of speeds that gives the best lift for the least drag, I'd glide the airplane in at that, which was 112 mph. As we got closer to the airport and lower in altitude, it became apparent that we were in more trouble than we first thought. It was completely dark out, but I could see the lights of cars driving along a country road that rounded the airport perimeter. Beyond that was the dark field before the runway with only the approach light strobes flashing their way into the runway. Roads mean power lines. We have to clear that road at all costs. I fought the almost irresistable instinct to pull up, which would have bled off our airspeed even further, and at best increased our drag and reduced our glide range - or at worst ended in a stall into the ground.

I also thought about how and when to lower the landing gear. The landing gear is electrically driven, and a typical extension takes about 4-6 seconds of transition time from retracted to down and locked. With neither of our engines that would mean we'd be counting on the battery alone to crank down the gear. I didn't want to burn up more altitude by extending the gear too early, but leaving it last minute would mean we'd have no time to troubleshoot problems resulting from the battery not being strong enough to lower the gear on its own. And as you recall we had recently been having some landing gear issues, which had been sorted out, but I was still paranoid and didn't want to take any chances. I decided to do a manual gear extension, which means disengaging the landing gear from the motor and allowing it to free-fall into place. It happens almost instantaneously, so there'd be less valuable time chewed up by waiting for the landing gear to crank itself down, and a manual gear extension is problem free. I briefed my instructor on my intentions with the landing gear, and we agreed he'd handle that task, so I could continue flying the airplane. He stand ready to drop it on my command. As per our cross country flight he'd already seen it done before which was good that he already knew what to do. He pulled up the floor panel and chucked it in the back seat to get ready.

Eventually it became clear we were going to come up short of the runway. It was an unfamiliar feeling to be so close to the ground at night. The runway was just a thin mash of lights on the horizon now we were so low. I steered left to avoid the approach lights and breathed a sigh of relief as the lights of the road beneath me disappeared from my peripheral vision.

"Gear down."

Instantly my instructor popped the lever to allow the gear to free fall into place, and I could hear and feel the clunk.

"Gear's confirmed down and locked." We were a well oiled machine, and I was so thankful to have another set of competant hands in the cockpit.

It was gonna be close, we just barely crossed the airport fence into the open snow covered field short of the runway. I started my flare and watched the airspeed bleed off from 112 to 110... 105...100...

BAMM!! I wasn't expecting such an impact. I felt it in my back and my butt. I thought we were still a few feet from touching down still. The next moment was a flash of flying again, and then sliding along in the snow on the airplanes belly. We came to rest. The lights in the cockpit were still on. Off to our right an approach light strobe flashed. A siren wailed through our headsets, the ELT (emergency locator transmitter, which activates on impact). I was oblivious to all of it though, I could believe or understand what just happened. I looked at my instructor. He looked at me,

"Are you all right?"

"Ya. Are you alright?"

That snapped me out of it. I called the tower. "We're on the ground short of the runway. No injuries... as of... yet." I trailed off and added the "as of yet" as an afterthought. I thought it sounded stupid when it came out, but I was aware that we were still sitting in the airplane, hadn't tried to move yet, and could be in shock. I shut the master switch off and undid my seat belt.

"We should probably let the tower know we're shutting down."

"Ok." I flipped the master back on and made the last transmition that I ever will in that airplane. "Tower we're shutting down."

I don't remember what their response was exactly, something like "Roger, trucks are on the way."

We got out of the airplane, and only then did the whole experience sink in. I looked at my airplane. It was sitting on its belly in the snow. The right wing outboard of the engine had a gash all the way back to the spar. It looked like it was a hair from being seperated from the aircraft completely. The left wing sat limply on the ground, its spar broken as well. Hoooooly crap. It was at that point that the adrenaline kicked in and my hands started shaking. The emergency vehicles pulled up and a fireman asked us if we were alright. The rest is history.

It turns out that the impact was from hitting the side of a small berm at the edge of airport property. We just grazed it actually. We walked back to look at where we hit, and there were 3 deep groves in the snow for where the landing gear struck. We marvelled at how close we came to missing the hill - or plowing straight into it. If we were a mere 5 ft higher we would have missed the hill completely and made a soft touchdown in the snowy field short of the runway. Five feet lower - and well, rather than just the landing gear being sheered off by the hill we would have plowed straight into the side of it, and probably not been around to continue blogging.

The airplane is gone, but we walked away, and insurance covered the loss of the airplane. So ultimately it is a happy ending. As for the cause of a dual engine failure... Transport Canada never did a full investigation since there were no fatalities. Our insurance company conducted only a very small one. A failure in the fuel selector caused the left fuel selector to become stuck in the crossfeed selection. Therefore even though we thought we had the engines selected to feed each from their respective main tanks (as the position of the selector handles indicated), what was actually happening was that the entire flight both engines were feeding from the right main tank, which was eventually exhausted with fuel, while the left main tank was left completely full. Thankfully neither myself nor my AME who maintained the aircraft was singled out as the cause of the accident, the insurance company covered the loss of the airplane, and all ended well.

It is nonetheless a sad way to part with my beloved airplane, but that is the inherent nature of aviation I guess. Stuff just happens sometimes. Overall it has been a valuable experience, and believe it or not, in some ways a confidence builder. How many people can say they've made an off-runway dead-stick landing, at night, and walked away from it?

So thats my first big piece of news, my next big piece of news is on a happier note which I'll cover in another post. This post has become long enough.

IFR X-Country

2010-01-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a beautiful clear day, so we took the opportunity to get my IFR cross country flight done. Its seems rather counter-intuitive, to wait for a clear day to go file IFR, but the Twin Comanche isn't certified for flight into known icing conditions, and in the winter essentially any flight through cloud will be into icing conditions, so even though we file IFR, we still have to make sure the weather is reasonably clear.

In the end it doesn't matter a whole lot however, IFR training is almost all about the procedures. So I got my first ever experience filing and flying under IFR flight rules, which was pretty cool, and not nearly as intimidating as I was expecting. I understand everything that's going on at this point during my training, the mistakes that I do make are usually things I know I have to do, but just forgetting to do them at the proper time.

The flight as far as the training side of things went relatively well, the mistakes I made I thought I could have avoided if I was more deliberate with my procedures, but it all comes with practice I guess. Unfortunately the airplane is once again back in the shop. Landing gear problems this time. Our flight was from London to Hamilton to Kitchener and back to London with missed approaches in Hamilton and Kitchener, and during our climbout on the missed approach in Hamilton we noticed the landing gear lights indicated the gear was stuck in transition. In the mirror it appeared to be retracted all the way up. We checked the circuit breaker, which was still engaged, and then tried to recycle the landing gear. No luck, the gear wouldn't move at all. In between the seats there is a floor panel that can be opened up to provide access to landing gear motor, screw jack, the actuator arm that moves the gear, and the handle for manually extending the gear, so we opened that up to see what we could find. The position of the actuator arm confirmed what I saw in the mirror, the gear was indeed retracted fully.

I figured there wasn't much we could do at this point, so I suggested we continue our flight to Kitchener, do our missed approach, and then continue on back to London as planned.

Coming into London we tried cycling the circuit breaker and then selecting the landing gear down one more time with no luck. So it came down to a manual landing gear extension. I briefed my instructor on the procedure so he could do it while I flew the VOR approach into London. I've done manual gear extensions on the ground before with the airplane up on jacks during maintenance, so I knew exactly what to expect. Its electrically driven gear, so after slowing the airplane down to blue line, you just have to disengage it from the motor, and then insert a lever to push forward and lock the gear down. No pumping necessary, which is generally the procedure for hydraulically operated gear. Gravity usually negates the need for step 2 however. For the post part as soon as you disengage it from the motor the gear just falls down into place due to both gravity and a bungie system. It pays to know your airplane! The procedure went off without issue, I made a smooth touchdown and breathed a sigh of relief with the sound of wheels rolling beneath me. With landing gear problems despite every indication showing the gear is down and locked there's always that little bit of fear (I can't decide if its a rational fear or not, lol) in the back of your mind that the gear could fold back up as soon as you touchdown. Thankfully that wasn't the case though, and we taxied in to end the flight.

Busting Bernoulli's Lift

2010-01-19T12:54:00.001-08:00

Today I'm sick with a cold, and the weather's been crap for almost a week now, so no flight training at the moment. Tomorrow is looking up however.

In the meantime I've been lazing around the house, playing computer games and browsing some aviation blogs. I came across one blog by an American flight instructor, which in one post was explaining the theory behind lift - incorrectly. That same incorrect explanation has been a persistant myth among laypeople and pilots alike for a long time now, and every time I hear it repeated it just raises my pet peeveness of it one more notch. So today we'll set the record straight, and I'll do my best to provide proof for any persistent skeptics out there.

The myth is that lift is produced by the curvature, or camber, of the top surface of a wing. The air being divided by the wing at the leading edge must meet up again at the trailing edge, and because the air has further to go over the top (due to the camber), its velocity increases and pressure decreases. The decrease in pressure causes a pressure differential between the top and bottom of the wing, which sucks the wing upwards, thus creating lift. This decrease in pressure is in reference to Bernoulli's Principle, which states that as the velocity of a fluid increases, its pressure decreases.

I am not disputing the validity of Bernoulli's Principle, because that part is true. The error however comes in the assumption that the pressure differential can create enough lift to counteract the weight of the airplane. If this explanation were true, it immediately raises some questions if one thinks about it:

For one, how does an aerobatic airplane fly upside-down? The quick answer is that aerobatic aircraft are equipped with a symetrical wing, which is a wing with an equal camber (curvature) on both the top and bottom. But that explanation creates yet another problem. How does a symetrical wing fly at all?! According to Bernoulli's Principle, it can't, because due to the symetry of both the top and bottom the air wouldn't create a pressure differential. Similarily, in theory, a flat wing, like what you would find on a balsa wood model, or many fabric wings like on hang-gliders and ultralights, would not be able to produce any lift at all either, but we've all seen balsa models fly.

Another problem we come upon is that our current explanation completely ignores what we know about angle of attack. Every pilot knows that term. Angle of attack is the angle that the wing meets the oncoming air. The illustration above would be a wing at an angle of attack of zero degrees. The myth would seem to indicate that a wing could produce lift at an angle of attack of zero. The myth also seems to say that it would be possible to maintain that zero angle of attack through the entire speed range of an aircraft, since lift is created by the Bernoulli Principle, and not angle of attack. This is at odds with any pilot's observations of how an airplane reacts as it is decelerated. It only takes a single demonstration of slow flight to show that as an airplane slows down, the angle of attack increases, which can be observed by the fact that the nose raises higher and higher into the air to the point of an aerodynamic stall. It is this observation of angle of attack that leads us forward to the true explanation of how a wing creates lift.

The majority of lift is in actual fact produced as a result of the angle of attack, which creates both a deflection force underneath the wing (resulting in higher pressure), and a vacuum effect on top of the wing (lower pressure). The vacuum effect above is not however a result of a wing's camber, it is a result of angle of attack. With a wing at a positive angle of attack, the air flows over the top of the wing and is forced to turn a corner down towards the wing. It is at this corner the low pressure zone develops. Note the illustration below of a flat wing moving through the air at a certain positive angle of attack. You'll have to forgive the pathetic visual, I made it in paint, but it gets the point across. I chose to illustrate a flat wing because its easy to visualize the "corner" that the air has to turn as it passes over the top.

So if all a wing needs is angle of attack to fly, why the heck do they give it a camber?! Well the primary reason is for smooth airflow, at a range of attack angles. A flat wing will stall at a very low angle of attack because it creates a very sharp corner over the top of the wing for the air to have to travel. At some point the air won't be able to make that corner, and will seperate from the wing, producing a turbulent airflow. We know this as a stall. When the top surface of a wing is cambered, it allows the air to make that corner over the top of the wing at much higher angles of attack without seperating and causing a stall. The camber makes for a much smoother corner. This, in effect allows the wing to produce lift at slower speeds, which is generally a good thing. This also explains effectively why airplanes designed to fly slow and carry big loads have a wing with a high camber. Its not because the camber itself produces the lift, but because the camber allows the wing to fly at greater angles of attack without stalling, and the greater the angle of attack, the more lift a wing will produce.

This explanation also neatly answers all of the questions that came up with the popular mythical explanation. Aerobatic airplanes can fly either right-side up or upside-down, regardless of whether they have symetrical wings, because they just have to maintaint a positive angle of attack. Flat wings like balsa gliders and hang-gliders are also explainable. Finally it also fits better in with a piot's observations during slow flight, because as the aircraft decelerates, the angle of attack must increase, which is observable in the form of a raised nose.

While the mythical explanation of lift may not be ENTIRELY false (the Bernoulli Principle), it may contribute to the total lift of an airfoil a little bit, but the effect is negligable for practical purposes. One thing in that explanation that is completely false is the idea that air being split at the leading edge must meet back up at the trailing edge. There's no law anywhere that says air particles have a "memory" to them and must return to the particles they began with. They are carried to wherever the forces acting take them. Wind tunnel tests with time-pulsing coloured smoke actually show that the above air accelerates far past where the lower air ends up at the back, and also are forced downwards. The downward flow is known as downwash (which is also an unexplainable phenominon with our mythical understanding of lift).

So, now you know the rest of the story...

Training has Commenced

2010-01-13T21:08:00.000-08:00

Airplane is finally fixed, and I had a training flight today, more booked for tomorrow. The crunch time is really on now because I have only six weeks until my INRAT exam expires.

Today we did a quick review of VOR holds, then did some localizer holds, and finished with an ILS approach. To be honest I'm having a pretty tough time. It feels like it takes me a long time to grasp even a little of what we're covering, while the rest of it goes right over my head. Its been a while since I've felt this dumb. I'm both amazed at and thankful for my instructor's patience. He'll calmly walk me through each step over and over again, and never gets upset or impatient that its taking me so long to catch on.

I do feel like I am making progress though, bit by bit, but I was hoping I would catch onto things much quicker than I am. The airplane is still causing frusteration however. The #1 VOR was replaced last year, and its a brand new unit, however it was doing funny things today. For some reason it refused to pick up the Morse code idents for the London VOR. It worked fine for every other VOR however. Finally once we were back on the ground we checked it again and it worked fine. Ghosts in the machine I guess. Those are the worst kinds of problems, where sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. We tried every possible combination of settings on the audio panel and the instrument, but we couldn't manage to figure out why we couldn't hear the Morse code audio. Its especially frusterating because not only does trying to troubleshoot those problems in the air take away from the training experience, its a brand new unit, so in theory it should work perfectly. The best we can do is cross our fingers and hope for the best tomorrow.

A part of me wants to go crawling back into the comfortable world of VFR flying and forget about advancing into the IFR realm. VFR doesn't take any effort for me anymore, its home for me, but I know that it'd be a mistake to limit myself like that. Not only because an IFR rating opens up better jobs with better pay, but because the longer I put off IFR training the more I become entrenched in VFR flying and the harder it would be to learn IFR later on.

That being said, there's been a couple job possibilities coming over the horizon for me this summer in the fire-patrol sector. I've always wanted to do that, either water-bombing or bird-dogging. Those are both VFR jobs, and I could see myself doing something like that for a while. I did some research today just out of curiosity to learn a little more about those jobs, and here's the short explanation of how I understand it for my readers who are also uneducated in the subject. Its all very cool.

Aerial fire-fighting is divided into 3 different "units" we'll call them. There's Fire Detection, Bird-dogs, and the Water Bombers themselves. The first, which is what I would start out doing if I end up getting a job in the fire-fighting field this year, is called Fire Detection. From what I gather its essentially what it sounds like. Small aircraft, like a Cessna 337, patrols a large area of wilderness with forest-fire potential looking for fires. If a forest fire is spotted, it calls in a Bird-dog aircraft. The Bird-dog aircraft essentially takes command of the entire operation. It will fly over the area and a fire-expert on board the aircraft will assess the forest fire and develop the attack plan for the water bombers, such as the best places to drop the water loads based on the winds and conditions for best control of the fire. Since water bombing is done at tree-top altitudes, the Bird-dog aircraft will then fly the low-altitude bombing route that the water bombers will fly, to note any obstacles that could prevent a hazard to the bombers. We're talking flying over fires and past smoke at 200 ft above the ground, cool stuff. After the bombing runs have been safely tested by the bird-dog, the bird-dog will then climb up higher and orbit the area to call in the water bombers. Since the airspace near a forest fire can naturally become very busy due to the boming activity, the bird-dog's next responsibility will be to act as Air Traffic Control for the water bombers conducting their runs, coordinating everything to make sure aircraft are kept safely apart during operations as well as monitoring the progress of the operation. At least thats my understanding of how things go, I'd love to hear the comments of any readers who have real experience doing this. I've always thought its sounded like a pretty fun job. All a very coordinated team excercise. As for me, we'll see how things pan out.

Quick Update

2010-01-02T19:48:00.001-08:00

Just thought I'd write a quick update since its been a month since I've written last now. No IFR training yet, the Twin Comanche's MP gauge decided it would be a good time to kick the bucket, so I had my AME take a look at it, and while looking at the airplane he also found a landing gear downlock spring that was broken as well, so we've been waiting for parts for the last couple weeks. The Christmas season is apparently a bad time to order airplane parts, cause we've been waiting for 3 weeks already.

So that's about all I have to report, as soon as that gets fixed I'll be able to jump headfirst into IFR training and get it all finished up. In the meantime its been snowing rediculous amounts in London. Which means I'm gonna have a lot of fun extricating the airplane from the mounds of snow that I'm sure its buried under. I can't wait.

Back Home

2009-12-03T06:08:00.000-08:00

Well I'm back home in London for the winter. The last week or so has been fairly busy, and I've been preoccupied with moving so I haven't written, so I apologize.

The last few days before I left it was snowing intermittently, not a whole lot of snow, but enough that I was sweeping off the Twin Comanche wings every chance I got to keep it from freezing into a solid block of ice. My day of escape was a little hectic, as I still had some last minute packing to do, and for weather reasons I planned on getting away in the afternoon, but my boss came by and asked if I could do one last trip, because my replacement pilot couldn't show up until later. Actually technically the season wasn't over, it was me that bailed out early. We've had such a late start to winter that I probably could have stayed for another month before the winter road goes in, which kills the flying business. I don't think I could have stayed and still had time to finish my instrument rating though. I wrote the written exam almost 2 years ago now, and if I don't finish the rest of the flying portion and do the flight test before the 2 years is up, the exam will expire and I'll have to write it again. Its a tough exam, so I'd rather now have to tackle it again.

These past 8 months have been a pretty cool adventure. The company was great to work for, and I've also grown as a pilot quite significantly since I first went up. I really did learn a lot.

But now I'm back home. The flight home was relatively uneventful. The weather wasn't ideal but I knew I couldn't expect perfectly clear VFR days for an entire 500-some-odd mile trip this time of year. I still made it home in good time however. I was surprised how busy the London airport is these days. I knew it got changed to a Class C airspace (same level as Toronto) several months ago, but they've even got multiple tower frequencies now. I came in and they lined me up to land and then handed me off to a new frequency I had never used before. Crazy. It was quite fun to fly in such a past-paced environment like that again, but I felt a little rusty. Its been almost a year now since I've regularly operated out of a towered airport, let alone come in a night, and I also haven't flown the Twin Comanche very often lately, so my cockpit procedures weren't as greasy smooth and as second-nature as they used to be. I'm looking forward to regulary flying it again as I finish up my Instrument Rating.

As for now I'm home, living with my parents again for the next few months (its been a while), enjoying seeing family again, and enjoying the things that Southern Ontario has to offer that I missed out on up north.

So for the next few months my blogging will have a change of pace as I'll mostly focus on writing about my IFR training.

Better to Be in Bed

2009-11-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

Nov 23, 2009

Currently I’m riding the train south. The Cherokee is finally fixed, so I’ll stay down south for the night and then fly it back in the morning. I’m looking forward to logging a few more hours in the Cherokee. Not because I need Cherokee hours, but because its just a more pleasant airplane to operate, and I have a bit of an attachment to it after 700 hrs.

Last night I had an OPP officer knock on my door at about 6 PM. It was rather unexpected, and as I answered the door I tried to quickly scroll back through my mind to try to find the reason they were at my door. I didn’t REMEMBER doing anything illegal. They were actually here for a favour. The officer had a guy with her, and she explained that he had a family emergency, and needed to get to Toronto ASAP. He was wondering if I could fly him in the Comanche. He was visibly upset, and mentioned that he had a significant amount of money on his VISA to cover the fuel costs. I told them I would if I could, but I’d have to check the weather first, and clear it with my employers, so if I got stuck somewhere they’d know where I was. It sounded like it was going to be a long night; it would have been an easy 6 hr round trip, so if I was airborne by 7, I probably wouldn’t be back until close to 2 AM.

I got some stuff together and took a good look at the weather. I’m still not Instrument rated so as always I’d have to make the trip VFR, which can be problematic this time of year for covering such a large distance, especially at night, where scud running (very low level flying) isn’t so safe. There was fog forming all across my route. Fog is still probably the single biggest thing that scares me. Strong winds can be handled, thunderstorms can be flown around or navigated through with the Stormscope, its tough to land if you can’t see the runway through fog, let alone even see the fog at night. I had to call the poor guy and let him know I couldn’t do it. I felt bad, I’m not sure what his emergency was, I didn’t ask and it was none of my business, but he seemed pretty desperate to get to Toronto.

As I went to bed I wondered if we could have at least tried the flight, but then images of being stuck in the dark cold night above a layer of fog unable to land, and I decided that I’d rather be curled up in bed like I was.

-------

Back home now, safe and sound, and one day later. I stayed the night last night, and then spent most of the day killing time waiting for the weather to clear, as I woke up with ceilings on both ends of my route at 200 ft agl. Finally as daylight was running out today the ceilings lifted JUST enough for me to give it a go. I spent a good part of the flight flogging through poor visibility, but both the ceilings and visibility got better as I got further north and the ground fell away below me.

Once again I get to sleep in my own bed.

Happy Hour or Happy Birthday

2009-11-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

More low level scud running today. I did one trip up the coast with a load of passengers, ALMOST got to the point of turning back, but we made it. The weather looked like it was clearing a little bit as the day went on so we decided to try a second trip taking two passengers and a load of stuff up to the usual place.

As we were fueling the plane I noticed my two passengers, a rough looking couple standing off by the edge of the apron with their backs turned with some suspicious beverages in their hands. It was obvious they were drinking alchohol, but were trying not to make it obvious. I went over and approached them about it. They seemed sober enough, but I told them sternly not to drink any more, otherwise they might get sick on the plane. There's also the concern that they may get a little too rowdy on the flight. I looked at their coat pockets, and it didn't seem like they had any other drinks stashed on them, so I figured they'd be fine and let it go at that. The woman mentioned that it was her birthday as an explanation for their drinking.

We took off and headed north, and most of the flight was fine. About 15 miles from landing, the women sitting in the back, who was probably twice my size, started to get a little louder and more boisterous. She kept leaning forward and shouting things to her husband upfront. As we got closer and closer to landing it became clearer that she had been drinking more since we took off. By the time I had landed and we were taxiing for the apron she was grabbing my seat and yelling at me to get my attention about something. She wanted to take off again or something, I don't know. Finally as I pulled off the runway I turned around and told her to "BE QUIET!", which worked long enough to taxi in and shut down. I was certainly glad we were on the ground. I shut the airplane down, and she was so drunk she couldn't even get out of the airplane on her own. Then the fiasco started. When she finally fell out of the airplane she was rambling and making a commotion. Next thing I know she chucks 3 empty plastic bottles out onto the ramp. Unloading the airplane would reveal one more empty. So much for listenning to the pilot's instructions...

Usually we give passengers the benefit of the doubt and settle the payment last, but on a hunch I figured I'd ask for payment BEFRORE I unloaded the airplane and gave them all their stuff. It turned out my hunch was right, because they only had the cash for less than half what they owed for the trip. She kept trying to give me a debit card to pay for the rest of the trip. What was I supposed to do with a debit card? The woman was stumbling around, almost falling over, and rambling on unintelligably. I did my best to keep her away from falling on the airplane while she was stumbling around. I was getting a little worried how I was going to manage the situation and get the rest of the money, and was glad when I saw two police trucks pull up. The passengers were known booze smugglers, so they had come to search the luggage, but I was also happy to have some support in dealing with this crazy lady.

4 cops walked up and asked how it was going. I rolled my eyes, motioned to the woman and mentioned she was a little drunk, and that she still owed me money. As all this was happenning the woman just got rowdier and rowdier, to the point where the cops finally gave up trying to reason with her and took her to put in the back of the truck, but she didn't want that, so she fought it. They got her over to the truck, but she was still struggling, so one officer gave her a final violent shove and slammed the door. I was a little taken aback by the shove, but I suppose she deserved it, there was no reasoning with her. It was agreed that one of the officer's would take her husband to the Northern Store to withdraw the rest of what they owed me, while the rest of us waited here. We sat around for a good 45 minutes waiting for them to return, and the entire time the woman in the back of the police truck was pounding on the tinted window, screaming and shouting, and apparently at one point took off all her clothes for some unknown reason, lol. What a joke.

Finally the husband and one officer made it back to the airport and I got the rest of what was owed, and it all ended well, for me at least. I only have less than 10 days before I go home, so I probably won't fly these people anywhere again, but if I do I'll certainly be more stern with them and more cautious that they don't have any drinks on them. Interfering with the crew of an aircraft, or disobeying orders from the Pilot-In-Command (in this example - don't have any more drinks) is actually a serious offense. I'm not entirely sure of the details however, but I could have probably pushed to the police a little more on the fact of the women's lack of obeying my specific instructions of not drinking anymore, but at the time I was just glad to be back on the ground. In hindsight I should have been more clear to the police about the sequence of events and push for charges. I didn't really think about that at the time, but if something like this happens again I'll certainly take it more seriously. I specifically told my passengers no more drinking for the exact reason of what happened, and I think there should be a zero tolerance level for it, especially with passengers in small aircraft when they're within reach of the flight crew.

In a way its a different world up here. Natives are very much treated like spoiled children, and many act like it. Kids somehow think its ok to regularly tamper with boats, or let them float away. Many adults abuse alchohol, the welfare system, and the healthcare system, and get away with it. The worst that happens when someone smuggles booze is to have it confiscated. Able bodied people spunge off government handouts because they're too lazy to find a job, and when one of them feels like going on a shopping trip down south all they have to do is claim they have a tummy ache and a medevac flight will pick them and a family member up and take them direct to the Kingston hospital. While the patient is treated for their "stomach ache", the family member gets to go hit up the shopping centers. At the end of the day, the patient miraculously feels better and they get their private medevac charter back home, courtesy of the government, via hard-working Canadians. Some people don't feel compelled to listen to the pilot's instructions about onboard drinking because its her birthday. When she throws a fit with the police, the worst that will happen is she's thrown in the drunk tank for a night, and the next day the world will continue as normal. Natives also get comprehensive free healthcare. They get dental work paid for, yet the general condition of the population's teeth here is the worst I've seen anywhere, and that includes the natives I've been with in the Venezuelan amazon jungle who still live in the stone age. Nor do they pay for medication, which is a good thing, because diabetes is a serious problem up here. Education is also paid for, for the very few that choose it. SPOILED CHILDREN. I do know some natives up here who do work hard, and take care of themselves, and those people I have the utmost respect for because they've broken the mold. I however also feel sorry for them in that they're associated with the majority who do in fact fit the native sterotype. I wonder how much better off Canada would be if we stopped treating natives with kid-gloves.

Boat Hunting

2009-11-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

I've been playing airliner service for the last couple days. I've had 3 trips so far that has involved taking a load of freight up the coast, unloading, installing the seats, taking a group of people further north, dropping them off, picking up more, heading back south to my original stop, dropping THOSE people off, and then taking more people on my final leg back south. There's been a lot of people wanting to move around lately.

Today was no exception. There was supposed to be fog this morning, but there was none out my window when I woke up. The GFA weather map was also indicating low cloud/fog all the way up the coast, however standing on the ground andn looking to the north there was no visual indication of anything. I shrugged, the weather forecast is often wrong, its so tough to make a prediction with so few weather stations.

So I took off with my load of pop and chips and 4 seats stuffed into the back and headed north. It turned out that the GFA was sort of half right, and I ran into the forecast layer of low cloud about 20 miles south of my first stop, and long story short I got the trip done, but we called it quits when I got back because we were picking up some airframe icing along most of the route.

So I went home, used the time to do some shopping and make some lunch. About an hour later my boss came by to go for a local flight. Apparently some mischievious kids untied some boats by the river, and they got carried away by the tide. We were being chartered to take a flight up and down the river to see if we could locate them. One of the locals who had lost his boat came with us, and I also took along our co-op student who's been working with us this semester as a spotter. Our co-op student and I took one truck to the airport to get the plane ready while my boss took another truck to pick up the client.

As they pulled up I turned around to greet the client, and he looked at me in disbelief and said, "How old are you?" Lol. I confidently answered that I'm 24. My answer didn't seem to put him at ease. Personally I don't think 24 is young at all to be doing this job, but the general public would seem to disagree. I take it as a compliment usually when people ask my age or mention/insinuate that I'm young to be a pilot. After we had all gotten seated and strapped in he asked me how long I've been flying. I told him I'd been flying for 8 years now, to which he relaxed and chuckled, "So you've been flying since you were 16? Heh heh, ok now I trust you.". Although I haven't been a professional pilot yet for 8 years, it wasn't a lie. I signed up for flying lessons soon after my 16th birthday. I could have told him how much flight time I had, but I find for most people uninitiated in the aviation world a total of hours doesn't mean much, since they don't really have any comparison.

It was a little warmer then up the coast, so icing wasn't an issue for the flight, but we were still stuck crusing around at 400-500 ft through misty conditions. It wasn't a great day for sightseeing, but finding boats was somewhat time-sensitive, considering the river current could potentially carry them out into the bay, where they'd be gone for good - forever consigned to roaming the vast emptyness of open water. Six boats had washed away. We found 2 right away that had floated into a small island inlet. Several trips up and down the river, and out to the bay didn't turn up the other four unfortunately. Too bad, when we took off I was fully expecting that we'd recover all of them. I guess not. I sure don't want to be those kids if they ever find out who did it, if it was my boat that got lost I'd be ready to skin them alive.

Windy Days, Long-Windedness, and World Wars

2009-11-11T18:07:00.000-08:00

Happy Remembrance Day everyone. I hope you all had time this morning and did better than me to pause for our veterans. I missed my chance at 11:00 AM to give a minute of silence, as I was loading the airplane and pre-flighting for my first flight of the day and 11 AM slipped right past me. As I taxiied out I checked my watch to record the time up and it was 11:11. I guess the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month will have to do. I sat at the end of the runway lined up and ready to go, the engine idling, as I gave a moment to ponder our veterans of the 2 World Wars. I could only manage 15 seconds before I had to cut it short because there was an Embraer 110 on final behind me closing fast.

It was windy today. Very windy. Gusts on the surface started out strong, and got stronger as the day went on, but I was lucky in that the wind direction was lined up within 10 degrees of the runways on both ends of the flights, so I didn't have much crosswind to wrestle with. But it did mean I had almost a direct crosswind for the cruising portion of the flights. It was quite fun actually, the upper winds were pushing 50-60 knots, which meant my wind drift was almost 30 degrees. You always have at least a few degrees of drift (the angle between the heading of the airplane and the actual path its travelling), but I don't think I've ever had as much as I did today. When flying I find it difficult to wrap my mind around pointing the airplane 30 degrees to one side of where I actually want to end up. Its unintuitive to keep where you want to go that far away from directly in front of you. Once I had the airport in sight I had to resist the urge to steer directly towards it.

Since the winds were so strong I couldn't resist the chance to see if I could slow the airplane down, and turn it into the wind to see if I could stop the airplane in midair altogether. The slowest I managed was 8 knots groundspeed on the GPS, which pretty much looks and feels like a standstill looking out the window. The 206 with its Robinson STOL kit can land and stop in an impressively short distance to begin with, but today with the winds I could have it down and stopped in under 100 ft with full flaps and a nice slow approach speed. What fun!

The high winds picked up as the day went on as a result of a low pressure system moving in from the north. I could see the weather system moving in on on the trip before, the winds were getting quite strong, and we were pretty much out of daylight, so when I taxied in I figured we call it day. Normally we would have called it quits, but the next load included some electrical supplies, which HAD to be there that night. Apparently there was an electrician that had been flown up the coast and he was leaving the next day, so I agreed to brave the winds, rain (which didn't turn out to be that bad), and darkness to get the job done. Technically we're a day only operation, but we can fly the airplane just like a private operator for repositioning flights and such when there isn't any paying passengers or freight onboard. So I had to make it up north with the load before official night-time, and the flight on the way back which would be empty would be legal to make.

It made me think about the idea of managed risk. Its the essence of commercial aviation. In one sense you always want to mitigate the risk as much as possible, but at the same time there is a job to do, and customers that are counting on you. Private pilots have the luxury of just deciding not to go flying if the weather isn't exactly how they like it, but its a bit more of a delicate balance with commercial aviation. In this case NORMALLY we wouldn't have made the flight, cause they can usually wait a day or two for more pop and chips, but today they couldn't wait on the electrical supplies - at least not without incurring a great deal more expense. So I thought about where do we draw the line? By doing the flight both the company and myself were exposing ourselves to a certain amount of MORE risk/danger than usual, but we were still charging the same amount for the trip, and the consequences would still be exactly the same if I bent up the airplane (ie. expensive repairs/possible injury). So why did we make an exception for this flight? At first it seemed like we should decide on an acceptable level of risk and never cross that line under any circumstances, regardless of the urgency. If the immediate rewards were still the same (in the form of X number of dollars paid for completing the trip), why increase the risk?

I came to the conclusion that its not always that simple. Sometimes its just good business sense to increase the acceptable level of risk in certain conditions. Like I said, the essence of commercial aviation is to manage the risk, not to cap it. In that case I was still very sure I could make the flight safely, as was my boss, so that temporary increased risk was worth the reward, intangible as it may be, of proving ourselves able to be counted on by our customers. From a business standpoint that makes the difference. If it was just another usual pop and chips run that could wait, it wouldn't make sense to expose ourselves to the increased risk, because it wouldn't make such a big impression on the customer. But when it mattered to the customer, it mattered that we came through, and as a result will be around for that customer to call on us again to use our service. Safety is always counter balanced by running a viable business. If we cancelled flights too much out of "safety", the company would go under eventually. In the other sense, running a viable business also to some extent contributes to safety. If a company crashed or bent up an airplane every week it wouldn't take long to go bankrupt. Obviously there's a threshold where it just isn't worth the risk, but that threshold can be different for every flight.

I joked once that I was going to start up a competing company to the one I work for now. My fleet would comprise of Cessna 150's cause they're cheap (I'd operate them two-crew, for safety of course). That way in addition to not doing any sort of maintenance whatsoever, and hiring extremely low time pilots at minimum wage, I'd be able to offer much lower prices than my competitors. When an engine seized up or a wing fell off out of lack of maintenance and crashed in the bush I'd just buy another Cessna 150 and hire a couple more pilots. Its the perfect business plan... right? Anyways back to the serious discussion.

Flying freight in higher-risk situations is one thing, but what about exposing passengers to increased risk? That can sometimes be a tricky situation. When I'm flying freight the only one that's exposed to that higher level of risk is me, and I have the ultimate go/no decision, and I'm well aquainted with the level of risk for that particular flight. Not so with passengers. Most passengers would have no idea of the level of risk that they're being exposed to, and generally trust 100% that they're not being put in harms way. Luckily I found however, is that MOST of the time that works itself out, simply by the fact that flying in weather that increases the the level of risk an appreciable amount, is weather that is far beyond the level where most passengers would be scared crapless. Usually when its a passenger trip with questionable weather we cancel the flight out of fear that the passengers would be airsick, or scared crapless, or otherwise be convinced we're crazy to go flying (and choose not to fly with us again) long before we'd cancel the trip out of a genuine risk to safety. So in that sense consideration for our passengers' sanity (so they DO fly with us again) generally prevents the need to asses the actual risk to safety.

I'm essentially separated from the business side of the decisions, so I never have to weigh the safety vs. the business gain. Its a good thing, I've come to realize a long time ago I'm not a very good businessman. My job is JUST being the pilot. Somebody else gets to decide whether or not it would make good business sense to try to attempt the flight. That doesn't mean my fate is left to someone else though, or that I just skip the decision making process altogether. My job IS the pilot. Its still my right and responsibility to consider whether "I" think I can do it safely or not. I don't have to consider the business ramifications however, my decision is based almost entirely on if I'm gonna come back alive or not. In practice however most of this is all just theory, because my employers are ALL pilot's themselves, so they can generally make a pretty good decision all on their own, with the exceptions that sometimes they need input from me on current weather conditions (since they can't see it for themselves from the airplane) and my particular skill-level (although by now they know my skill-level fairly well).

So that was my thought process provoked by the flight today. Writing it down may have been long-winded and far too over-analytical for the actual importance of the event, but I won't apologize. Its my blog.

Just One of Those Days

2009-11-05T19:22:00.000-08:00

We had 4 inches of snow last night. I had some flights I was supposed to do in the morning around 8:30, but the boss said if the weather doesn't look great when I wake up just go back to bed. Sounds good to me. Sure enough as my alarm went off this morning I got up and peaked out the window. I was surprised to see the winter wonderland out the window, but it didn't look to good for flying. Just to be sure I checked the weather reports, and they confirmed the Mark 1 Weather Observation System (aka living room window), so I crawled back under the gloriously warm blankets.

About an hour or so later the boss knocked on my door as per usual and said the weather's looking better, so to be ready in a half hour. We were supposed to have a couple freight trips, but we didn't end up getting all of the freight for one of the trips, so that's been pushed till tomorrow, so I just had the one, and then I had one pax trip after the train arrived in the afternoon.

The Cherokee is down south for maintenance, so I'm flying the C206 in the meantime. I've got almost 50 hrs in it now, and its starting to grow on me, but I think I still like the Cherokee a better. The 206 is just so awkward to climb into. You have to move the seat all the way back, then climb in by vaulting off the tire, and somehow squeeze your feet through the 6" space between the seat and the front of the door openning. Then you have to slide the seat forward, watching that you don't tangle your feet in the dangling headset wires in the process. Before you do that however you have to latch the back cargo door, which can only be done from the inside. Not a big deal if you have a full load of passengers, you can just get them to do it, but if the back of the airplane is all loaded up with freight you have to go in from the front door, somehow reach across the airplane through/over the baggage, feel for the handle, and latch it (you'll have to do that again to unlatch it). Boarding was not a top priority on the engineer's design features for Cessnas.

We got out to the airport, and thankfully it was still well below zero the snow was dry and fluffy so it was just a matter of pulling the wing covers off and then brushing off the rest of the airplane. No scraping ice. We also ended up waiting 15 min or so for the freight to be delivered out to the airplane, so I got a chance to brush the snow off the Twin Comanche as well. Better to do it now than when it warms up a few degrees and turns crusty. The first trip was uneventful. After I came back we still had a couple hours until the train came in so I had a chance to go home and get something to eat before I headed out for my second trip.

The second trip was two adults, both large people, with a baby and a small toddler, and a TON of stuff. It was awkward stuff to pack too. Things like a shovel, a baby basket and a sled as well as the usual boxes and bags. Finally we managed to pack it all in and squeeze the doors shut. The packing job was a work of art. Next came loading the passengers in from the other door. I keep my flight bag in between the two front seats, but that presents a problem for the front seat passenger in boarding since he has to climb over the pilot seat into the front right seat, so I pulled my bag out and put it on the ground beside the airplane. I'll throw it back in after my front passenger has boarded and then I'll be the last to climb in myself. The woman climbed in and got seated in the back, and I waited to host the toddler up onto her lap as she dug around for her seatbelt. She found the one strap, but couldn't locate the other one. I tried to poke my head in and help her dig around to find it, but with no luck. It must have been buried under the bags packed beside the seat. I couldn't get it with her still seated, so she had to extricate herself from the airplane so I could better dig my hands under the bags and pull it out. Still no luck, I couldn't find it. I did however find the rung that it should have been attached to, so that means it wasn't there. Dang. So I wormed my arm through the stacks of cargo to unlatch the back door, and then walked around to the other side of the airplane to see if I could dig up the seatbelt. I tried rustling around with my hand wedged under all the cargo to find it, but still had no luck, so getting quite frusterated, started UNPACKING the back of the airplane again to locate the missing seatbelt strap. I ended up unpacking the entire airplane, because the strap must have somehow come loose during the previous freight trip and been thrown by someone to the very tail end of the cabin.

In a hurried frusteration I started REPACKING the airplane again. It wasn't quite the work of art that it was the first time, but still managed to get it all in there. Time for take two. Once again I closed the door and walked back around to start the boarding process again. Somehow try to latch the back door, load the back passenger, get her belted in, hand her the toddler. Hold the baby while the front passenger climbs in. I've held so many babies this year than I ever thought I would. I used to generally avoid holding babies cause I had never really done it before, but its kind of a requirement of the job here. Apparently I'm doing something right because when the father handed him to me he was crying away, but as soon as I took him in my arms he stopped instantly, lol. Finally everyone was good to go, so I hauled myself up into the airplane. I got seated, and was just about to put my seatbelt on when the passenger in the back piped up, "What about your briefcase?" Aww frig, there it is, still sitting on the ground beside the airplane, out of arms reach. So I extricated myself from the airplane to retrieve my bag, stuffed it between the seats, and climbed back in. I'm glad she said something. I probably would have started up the airplane, then reached for my notebook to record the time, and done the 'ol slap the forehead routine. What a gong show. FINALLY everyone was aboard, the doors were closed, and we were ready to go. Just one of those days.

Winter Flying is Here

2009-10-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

So winter arrived for real yesterday. We got about 2 inches of snow over the course of yesterday and last night. As the afternoon rolled around my boss came by to tell me the weather looked ok to try some flights. We had a couple trips booked.

When I got out to the airport they had the Cherokee fueled and loaded up and the wing covers off already. I had to take one passenger and a load of the usual freight up to the usual destination. The AWOS was calling 1500 ft ceilings and good visibility before I took off, with the surface temperature just above freezing. I took off into a crisp 13 kt wind directly down the runway. Most of the flight we went through some mist/drizzle, so I stayed at 500 ft, knowing that the temperature up above would probably dip just below freezing, making the drizzle turn into icing conditions. I was sure to be vigilant in checking for carburetor icing. Carburetors have the interesting property of being able to ice up even in atmospheric temperatures well above freezing. Carburetors employ a bernoulli effect to create a lower pressure and draw up the fuel and mix it with the air. A side effect of this air pressure lowering is a cooling effect on the air. So even though outside air temperatures may be above freezing, its quite possible that the air in the carburetor is well below freezing temperatures.

As I left the airport area I passed the local Navajo coming back from where I was going. We gave each other a quick call to make sure we were safely separated, and he also let me know conditions up the coast were about 1500 ft ceilings, good vis underneath, with the winds on a direct crosswind to the runway. The winds weren't too strong, and I touched down lightly on a slushly and soggy gravel runway, with two tiny snow piles plowed alongside the runway.

I dropped off my passenger and unloaded the freight tromping around on the slushy gravel. I bought some winter boots about a week ago when I was down south for the last inspection, and today I was glad I did, my feet stayed warm and dry. They're kind of like a high hiking boot except with a fully rubberized foot section so they're fully waterproof up to about 3 inches, but the lace and toungue section is also fully attached to make them near-waterproof up to the full height of the boot. My summer-weight hiking boots I've been wearing all summer are cracked in the bottom of the rubber sole and no longer waterproof in the least. For the price I paid they didn't hold up to much actually, they started cracking like that 4 months after I bought them, and I haven't really abused them in the least. Don't ever buy Prospector brand boots, waste of $120. Pieces.of.crap. Hopefully my new winter Columbia brand boots hold up better. They were regular $76, but when I took them to the counter to pay for them, surprise! They were on sale for $60. Sweet deal.

Anyways, once again the cops were there to do a quick search. They've really been cracking down. They've been at the airport almost every time I've been there the last few weeks. Its good.

I took off and climbed out to head back south. I knew for the second trip since it was getting late in the day it would cool down a few degrees more, so I decided to do some experimenting and climb up to 1500 hr ft, where it would be cooler, and I could simulate what the misty conditions would do on my second trip back up north in the cooler weather. Sure enough as the temp dropped below 0 the water droplets on the window would start to freeze. That's icing, so I went back down lower where we were still in the positive temps. By the time I had made it back further south and temperature had already dropped a couple of degrees, and even at 500 it was -1. I checked the AWOS and the surface temp was reported as being right on 0.

My windshield had started collecting trace amounts of ice even down at 500 ft. I wasn't going through the drizzle for the entire flight, so the ice would collect on the windshield for a few minutes, and then sublimate off, then collect some more etc, so I never got a build-up any thicker than just a paper-thin layer, but it was icing nonetheless. I landed and my boss pulled up with another passenger with him and asked me how the weather was. I told him about the icing.

"Oh, well thats not too good, I guess we'll try the second trip in the morning."

So that was it for the day, he turned around to take the passengers back while I pushed the airplane back into its parking spot, refueled it and put the engine blanket back on. There was still a thin layer of clear ice covering the leading edges of the wings. It was only maybe the thickness of 2 or 3 pieces of paper - not thick enough to see from the cockpit with no sun to glint off of it, but it was still cool to see it up close. I've picked up a little bit of icing a couple times before in the last month, but its always been above 0 degrees on the ground and so had melted off and disappeared before I had a chance to look at it from outside the cockpit.

Just a Few Terms

2009-10-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by a couple of my non-pilot readers a few weeks back now to post some explanations of some of the aviation abbreviations and terms that I use often. So I went back through some of my posts and picked out all my commonly used terms that I don't usually provide explanations for directly in the posts, so here they are:

AWOS - Automated Weather Observing System. This is a radio broadcast that repeats every couple minutes with the current weather report for that particular airport. The pilot usually tunes it in to listen to prior to takeoff and while he's approaching the airport to land. The report includes all the weather items included in a METAR (see below)

GFA - Graphic Forecast Area. This is a regional weather chart that depicts current and forecast weather (up to 12 hrs ahead) in a picture format. It displays weather systems moving through the area and describes the resulting weather.

METAR - I have no idea what the letters stand for, I think its a french derivative. This is the hourly weather observations that are given at certain airports equipped with weather stations. It reports winds, visibility, type and intensity of precipitation, cloud layers, temperature, dewpoint, and altimeter setting (atmopsheric pressure).

PAPI/APAPI - Precision Approach Path Indicator/Abbreviated PAPI. These are at set of 4 lights (or two lights in the case of APAPI) that some runways have set up beside a runway which can indicate to an aircraft on approach whether he is on the correct glideslope or not. If 2 of the 4 lights are white and 2 are red, the approach path is on the correct angle, if they're are more red than white - too low. More white than red - too high.

PIC - Pilot in Command. Self Explanatory.

PIREP - Pilot Report. This just what it sounds like, but is usually in regards to weather conditions. Pilots can report weather conditions (to flight service) they experience during their flight. This PIREP is then logged in the system and can be used to advise other pilots of the conditions.

Radio Service - Sort of like Air Traffic Control with the difference that ATC issues instructions and clearances to the pilot, whereas a Radio Service is advisory in nature. A pilot will report his/her intentions, and the Radio Service will then relay that information to other pilots as well as any other information that might be useful to the pilots.

STOL - Short Takeoff and Landing. Generally in reference to aircraft specifically designed for operating out of short runways, or kits that can be installed on aircraft to improve the landing and take-off distances.

TAF - Terminal Aerodrome Forecast. Similiar in format to a METAR giving the same information, except that a TAF gives forecasted weather (up to 6 hrs in advance), not observed weather.

Random Ramblings

2009-10-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

So no exciting stories to tell in this post, sorry folks, but I do feel the need to write something. So far October has been one of my busiest months yet for flying, which means lots of money for me, as I partly get paid by the mile. I figure by the 28th I'll have blown by July's record number of trips. Not that its actually busier for the company now than it was in July, but our summer temp pilot went home at the end of September, so now I don't have to share.

I got the latest Aviation Safety Letter, which I always enjoy reading. I got the publication on the way to the airport for my first flight of the morning, so I tucked it into my flight bag for a little in-flight reading if I got a chance. I wonder what would happen if I got in an accident while reading the newsletter... I can imagine the accident report: Cherokee 6 loss of control and subsequent flight into terrain. Aircraft destroyed and pilot, sole occupant, received serious injuries. Findings as to cause: Pilot's attention was diverted while attempting to remain a safe pilot by reading about safety issues in the Aviation Safety Newsletter, which contributed to loss of control of aircraft. Wouldn't that be ironic, if not unlikely.

This quarter's issue was actually quite interesting, there were some good stories, as well as a number of interesting accident synopses. There was the usual student in a Cessna 150 accident, there seems to be one in every report. This time it was a first-time solo student ending up off the runway and dinging the prop. Pretty standard stuff. Some other ones make you shake your head and ask "what was he thinking?", like a Cessna 310 pilot who was demonstrating a single engine approach and landing, who actually shut the engine down. During the approach, he found out too late that the remaining engine operating at full power wasn't enough to reach the airfield, and he crashed in a field 1 mile short of the runway. What was he thinking? Who actually shuts an engine down like that so close to the ground just for the heck of it? The report doesn't seem to indicate that the pilot was an instructor and the passenger a student... so was he just showing off? Real smooth...

There was also a private Beech Bonanza that had a gear up landing due to being distracted by chatting away on the radio all the way down to touchdown. Thats why the "sterile cockpit" rule was invented (aka don't talk while you're landing/taking off). I can understand how sometimes there can be distractions and it would be easy to forget to extend the landing gear, but at the same time I can't understand how it still happens, especially to people who own the airplane they fly, and know they have to pay for stuff they break. Personally for me when I fly the Twin Comanche, I consciously maintain a healthy state of paranoia during my approach, and verify the landing gear is down probably 4 or 5 times before I cross the runway threshold.

Then there's the accidents that are just plain bad luck, or just cases where the pilot accepted the calculated risk and the cards weren't in his favour, like the private Maule who tried landing on a grass strip. He did a low level pass to inspect the field first, and it looked good, but then he flipped over after touchdown. Bummer. Sorry about your luck.

I also feel sorry for the helicopter pilot whose rotor wash blew a sign loose off of a building and sucked it into the tail rotor. He managed to land safely however.

There was also a accident that seemed to ring familiar with an experience I had back when I flew my old C-150. A Piper Super Cub on skiis tried to take off in too deep of snow, and couldn't get enough speed, so he aborted the takeoff, and kicked the passenger out to try again. Not only did he not get off the ground the second time, but he also crashed into a crevasse and overturned. My experience wasn't nearly as extreme, but I can relate to how the pilot must have felt. I landed at a grass strip (on wheels) just north of London to pick up my cousin and take him for a flight. The runway was plenty long enough, 3000 ft, but after I landed I realized that the grass was very thick, probably 6 inches high, it hadn't been mowed in a couple weeks I guess. You get that feeling like, "oh crap hopefully I can get off the ground". We decided to give the takeoff a try with the both of us, but I had set a spot on the runway that was my go/no-go spot, if I wasn't off the ground by then I'd abort. It ended up being no problem at all, it took a longer take-off than normal, but we still got off the ground before my no-go spot, so it all worked out in the end. Unfortunately the ski pilot in the accident report wasn't so lucky. Such is aviation I guess.

In other news, its cold enough now that we're back to putting the engine blanket and wing covers onto the airplane every night so we don't have to scrape frost off in the morning. Its not really a big deal, but for some reason I just hate doing it. When I come in from my last flight of the day I just don't feel like tucking the airplane into bed, I just want to go home and eat dinner. I know, I'm a whiner. At least its a low wing airplane and they're easy to put on.

Thanksgiving Shakedown

2009-10-12T22:43:00.000-07:00

Fall air is definitely here. I can smell that crispness in the air, and I'm starting to have to bundle up as well. I always bring more sweaters/coats then I have to because you never know how cold it might be 150 miles north, and it wouldn't hurt to have an extra layer of clothes handy if I end up on an unplanned night of camping in the middle of nowhere.

A few days ago I took the Twin Comanche up for some circuits. Its been a few weeks now since the engines have been fired up, and I had a bit of a craving for some twin flying. I just went up for 3 circuits, about a half hour flight which satisfied my fix and gave the engines a good workout. At one point there was a Dash-8 inbound and the radio service advised them that there was a "Cherokee 6" in the circuit. I almost felt like correcting them, but it was my last circuit, and in the big picture my airplane type didn't matter a whole lot in that situation. In the past they've also advised other traffic of a "Twin Comanche" when I've been flying the Cherokee. Its obvious they've made the connection that its the same pilot that flies the two different airplanes, and they key on the sound of my voice I suppose.

Today is the Thanksgiving Monday, and I had a couple flights today, so I didn't get a turkey dinner. Not that I would have if I didn't fly. To be honest its getting a little tiresome living up here being away from friends and family, and not having much to do other than rotate between watching TV, reading, and playing on the computer in my days off. I'm still really enjoying the flying, and I'm going to miss it over the winter, but despite that I'm counting the days on when I'll be home for the winter. I will get my fix of flying over the winter though in the form of IFR training. This winter I REALLY have to finish up my Instrument Rating. If I don't, my INRAT exam will expire and I'll be back to square one with that. I also want to have a shot at a twin-ifr job as well. I have almost 1200 hrs total time now, most of that being PIC time, with almost 200 of that being multi-PIC time as well, so I think I've got a pretty good shot at finding something half decent - hopefully. I'm sure how much good another year of single-engine VFR flying will do career-wise for me. I guess we'll see how it all plays out. Hopefully the industry gets a bit more momentum that it got this last spring.

My first flight today was a couple passengers to the usual destination up the coast. The weather was pretty good with only a broken-scattered layer at around 3500 ft, so enroute it was smooth sailing. When we were loading the airplane my boss mentioned with a bit of a wink in his eye that they didn't seem to have much stuff. Usually passengers load the airplane up stuffed to gross weight to get the most out of what they're paying for the charter. If they don't stuff the airplane, its sometimes a hint that the cargo they do have onboard MIGHT just be helping to pay for the trip in the form of contraband liquor. A couple weeks ago I took one passenger up the coast to the community across the river from the one I was going to today, and this one passenger only took with him 4 boxes and 1 50 lb bag of potatoes. Unfortunately for him, his daughter who was supposed to meet him at the airport didn't show up, so he took off to go hunt her down, and in the meantime, the local police showed up and searched the airplane. Turned out ALL of his boxes were nothing bud bottles of hard liquor. By the time they were finished all he had left that wasn't confiscated was his sack of potatoes. It was hilarious. In that case it was ridiculously obvious that he was trying to smuggle liquor. No one legitimately chartering an airplane only brings 5 small pieces of luggage and themselves with them, it just doesn't make financial sense. One of the officers there mentioned that catching that load before it got distributed meant avoiding lots of headaches. He said that 70% of the violence and trouble they have to deal with up there is a direct result of alchohol.

In the case today, there were two people going up, and they didn't have a ton of stuff, but they did have more than a few pieces, so I didn't think anything of it. Apparently my boss picked up on it though, since he made that comment. When we pulled into the ramp after landing sure enough there was a whole convey of vehicles waiting for us. There was a local police truck, an OPP SUV, and my passengers ride waiting for them. This was only the third time since I've been up here that the police in this town have shown up to search a suspected bootlegger flight, usually the local police don't seem to be that hardcore about searches, not in this community at least. The OPP are pretty hardcore though, you know that if they show up something is going down.

So we unloaded the airplane while all the vehicles surrounded the airplane and they all went to work at opening up the bins and boxes and rustling through the stuff. They also searched the passengers themselves, and I looked over laughed and shook my head when I saw one of the passengers with their foot up on the horizontal stab with her pantlegs pulled up and a bottle of vodka taped to her shins. Where am I. Actually they found quite a bit. By the end of it I counted around 14 bottles of vodka, and another 25 or so bottles of some sort of low-alchohol content cooler-type beverage. Quite the load. I figured the street value of all of that would probably be around $2000. So much for the profits they were hoping for, haha. Usually the cops just confiscate the alchohol and drive away, but this time in addition to the liquor, they also apparently found baggies of weed. Now they were in trouble. Long story short in addition to having the contraband confiscated, they also both got arrested. Well, sucks to be them, lol. Good thing this time we got paid for the flight before we took off. Once all the commotion had finished and the vehicles and people were safely away from the airplane, I started up and I was off heading back home for my next flight.

Fall Weather Flying

2009-10-02T18:29:00.001-07:00

We've had really crappy weather lately. Monday I flew most of the day but we called it quits by late afternoon because the winds were getting too strong. Tues and Wed I sat around and did nothing because we had two full days of high winds and rain. Thursday morning was also not much good for flying due to poor vis and low cloud, so I only got 3 flights in the afternoon done, and most of those were spent bombing along through 3 miles vis at 400 ft.

Today, which is Friday, seemed like it might be pretty good, so we decided to get at it a little earlier to get as many fights as we could in. On the weekend they're also closing the airport where I do 80% of my flying into for runway resurfacing, so there's also the push from that to get as much as we can in today.

So I hauled myself out of bed this morning and did my morning routine: Sit around a for a couple minutes and wait for my brain to start functioning, check my email, check the weather, take a shower, have breakfast. There weren't any Low pressure systems or fronts moving in at all on the map, even though there might be a little bit of low vis, and the METAR was reporting just over 1000 ft overcast and 8 sm visibility. Not a great day for a joyride but enough to get 'er done.

Our first flight was a pax flight, so we got out to the airport and loaded the airplane and I got the preflight done. There was another company van coming after us with my load of passengers, but by the time I was ready they weren't here yet, so I hopped into the Cherokee to get to start it up and get it warmed up. Just as I was shutting down my pax load showed up so it ended up being pretty good timing. They had more luggage with them than what we had pre-loaded, so we had to take some stuff out and rearrange it so it was loaded properly.

As we taxied out for takeoff the AWOS was now reporting 8 sm vis and 600 ft overcast clouds. Worse then when I had checked it when I got up. Conditions were pretty much the same all the way up the coast. I dropped my passengers off, and headed back south with an empty airplane. As soon as I got within range to check the AWOS broadcast I tuned it in to see how the weather was doing. Sure enough it it had dropped even further down, now calling 500 ft overcast and 2 1/2 sm miles visibility. I'd have to get special VFR to get in to land, which is kind of like an IFR clearance to fly in lower weather conditions in the sense that in the type of control zone I was flying into, only one IFR/Special VFR aircraft would be allowed in the zone at one time.

I called up the radio service, advised my intentions and requested my Special VFR clearance. There was going to be a delay, since there was an IFR aircraft landing, and then another one waiting to take off. I had been listenning in on the frequency for a couple minutes beforehand, and was aware of the traffic, so I was expecting a delay, and let them know I'd orbit out of the way to the west of the field for the time being (orbit: basically a "hold" for VFR aircraft, just flying circles around a particular landmark).

"Roger, give me a call when you're 5 miles out."

Before I even made it to 5 miles out the aircraft that was waiting to depart called to cancel their flight and they needed to taxi back to the gate. Not sure why, could have been mechanical problems, or some sort of passenger issue, or maybe one of the pilots decided that had to go to the bathroom, and no they couldn't hold it. Anyways with the landing aircraft down and clear that left me free and clear. So before I even had to start my orbits, I got my clearance to enter the zone and land via Special VFR. Generally once a clearance is issued, any subsequent aircraft aircraft wishing also to obtain a clearance to take-off/enter the zone has to wait their turn... unless they're a medevac flight - they get priority over everybody. So sure enough, 4 miles out and a King Air 100 medevac called for their IFR departure clearance.

So my clearance got cancelled, and I had to orbit afterall. Okie dokie. This was actually a first for me, I've gone into a few different airports using Special VFR lots of times, but I've never yet had to wait. There's no real landmarks up here to orbit around, so I just flew circles between 4 and 5 miles NW of the field via my GPS, and I'll tell you, after 6 or 7 minutes of circling in poor visibility and close to the ground, I was thoroughly disoriented! I had lost all sense of which direction I had been heading, which direction I came from, and I no longer had that mental awareness of where I was relative to the field. It took a deliberate gaze at my GPS screen to "re-aquire" my mental position fix.

Soon enough the radio service was back calling me on the radio to re-issue me my Special VFR clearance. I had chose the NW of the field to orbit because the usual routes out of the the airport are to the North-North-East to head up the coast, or South to head to the usual southerly stop. The runway I intended to land on was also runway 06, which mean I needed to approach the airport from the west to land. The approach to that runway runs right alongside the river, which our little town runs along. In order to set up for my final approach for runway 06 I'd have to overfly the town. Now as you remember the ceilings were quite low. When I made my initial check of the AWOS, it was calling 500 ft, but now 15-20 minutes later after flying closer to the airport and then orbiting for 5-10 minutes it had dropped even lower, down to 300 ft overcast. In reality, at least about 3 miles to the SW of the field, the weather was more like 250 ft overcast and probably 1 1/2 miles visibility.

In that town area there's both an NDB radio tower, and a cellphone tower. I made sure I flew my base leg much further to SW to avoid overflying the town, both so I didn't smack into a radio tower, and because we're not really allowed to buzz town areas at heights lower then 1000 ft, except for the purpose of taking off and landing. I guess technically I was landing, so it would be ok. But 250 ft just seemed a little to low to me. Mainly I didn't want to cause people the inconvenience of no cellphone service. That would be tragic. So would fishing a dead pilot and busted airplane down from a cellphone tower.

Anyways I made sure not to overfly the town, and even though 4 miles away I couldn't see the airport yet, I knew I could just follow the riverbank right in to the runway threshold. So that's what I did. I got a nice tour of the town waterfront as I safely flew by over the water. I also saw my house, and my bosses house on the way by, as they are situated right on the riverbank. I wondered if they saw me as I buzzed by at 200 ft. Finally a little more than a mile out I could make out the runway APAPI lights (a set of two lights that turn red or white and give you and indication of glideslope). They were both red, meaning I was too low. Huh, no kidding. At what I figure to be just about a mile final the runway started to come into view. The winds were light and I managed to put it down just as soft as ever, if I do say so myself.

I taxied in, called the radio service advising "Down and clear", and shut down. The Ops Manager, my trusty dispatcher/boss rolled up with the fuel truck. "How's the weather?"

"Uhh, ya I think we're done for a bit."

Making a Break for It

2009-09-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

I had three flights today. I was going to have only 2, but the other pilot took the day off, so I got the one flight he was going to do. I'm not complaining, bring it on.

The day started out quite nice, somewhat warm, for the time of year at least, and only a harmless overcast layer which had all but broken up by my second flight. My third flight up the coast was an entirely different story however. All seemed well until about 20 miles south of my destination, where I could see a long line of dark clouds on the horizon. Wow that moved in fast, there was nothing like that visible on my last run, less than 2 hours ago. As I got closer things started to look worse and worse; there was a solid line of heavy rain moving in. I couldn't yet tell if it was still north of the field, or if the field was already drowned in it. My wondering was answered when the town came into view, ahead of line of heavy showers. The heavy stuff hadn't yet made it to where I was landing, but I was already starting to fly through spats of rain, the kind where the raindrops make a big splat on the window.

I turned final with the line only a couple miles off my right wing. It was apparent I was definitely going to get wet unloading the plane. Oh well, last flight of the day anyways, no big deal. FLASH! A big bolt of lightning struck the ground out my left window about a mile to the south of the field. Well that was... unexpected... but there wasn't much I could do at that point because I was already on final. I landed, and taxied in, and then the heavens just opened up. It POURED.

I only had my zip-up hoodie sweatshirt with me, so I put that on with the hopes that it would provide some sort of rain shield. We unloaded the airplane as fast as we could, but it didn't do much good, I was completely soaked through and standing in a 1 inch puddle before we even got the truck backed up.

There was also rumbling thunder and lightning flashing every few seconds while we were unloading, it was quite the storm actually, and I wondered how long I'd be stuck here, soaking wet, waiting for it to move off.

As our luck would have it though, the rain stopped just as soon as we finished unloading the airplane. The driver remarked in disdain that of course the rain would stop as soon as we were done unloading. I chuckled, but it was good news for me. I might be able to get out of here afterall. Once I was ready to go, I took a look to the north in the direction of where the storm came from, it didn't look like there was any more coming at least in the next couple minutes. I also looked to the south towards the stuff that had just passed us, and also in the direction I needed to go. As bad as the rain we got on the ground was, it looked like we even missed the worst of it, and there was an opening of sunlight that I could see, so I decided to give it a shot.

I took off and made a break for the patch of hope. On both my left and right were two storm cells with so much rain, it couldn't have been more then 1 or 2 miles visibility inside. I could also see the occasional lightning strike flash inside as well. I'm definitely staying out of those, but between them was a brilliant glimmer of bright blue sky. What I wouldn't do for a stormscope right now! The company bought a second Cherokee 6 back in June, which still isn't ready to go yet (waiting for the engine, but it should be any day now), but its equipped with a stormscope. Its a WX-8, which is a slightly different model than the one I have in my Twin Comanche (a WX-10), so I've been itching to try it out, and today would have been perfect. I doubt that there will be any more summer storms by the time the new Cherokee is online though.

Five minutes later I was out of the worst it, so I could relax, and another 5 minutes after that I was back in the sun, as if it had always been a beautiful day! I filed a PIREP of the weather conditions with the radio service when I approached home. It wasn't a busy day today, so I was likely the first/only aircraft to have encountered the conditions, and of course there aren't any weather stations other than the airport I'm based out of. In a way I actually enjoy that part of my job up here. Flying down south there are weather stations all over the place, so before you take off you can know with a fair degree of accuracy the weather that you're going to encounter along the way, but up here, except for our GFA charts (a regional weather map, which depicts likely conditions), which are often vague, or downright wrong, there's nothing. So when we take off for a trip to the north its very much flying into unknown conditions. Quite exciting, and it gives me that little taste of "frontier bush pilot". I'd love to do some of the winter ski trips into the bush with the Cessna 206, but I haven't had the opportunity yet, since I've only been up here since April, which was when the bush trips were just finishing up.

Bad Day for Passengers

2009-09-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

Things are still going strong coming into the second half of September, which has been totally unexpected. I was under the impression at the beginning of the month that the busy time would be wrapping up, but apparently thats not the case.

Yesterday was cold, wet and miserable however. There was a strange layer of mist blanketing the entire route of flight, giving a vertical visibility of 1000-1500 ft and forward vis of around 3-5 miles. The temperature on the ground stayed between 4-6 degrees C for the better part of the day, but a high pressure system was forecast to move in from the north and push the bad weather away. On my first flight I took off with two passengers onboard and initially climbed to 1000 ft into a headwind. It was pretty turbulent as well as wet and rainy underneath the cloud layer, but I could see the sun and just a tint of blue sky above me, so it looked like this mist/cloud layer was pretty thin. One of my passengers was really not enjoying the ride, she was very nervous, tapping her knee and wringing her hands. The longer we flew the more nervous she got, eventually to the point where she was shivering out of nervousness. I figured for the sake of my passengers I'd pop up another thousand feet or so to get on top of the cloud layer, where we'd see the sun and hopefully the turbulence would taper off a bit as well.

Once at 2000 however I looked up again but it still looked the same, I could still just barely see a bit of blue sky and the sun piercing through the mist, but now I was flying on instruments as the ground had long disappeared. The layer didn't look like it was this thick, but oh well, it can't be more then another few hundred feet before pop out the top. At 3000 ft nothing had changed. We were still in the layer of mist - it was such a strange phenomenon. Here I was 2000 ft higher than I was initially yet looking up still looked exactly the same. It looked like just a thin layer of mist above me. I considered continuing the climb even further, but the temperature was very close to zero degrees as it was, so I didn't want to get any higher and start picking up ice, and we were flying into a headwind, so I didn't want to fight too strong of winds either, so I conceded defeat and started a descent back down to where I could see the ground. Conditions were the same all the way up the coast, so we spent the remainder of the flight bouncing around in the rain and mist at 1000 ft.

Once we landed and unloaded my passengers, I had 5 more waiting ready to come back with me. We got all loaded up and ready to start up when one of the ladies on board said, "No, I can't do it". Can't do it? She was a little larger so I assumed the leg room wasn't enough or something and asked if she wanted to sit in the front where there's a little more leg room. Her friend explained that she was too nervous because of the weather. Oh, not much I could do about that. I could see how it was a bit of an indimidating day to fly - like I said it was cold, rainy, and the winds were quite gusty. In the end we departed with only 3 of the 5 passengers back southbound. The way back was bumpy, but eneventful and quick as we caught a stiff tailwind for the return leg.

My second trip was the same thing. I decided not to experiment with the cloud layer this time however and just stayed at 1000. A Navajo from the other local carrier that departed about the same time I did for the same destination decided to try to get on top however. They advised they were climbing to 3500 ft. I wondered if I missed the cloud tops by a mere couple hundred feet, since I only climbed to 3000. A few minutes later they radioed an advisory that they were now at 4500 ft and level. They had been fooled by the illusion as well, and ended up having to go higher.

The pilots for that carrier are regulars in the area like me, so we're on pretty familiar terms and usually all recognize each other's voices, so I keyed the mic, "Did you manage to find the top of that mist?"

"Ya we popped out at about 4200 ft."

I remarked that I tried that on my last flight but gave up at 3000.

"Hey Chad have you been to **** already today?"

"Yep."

"What are the winds like?"

I tried to remember exactly how the windsock looked. I tend to have a short-term memory and forget entirely what the conditions were at the airport on my last visit, but I managed to pull the mental image of the windsock out of the back of my brain.

"Ahh, gusting about 12-15 knots, pretty much 90 degrees [to the runway direction]."

"Alllll-riiiiighhht."

I smiled to myself. I guess I'm not the only one who likes crosswind landings - they keep life interesting.

By the time I was southbound again for the second time the High Pressure system was starting to work its magic you could see it starting to clear up in the north, but it was still pretty turbulent. About 10 minutes from landing one of my passengers tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had a tissue. "Sorry no I don't." I turned around to see their young son leaning into a sick bag that his mother was holding for him. Poor guy. Not a good day for my passengers apparently. One terrified flyer, another one that cancelled out of panic, and now a sick kid. I haven't yet had an adult puke in the airplane, but that would make my 3rd child, all probably under 5 that haven't been able to hold it in on the bumpy days. All in a day's work of a pilot I guess.

London and Back Again

2009-09-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a visit back down in London. I was lucky enough to get to go home on a long weekend, when all of my friends were free/home as well, and it was awesome weather.

We took off Friday morning in the Twin Comanche, first bound for North Bay, as I was dropping a friend off there for the weekend so she could visit her friends as well. I've decided that I don't like North Bay. Its such a huge airport (that I'm not really familiar with), and there's no control tower to tell you what to do. There's only a radio service, which means its up to you to find out where you need to go and how to get there to take-off or park after you've landed. Its strange taxi-ing around such a huge airport without the reasurring clearances issued by the controllers. It makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong.

After I dropped my friend off I started back up again and picked my way through the taxi-ways back to the active runway.

I had a great weekend. Went camping for a night, then canoeing, spent a day at the beach playing volleyball, played some tennis with my Dad, and helped out with some farm chores. All in all a pretty full weekend. Good times. Today it was time to head back up and back to work. I was planning to leave around 9:30 in the morning but London was fogged in, and didn't get away until around noon to head back up to North Bay again for the first stop. It was a relaxing flight. I only had about a 5 knot headwind, and it was pretty smooth above the clouds at 7500 ft. I had the airplane cruising on autopilot and managed to read a couple chapters of one of the books I borrowed.

When we got back we gathered all our stuff and parked the airplane and by that time the fuel truck showed up with the Ops Manager and the other pilot - we each had one freight flight up the coast, so off I go to the races.

The flight up the coast was fairly uneventful, the flight on the way back started to get interesting about 20 miles from the field. I was just about to key the mic and call the radio service to advise I was 20 miles and about 9 minutes out when a big Hawker freight plane beat me to it. He also called inbound and although he was still behind me estimated the field about 45 seconds before me. The other pilot in the C-206 was also about 3 miles behind me, so we were all planning on landing within the span of about 2 minutes. Could get interesting. We were all instructed to report 10 miles out, and there were a few minutes until that point where none of us were entirely sure how it was all going to pan out. I watched the mileage to go tick down on the GPS and tried to find the Hawker coming up behind me. He stayed at a higher altitude then me so I wasn't worried of a risk of collision, but more so whether he was going to pass me in time to make his descent and land before I started my approach. We all planned to the use the runway that allowed a straight in approach.

At 10 miles back I called the radio service again and advised my position and also made the suggestion that if the C-206 behind me had me visual I could slow down a bit to give the Hawker more time to get in front of me. So that was the plan. By the time I spotted the Hawker I realized even with me slowed WAY down it still didn't give him enough time to pass me, so I advised that I'd join the circuit on a left base instead of final. I watched as I crept closer and closer to the airport dragging the airplane along at 90 mph while the Hawker rumbled along its approach on final parallel to my flight path. I could slowed down further, but I also didn't want to push my luck with the C-206 following behind me. Even adding a base leg into my circuit left me fairly close behind the Hawker. As I was turning short final he was just starting to clear the runway. The Hawker is a big airplane, bigger then a Dash-8-100, so I was concerned a little bit about the possible wake turbulence. I made a mental note of where the Hawker touched down, and made sure to keep my approach higher and land beyond it. I must have just grazed the wake turbulence area on short final because for a quick second the airplane waggled and shuddered before smoothing out again. I touched down without incident and rolled to the end of the runway to quickly clear for the last of the three of us landing.

Who wouldn't wanna be me?

2009-09-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

Last night I found myself in an empty airplane on the last flight of the day westbound into a beautifully clear sky with the sun setting in front of me. I was in a good mood and was rocking out on my MP3 player to Keith Urban's "Who wouldn't wanna be me" song as I was flying and watching the sun set.

I always like to lock my gaze on the sun and witness the exact moment that the last sliver of the sun disappears below the horizon. I know I shouldn't look directly at the sun, but at least I was still wearing sunglasses. I usually forget to take them off when the evening light starts to fade, and inevitably end up wondering why the cockpit lighting doesn't seem to be as bright as I think it should be. That's when I remember that I'm still wearing sunglasses.

Well just as soon as the sun went down, I remember reading Alan Cockrell's post on his blog http://alancockrell.blogspot.com/ about having the sun and moon on his "yo-yo string" and being able to make the sun or moon come back into the sky after it had already set by climbing. I imagined how that would be cool to see. I assumed you could only see that flying a jet aircraft that has the power to quickly climb into altitudes well above what little piston aircraft can do... or could you? Could my little Cherokee haul the sun back up to this side of the horizon? Nah... there's no way. I almost didn't try it. Then in a split second, now or never decision I pushed the mixture, prop, and power levers in and pulled back into the best climb the little Cherokee could muster. When I had finished converting my kinetic energy into altitude I pushed the nose back down into a more reasonable attitude and looked to where the sun had set. NO WAY! Sure enough, a mere 1000 ft climb had summoned about a quarter of that orange glowing disk back into the atmosphere. I broke out laughing hysterically in disbelief. What a sight!

Fantastic. Who wouldn't wanna be me?

Random Untold Stories

2009-08-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

So in the past few months I've had a bunch of other interesting experiences/stories that I haven't yet blogged about mainly due to the reason that they're not big enough events to dedicate an entire blog entry to. They're still fun to mention though, so this blog entry is dedicated to all the short little random stories I have, explained in no particular order, with no particular continuity, nor with any particular point.

I transported a coffin up the coast once, complete with a body inside. The coffin arrived at the airport early however on the back of a pickup truck, and we couldn't take it until later in the morning. So the driver of the pickup ended up cruising around town doing his errands for 3 hrs with a casket and dead person riding around in the back. Yep, we're up north. When we unloaded it from the airplane we muscled it out of the airplane and loaded into the back of another pickup truck, and off they went.

I've also hauled gravestones on a different occasion, earlier in the summer. Those things are HEAVY!

A couple days ago I did another sightseeing flight, which is about 4 for me this summer. I like doing them, because my passengers have all been very appreciative which makes my day. I also haven't done so many that it becomes "just another flight" however. My latest tourists were a couple guys from North Bay, I think a father and middle aged son. They thanked me after we landed and said it was great. I also heard from our dispatcher afterwords (who gave them a ride back from the airport) that they also had lots great things to say about my aviating, how they could tell I was a really good pilot and the landing was very smooth. Complements like that always make my day and give me warm fuzzies. There was another older tourist lady I took up earlier in the summer, just by herself. It was a bumpy day, but she didn't care because she said she was determined to go for a "bush plane ride". She was so thrilled and thankful, and when we landed she told me her life was now complete.

Today during my landing flare the nose cargo compartment door became unlatched and flew open and up. There was nothing in the compartment to fall out, so no harm done, but is awfully distracting when it happens. That's the 3rd time its happened in the last 2 months. The Last time was also during my flare just before touchdown, the other time was during my landing rollout after I touched down. Last inspection the AME's looked at it and ordered a new latch for it, and also in the meantime made an adjustment on the latching mechinism in the hopes that it would help. We're due for inspection in another couple days, so hopefully the new latch is in and it'll get changed out. Its kind of embarrasing when it happens and I have passengers onboard.

I've finally passed the 1000 hr mark. As of my writing this I'm at 1014 hrs total time. Pretty exciting.

I've encounterd some interesting things on the runways up here. One time a pack of some sort of canines crossed the runway just as I was coming in to land, so I just added a bit of power for a second to extend my touchdown point. After I touched down however, there was a large flock of seagulls milling about on the runway in front of me. So after making the effort to lengthen my landing I found myself having to brake quite heavily. All turned out ok. A few weeks ago there was someone on an ATV trucking down the side of the runway. Technically he wasn't on the runway, he was just on the other side of the row of lights, so I didn't see any harm in landing. He was trucking along at probably 40 km/hr in the same direction I was landing, and we bothed looked at each other as I cruised past him on my rollout after landing. It was an odd feeling. It felt exactly like that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Cruisade where the Nazi pilot flies into the tunnel, rips off his wings, and goes sliding past Indy and his father as they're driving through the tunnel. Except lucky for me I still had my wings and landing gear.

I finally received my spiffy new Canadian Aviation Document pilots license. The new passport style booklets. They look much more professional then a tattered piece of blue paper, but the ratings on my license are no longer spelled out in english, but have been given a acronym code. "SMEL" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "All single pilot non-high performance single and multi-engine land airplanes". Oh well.

I'm sure there are others that I have since forgotten about, but I'm gonna start making notes now and when I remember/aquire more mini-stories I'll compile another post like this.

Pictures

2009-08-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

Clouds.

A beaver lodge.

A floatplane that struck a sandbar while landing in the river.

You're in Luck

2009-08-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

We had a bunch of freight flights today from off the train that we were supposed to take up, but the train doesn't come in until the afternoon, and we had some thunderstorms roll in.

So this morning I just had the one, a passenger flight to the east. I got my orders to head out to the airport, get the plane ready and my one passenger was going to meet me there. Usually passengers wait for us just on the groundside of the airport gate, which is in line of sight of where we park the Cherokee. After getting out there, fueling up and doing my preflight I still couldn't see anyone there, so I took the truck out and parked it just outside the gate in a conspicuous spot. As I was waiting there a man approached me asking about our rates.

I let him know our prices but told him I was just waiting to go on a flight, and the weather was already starting to look iffy.

Apparently he and his girlfriend had intended to fly on the sched service, but the plane was full and he was stuck waiting around on standby. It was the last flight until monday, and he had to be back to work by then, so the situation was starting to get stressful. Turned out he wanted to go to the same place I was taking the passenger I was waiting for. "Well, I'm actually waiting to take somewhere there right now. If you wanna hang around for a bit until she gets here you might be able to split the flight with her." His face just lit up. When my passenger showed up she was thrilled to split the cost of the charter. She had booked a charter with us for the same reason that the guy and his girlfriend couldn't get on the sched run - a wedding was the cause of the unusual amount of travellers.

It made my day to see the stress melt off of the man's face. He was so relieved and thankful, he was calling me an angel in disguise. Long story short, I made a couple people's day, which made my day.

Stuff Happens

2009-08-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Not a whole lot of excitment going on around here. Staying fairly busy with the flying however. There was one bit of excitment a couple days ago though. There was a private Cessna 206 floatplane that tried to land on the river, hit a submerged sandbar, and flipped over. I heard about it about a half hour after it happenned, and we all went out to gawk at it. You couldn't see much, it was several hundred metres away out in the middle of the river, resting upside down half in the water, half beached on a small island. There was only the pilot onboard I believe, an older gentleman, and he's ok from what I hear.

The airplane is totalled. They have since dragged it out to our place to keep it until they do something with it. One wing is ripped off, the tail is hanging off the back of the airplane, not much left holding it on, one of the floats is bent upwards, and one blade of the prop has been bent right down right at the route. Its quite the sorry sight. I'll get some pictures up when I decide to stop being lazy.

An interesting twist is that the other pilot was down at the maintenance base for the day with our 206 for its 50 hr inspection, and the crashed pilot's buddy showed up there looking for him. They were both headed north for a fishing trip, and the buddy decided to stop at the maintenance base (which is also a floatplane base, its situated on the edge of a small lake), but the doomed 206 float pilot didn't stop with him but continued on. Interesting to get two perspectives of the same event unfolding. Almost like the movie Vantage Point, or at least what I think that movie would be like, as I haven't seen it.

Apparently a floatplane crashed up here last year as well, or maybe two years ago, I'm not quite sure. Funny to think that stuff like this happens every now and then - its just the nature of the industry (particularly the private sector). No matter how much we try to tame it, stuff happens.

The Perfect Storm

2009-08-02T09:21:00.000-07:00

Yes, I just watched that movie - for the first time. I never got around to seeing it back in the day, but finally while I was down south for maintenance I picked it up for $2.99. And you guys thought I was going to blog about me flying into a storm.

For those who haven't seen the movie "The Perfect Storm", its a story about a small crew of swordfish fishermen off the coast of Massachusetts who get caught in the hurricane of the century and everybody dies. No really. I thought despite being in a nautical setting, its still a great study on human factors, and what influences our judgement and decision making. It also reminded me of the show on Discovery Channel called "Deadliest Catch", which is a reality show following several different crab fishers off what I believe is the Alaskan coast.

For those who haven't seen the move, and those who haven't seen the movie in the last 10 years, I'll provide a quick summary.

The movie opens with all the swordboats (swordfish boats) returning to port and offloading their catches. Our star crew, and ill-fated subjects of the movie, return with little to show for their season's work - a developing trend apparently. The boat owner threatens the captain of the boat (George Clooney) with being replaced if he can't find a way to do better. The entire crew is dissappointed as well considering their cut of the profits is affected by the poor catch.

Despite it being October, near the end of the fishing season, the Captain decides to head back out for one more trip before winter, to try and salvage his job, reputation, and paycheque. There's some foreshadowing that they're going to run into some trouble (like we didn't already know from the title of the movie).

Out on the water after several days of fishing, once again it appears that they're going to come up short. They decide to head even further out to the known hot spot. Back in Boston, a meteorologist is tracking a developing hurricane thats heading north towards our intrepid fishermen. Back with our fishermen, who at this point have made it to the hot spot, are making the catches they were hoping for. Things are looking up. However they are warned via radio, and also by weather charts faxed directly to the Captain onboard, that they're being cut off from shore by the hurricane. They make the decision that they can stay offshore, hang out for a few days once they're done fishing and wait for the storm to pass before heading back inland. They have all their fish packed in ice, so they won't spoil. So far so good. The trouble begins when their ice machine breaks down. Without the constant production of ice, they can't keep their fish from spoiling. This present this with a critical decision - continue to hang around out at sea, wait for the storm to pass and all their fish to spoil, then head home, broke and failures again... or run the gauntlet straight through the hurricane. This is where the excellent study of human factors comes into play. Obviously the safest course of action is to wait for the storm to pass, however there are several factors that influence their decision otherwise. The first is the paycheque. If they wait out the storm, they'll come back with spoiled fish worth nothing. Secondly they're motivated, the Captain especially, by the fact that this is their last chance to make a successful fishing trip. If its not, the Captain will be fired, his reputation and pride spoiled.

Thirdly their lack of understanding of the magnitude of the storm prevents them from seeing the danger. The Captain never really looks at the weather charts faxed to him, and warnings issued by another fishing boat is ignored. Why? I think certainly a contributing factor is the "I've seen worse" syndrome - the falso belief that he can handle anything, because he has in the past. I also think his first reaction to the warnings is the defensive reaction of refusing help, because of the perception that accepting help would reflect poorly on his alrady fragile reputation.

So the decision has been made - through the storm they go. They endure massive waves and wind, constantly being swamped, and having their windows broken by flailing equipment, yet they continue on. Finally the exhausted crew fighting endlessly with a battered boat, make the decision to turn back around. Fatefully, its too little, too late. They're too far into the storm, and they can't make it out. A huge wave finally capsizes them, sinks the boat, and they all drown.

What influenced their decision to continue for so long? I think most of the factors that influenced their decision to try for it in the first place continued to play a part, but additionally, the fact that making a 180 in rough waters is a dangerous maneuver also contributed to them staying the course for so long. I also think that in general as humans once we make a decision, its difficult for us to re-evaluate our decision and change our mind. We're generally stubborn, and rather then honestly re-evaluating the situation and making a new and different decision based on the newly available data, we'd rather justify the original decision instead. That is until its clear beyond any doubt that we made the wrong one, which was the case of the Captain in the movie. Rather then re-evaluting the decision to plunge through the storm, he stuck to his guns, until it was too late. Finding the line that separates "too-late" and "still enough time to turn around" is an incredibly difficult task. The closer you approach the line, the more difficult it is to see, and the more dangerous the situation becomes. On the other hand there are always influencing factors that motivate us to creep closer and closer to that line.

This can apply with any type of activity with risk involved - aviating, seafaring, driving, even working with power tools or at heights. There are factors that motivate us towards taking the risk, yet the goal is to remain in the safe zone. This movie is such a great example because in seafaring the decisions made and the progression from safety to disaster occur slowly over the course of several days, so it is easier to disect. That progression in aviation can occur in a matter of a couple of hours or less. In driving it can occur in a matter of seconds. Understanding our motivation and the factors that influence us is key in staying on the right side of that line.

C-206

2009-07-28T05:27:00.000-07:00

So I finally got checked out on the Cessna 206 yesterday. Its been a while since I've flown a high-wing... 3 years now I think. We went up intending to do a few circuits dual before some solo practice, but after the first one he told me to go drop him off on the ramp and sent me back up for a few more by myself.

The 206 is much more responsive in the roll axis then both the Cherokee (which is lethargic by any comparison) as well as my Twinkie. Due to the large rudder it also has lots of yaw authority. Conversely it seems to have a much heavier elevator pull/push.

I think of the comparison like this: The Cherokee is more airplane-like, whereas the 206 feels more like a flying-machine contraption with the wing struts, wheels visibly hanging down, and taxi characteristics. I forgot how wobbly Cessna's are on the ground - there's lots of spring in those steel leaf landing gear compared to the rock solid taxi-ing characteristics of the low-wing Pipers. Every bump causes a side-to-side rocking motion during taxi.

Our 206 is equipped with the Robinson STOL kit, which includes wing fences and drooping ailerons to assist the main flaps. Takeoff performance is incredible; by the time you've finished advancing the throttle the airplane is almost ready to come off the ground when its empty. Climbout happens in a strange almost nose-down attitude until the flaps are retracted.

There's something about the construction of the 206 compared to the Cherokee that says it was meant to be a workhorse. Its solid. The Cherokee feels more like it was built to be a private plane that has been pressed into Commerical service. I can't provide any real evidence, its just the vibe that I get. There's also no argument when it comes to which is a better bush plane.

All in all the 206 is an interesting bird to fly, but I think I prefer the Cherokee for my day-to-day flights. Its about 5-10 knots faster, easier to load, easier to enter and exit, easier to fuel, and much more stable on the ground.

Mission: Incomplete

2009-07-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was spent wasting my life away sitting at home waiting for the weather to lift. But today was looking a little better, so around 9 AM I got a knock on my door. It was the Chief. He wanted me to check the weather and then come by and let me know what I thought.

Sweet, flying today - maybe. Well I checked the GFA, there was a low pressure system sitting over top of us, but move east, and the METAR reports were calling good vis but marginal ceilings hovering between 500-700 ft. So I had breakfast, got my stuff ready, and just before I headed out the door I checked the METAR one last time. This time it was calling 1600 ft cloud. Whoo hoo! Much better.

Out to the airport, and off we go. I departed and climbed up to 1000. But as we went further north, I had to drop down to 800, then 600, then 400 ft. We cruised along at 400 ft for a bit, and then it started to get even worse. Hmm... to turn around or not to turn around? As long as I could see where I was going we'll be alright. But soon enough I was down to 300 ft agl, the lowest I can legally fly with pax onboard, with the visibility quickly getting worse as well. I peered ahead and couldn't see much in front of me, and if we went much lower it would start to get dangerous. We only made it 30 miles. I nudged in the power and started a climbing left turn to start backtracking. Instantly I was in cloud, but I'd rather be in cloud for a couple minutes at an altitude that I know is safe rather then make a turn close to the ground trying to stay visual in poor conditions. After I made my 180 turn, I started a creeping descent back down out of the clouds. Heading back south the conditions quickly got better.

I called up the radio service again and told them I was coming back. I passed by a helicopter trying to go the same place I was. I wonder if he'll have better luck. I filed a PIREP and landed. Thats the first time I've had to turn around since I started working here. I wonder in the back of my head if a better pilot could have done better. Ahh well. I left a msg for company to pick us back up at the airport, they didn't get it apparently, but after waiting around for about 20 minutes the owner pulled up in the fuel truck with the other pilot. They're heading South to swap airplanes from maintenance. Hopefully he makes it further south then I made it north.

I noticed the helicoper that passed me when I was heading back is also back now. I went over to see if he made it any further, he was certainly gone a fair amount longer then I was. Turns out he ran into the same stuff, but tried to go around it a couple different ways before turning around, and it got even worse then it was when I turned around. I don't feel so bad now. If a chopper can't get through, there's no way an airplane can. We also got chatting, and funny thing, he used to work for us about 20 years ago. It seems like every second pilot I talk to is like, "Ya I used to work for you guys XX years ago!". I should hardly be surprised anymore.

So, now I'm back at the house, waiting for weather to clear up. Dag-nabbit.

How High

2009-07-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of factors in play when it comes to choosing our altitude. I often get asked how high we’ll be flying, and I always have to hold back the "well it depends on..." and launch into all the different factors that come into play when choosing how high we're going to fly. I don't think my passengers usually want the answer in the amount of detail I'd like to give. That's what a blog is for. So here we go.

Every airplane has a favourite altitude – the altitude where it performs most efficiently. The higher we get the thinner the air gets, which carries with it both a pro and a con. The pro is that since there’s less air, there’s also less resistance, meaning it takes less power to move through the air then it would at a lower altitude. Less air also unfortunately means the engines can’t produce as much power, which is where the trade-off is. An airplane's most efficient altitude is where we burn the least amount of fuel and go the fastest. This is accomplished by finding that trade-off of drag vs power produced. We can go even further to say that this depends on the power setting we want to cruise at. If we want to fly for maximum range, then we'll have to cruise at a lower power setting. In that case since we’re not asking a whole lot of the engine, it makes sense to climb up high to the thin air where both power and drag are reduced. The higher power setting we want to cruise at, generally the lower we have to fly. Lets say we want to fly at max cruise, which is usually 75% of the maximum rated horsepower. Our most efficient altitude will be somewhere near to the height at which we have the throttles fire-walled with the engine only producing that 75% power of its full power horsepower at sea level. Usually for most normally aspirated (non-turbocharged) airplanes that’s around 6000-8000 ft. In the Twin Comanche (which I happen to be flying in while I write this) it is 8000 ft. Any higher than that and the engine power stands a good chance of falling off below 75%. Any lower however and the thicker air will be holding us back in the form of extra drag. So engine power vs drag is our first consideration when choosing the best cruising altitude.

For this reason turbocharged airplanes have the ability to fly both faster and much higher. A turbocharger compresses the air before it enters the engine, which eliminates (to a point) the disadvantage of a power decrease at higher altitudes. This allows an aircraft to fly in the higher altitudes where the air is thinner, resulting in a higher cruise speed while still be able to produce the same level of power as it would much lower. How high exactly depends on how much boost the turbocharger has, or how much it is able to compress the air. For a turbocharged airplane the most efficient altitude occurs at the highest altitude where the turbocharger is able to produce the desired power setting. Below that altitude and the turbocharged engine can produce more power then is required, but above that the turbocharger’s ability starts to decline and engine power decreases.

Our second biggest consideration is what are the winds doing? Wind strength usually increases with altitude. So if we’re fighting a headwind, we have to decide if the stronger winds aloft are going to cancel out any advantage we’re gaining by flying high. If we’re in a tailwind, the winds aloft may very well give us a bigger push then we’d achieve by flying at our airplanes most efficient altitude. Considering that it’s usually a good practice to fly higher in a tailwind, and lower in a headwind.

Weather is also a factor, especially if we’re flying VFR. VFR airplanes aren’t supposed to fly through clouds, some sometimes that can limit us to flying lower underneath, or in some cases overtop. Weather considerations for IFR airplanes can include icing, which may mean that airplane has to stay lower in the warmer air where airframe icing is not occurring.

Other factors include obeying the Cruising Altitude Order, which is a rule that governs certain altitudes airplanes flying in certain directions cruise at. VFR aircraft flying westbound should always cruise at even thousands plus five hundred feet. For example 4500, 6500, 8500, etc. VFR aircraft flying eastbound should cruise at odd thousands plus five hundred feet – 5500, 7500, 9500, etc. For IFR traffic it’s the same except without the “plus 500 ft”. This in theory is supposed to reduce the risk of a mid-air collision. I think it works fairly well.

Turbulence also comes into play sometimes as well, especially when carrying passengers. Usually convective turbulence caused by the sun heating the earth on sunny days is stronger at the lower altitudes. So sometimes for your passengers’ sakes, it may be worth it to cruise a little higher in the smooth air, even if it means catching a stronger headwind or giving up some engine power. A smooth flight that’s slightly longer is usually more enjoyable then a short flight bouncing around. Especially if it means you don’t have to clean up puke afterwards.

How far the destination is can also be a factor, especially when flying at aircraft with marginal performance. Sometimes staying lower then the altitude where you’ll fly the fastest can be better in the long run if its just a short hop. Spending 20-30 minutes climbing at a slow airspeed and burning obscene amounts of fuel may not make much sense when it’s only a 40-minute flight. That being said, during the descent it is possible to convert much of that altitude back into airspeed, but its never possible to gain back all of the spent time and energy.

Finally, and this generally only applies to single engine airplanes, safety in the form of gliding distance should also be considered. If we’re flying over bodies of water or unfriendly terrain its wise to consider choosing an altitude high enough to leave us with options should an engine fail and we become a glider.

This all being said, all this may be great theory, and though it may be possible to sit down, check the weather reports and aircraft performance charts and compute the absolute best altitude to fly at, it rarely makes sense or is practical to spend the time doing that. Usually after having flown an airplane for a reasonable amount of time, one gets to know the airplane enough to form a pretty good idea of its most efficient altitude and time it will take to climb to it. The difference on all but the longest flight may mean only +/- 5%. Winds can make a big difference, but if you don’t have the chance to check the upper winds, going on the rule of thumb of flying high in a tailwind and low in a headwind usually works reasonably well. Everything else can pretty well be figured out on-the-fly (pun not intended).

Well, been flying for an hour and forty minutes so far, one hour fifty to go… lousy headwind…

Interesting Passengers

2009-07-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Most of the time when I take passengers it includes any number of kids, most of them not well behaved. Good parenting doesn't seem to be a high priority on native reserves. A couple days ago there was a particularly poorly behaved child on board, who was probably around 4 years old. Most of the time I've found with young kids, even the scared and crying ones, a couple minutes after we take off they end up passed right out, and don't wake up until the wheels start rolling again. This time I wasn't that lucky. The kid was probably big enough to have a seat on his own but for fear of him misbehaving and opening a door or something they had him sit on the lap of his mother in the middle row of seats, and his grandmother (I think) was in the seat beside. The entire flight he was fighting his mother and grandmother, crying, complaining, kicking the back of my seat, and generally making a ruckus in the back. It made me want to turn around and shout "Don't make me pull this plane over!".

I was glad when we landed, but my relief was short lived. We stopped and unloaded the passengers and no later then unloading the first piece of baggage I looked up and the kid was making a beeline across the apron. Ahh frig. "HEY! Come back here!" I turned to the mother and asked what his name was, but I could neither understand nor pronounce what she said. They started calling after him as well, but the kid never looked back. Sheesh. None of the parents seemed too on the ball for going after the kid, so the responsibility fell t0 me. Pilot, babysitter... same difference right? I took off after the toddler, who was still trucking across the ramp as fast as his stubby little legs could move. I finally caught up to him and scooped him up in my arms. The parents were laughing by the time I got back to the airplane, and if the kid wasn't driving me crazy the entire flight I might have found the humour in it as well, but at that point all I could do was shake my head.

The next family I picked up was headed south for vacation, and they were the most friendly, cheerful passengers I have had the pleasure of flying to date. It was sunday, and when I landed to pick them up, the gate to the airport was locked and there was no one around. They all ended up throwing their luggage over the fence to me and climbing over. Yet despite that minor inconvience they were still all smiles. The two kids were also very well behaved. When we landed they thanked me, and remarked that they were glad they flew with us. It was a refreshing change from hearing an exchange of harsh words in Cree between the passengers, kids who I constantly have to keep from climbing all over the airplane, and then being ignored as they unload and just walk away. It made my day.

Another flight we managed to cram 8 bodies into the Cherokee 6, 3 adults, me, and 4 kids. We had to put in the mini seat in between the two middle row seats to form a bench seat, which could fit 3 across. They had barely any baggage so we still came in under gross weight. When I dropped them off at the terminal I couldn't help but chuckle as they all climbed out, one by one, to form a crowd around the little Cherokee. The words "Clown Car" crossed my mind.

Another interesting aspect of flying up here is the rum runners. Every so often we get passengers who try to discreetly pack 50 lbs of hard liquor into their bags to bring up the coast to the dry reserve. Usually when we notice some suspicious looking bags my dispatchers will call the local police up there and give them the heads up for when we land. Sometimes they show up to search the bags, usually they don't. Today I took a couple passengers up with a couple suspicious looking bags. I have a problem with alchohol consumption when 80% (no exageration) of the community is on welfare. Welfare cheques should not be spent on bootlegged liquor at $100 a bottle. I was hoping the cops would show up this time. When we landed sure enough the passengers hopped out as quickly as possible, retrieved the suspicious bags from the back, and carried them to behind a dirt embankment to hide them before the cops showed up. I took my time getting ready to leave, hoping they would show up before I left so I could tip them off about the hiding place, but I couldn't wait forever, so the bootleggers won that round. Day in the life of a northern ontario pilot.

Timed Out

2009-07-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

By friday if I keep up my current pace I will be timed out so far as number of days worked over the past 30. I can't go more then 30 days without having at least 3 days off in there somewhere, and by friday I'll have worked 27 days straight, so I get to take my 3 days off all at once! Whoo hoo! I'm also getting pretty close to timing out in the flight time over the last 30 days category. So the plan is to finish whatever trips I have on Friday and then I'll fire up the 'ol twin and head 'er back to London late in the evening.

There's a small 2100 ft turf strip 2 minutes down the road from my parents' farm, and last time I was in London we went down to check it out and talk to the owner. Unfortunately it was a little rough for what I'd be comfortable flying the Twin Comanche into. That's one of the big downfalls of that airplane, the props have such little ground clearance I'm terrified of the nosewheel sinking into a depression and causing two prop strikes. So I guess we're stuck with the half hour drive from CYXU. I can't complain though, it sure beats a 6 hr train ride plus a 10 hour drive!

A couple days a Piper Navajo (one of the regulars) and I arrived back at the airport at the same time. He chose to land on runway 24, and I chose 32, hoping to beat him in. The threshold of 32 intersects 24 at about the halfway mark, making a T shape. As it turned out he was ahead of me by about 5 seconds, so I extended my downwind leg a little to give him time to land and roll past 32. Unfortunately I misjudged the amount of time it would take for him to roll through and turned base and final way too soon. We saw each other the whole time, so there wasn't any real danger, but it was embarrasing when he elected to hold short and let me land before he taxied across. It was an honest mistake but it made me look like a little bit of a jerk. Whoopsy.

Goals

2009-06-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some thinking lately on my long term pilot goals. Last week on the ramp I ran into a PC-12 crew, and we got chatting as I unloaded. They were fascinated with the Cherokee 6 and its load hauling ability, and the Captain was marvelling at how this was "real flying" as compared to the button pushing they do on the PC-12 and the totally planned-to-the-detail type of flying IFR flying is, to the point where it becomes boring. The First Officer remarked that the most important decision they make is what type of reading material to bring for the day.

Strangely enough that same evening I was reading some of Dagny's blogs and came across one that had the retirement letter of a Northwest Captain, and an excellent article detailing how pilots are systematically being turned into robots and procedure followers, and the adventurer-pilot has been all but bread out of the industry, particularly the airline industry.

The retirement letter goes on about how airline pilots in the old days were revered, and respected for their skill, and paid well for it. Now they are looked at by their companies as liabilities and commodities, paid and treated poorly. In the name of safety there is no adventure to flying anymore. This is obviously a good thing in terms of making air travel incredibly safe, but it strips a flying career of the excitement and any personal rewards.

I have always been a little wary of this... I have heard and seen how the airline jobs are becoming less and less attractive for quite some time, and I'm not ignorant of it. I want to stay in the adventurous side of aviating - VFR bush flying, maybe some float flying, perhaps medevac, and hopefully, one day I can get into water bombing flying the CL-215's. I'd also like to try my hand at mountain flying, which is a whole new skill set I have yet to learn. Right now where I fly is completely flat. Much of what I enjoy about flying is the risk taking aspect of it, and the seat-of-your-pants decision making that you have to do sometimes; dealing with the unexpected. For now I am having the time of my life flying the Cherokee, especially when marginal weather rolls in. I find flying VFR in marginal weather far more rewarding then blue sky days. The other pilot I work with has tons of experience (2500+ hrs) flying the C206, which gets put on skis during the snow season. Some of the flying he does can be quite extreme in my eyes, and it looks like so much fun. He's landed on small untouched frozen lakes to drop off hunters, half melting rivers, and rough tundra (with the wheels on). Places where he's the first and only airplane to visit.

Eventually I imagine I'll want to settle down and fly a nice corporate jet with decent pay in or near my hometown. But right now I'm single, so I might as well go after and enjoy the more adventurous side of aviation.

Unpredictable Weather

2009-06-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to take the Cherokee down for the 50 hr inspection today, but they were fogged in down south, so that got nixed until tomorrow. We still had a couple hours to spare before the inspection was due however, so we decided to fly a few trips up the coast.

The weather started out around 2500 ft ceilings at home, with afternoon t-storms and rain showers forecast. The first trip was uneventful, with the ceilings up the coast going down to 700 ft. Lower than ideal, but still easily flyable. By the time I got back the other pilot was there with a fresh weather update and ready to join the flying. The storms were now visible on the horizon but looked like they may pass to the south of us, and there were no lightning strikes observed, so we decided to depart and try to get one more flight in.

The flight on the way up was pretty much the same as the first trip. I landed 9 minutes ahead of the other pilot, and was just unloading the last of the freight when he pulled in and shut down. A passenger was flying back with me, so I installed the seat I had brought and we were off again.

As we worked our way back south the clouds were getting thicker and thicker, and we flew into some rain showers. Up ahead there was a dark foreboding patch of cloud, which looked like it had some serious lightning potential. It wasn't big at all, maybe a half a mile across, so we made a quick diversion around it.

Steadily the rain was getting heavier and the clouds thicker and lower as we approached home. About 40 miles out I checked the AWOS (weather reports), which was calling 6 miles visibility, 700 ft vertical visibility, and light rain showers. A few minutes later I tuned in again and it was calling for 1300 ft VV, even better. So far so good. It was not. In fact today was the first time working here, and the first time in a couple years now (since I had an adventure flying through torrential rain over the middle of Georgian Bay in the Twin Comanche) I became a little nervous about my situation. By the time I was approaching the airport the rain was coming down heavy enough that the rain drops and water flowing on the windshield made it difficult to see ahead. On top of that the clouds had pushed me down to 3-400 ft agl. On my 3 mile base leg I still couldn't see the airport. I had the runway guidance punched into the GPS and aside from being able to see the trees below me out the side window I was 100% on instruments. Following the GPS I turned final, and at 2 miles I still couldn't see much through the rain on the windshield. Frig I need wipers - or RainX. That stuff is awesome. But anyways. During my turn to final it crossed my mind that flying on instruments at 300 ft agl isn't exactly an ideal situation, even if it is flat everywhere. I don't have any reservations about flying on instruments, at least during cruise portions of the flight, I'm comfortable doing that. But the only navigational aids the Cherokee is equipped with is an old Apollo GPS with a text-only display, and my own handheld Lowrance. I didn't anticipate having poor visibility due to the rain on the windshield. Despite the unanticipated factors, I decided that landing was probably my best option anyways. It was either land or fly the 40 minutes back up the coast, as that is the nearest airport. By then the weather very well might be over top of that too, and I would be pretty low on fuel. My other option would be leave the zone and do a VFR hold with the GPS somewhere in IFR weather until it cleared up, which didn't seem to make much sense. So land it is. Its times like these that make me feel most alive. This is what makes flying interesting, challenging and exhilarating. Such is flying in the north - where airports and weather stations are few and far between.

By 1 mile final the runway popped into sight, and we landed uneventfully. I was suprised that the runway showed itself so far ahead, I was half expecting it to fill my windscreen at half a mile or less. I guess the rain on the windshield wasn't as bad as I thought, I just thought it was worse because trees and clouds don't allow much visual reference for how good the visibility is.

After I landing I taxied over to the terminal to drop my passenger off. There was a Dash-8 parked there, but there was still lots of room for me to pull up close to the door so my passenger didn't have to make a run for it in the rain. It wasn't until the last minute I noticed a ground power cart cord stretching across the ramp. I noticed it and slammed on the brakes at the same time a ground attendant saw that I was about to run over it and frantically motioned for me to stop. I stopped short of running the cord over, but so much for the passenger not having to make a run for it in the rain. Sorry 'bout that, but you gotta get out here.

Summer

2009-06-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

Its been hot this past week, especially before I figured out that there's air vents at my feet that open.

A couple days ago even though we had flights we took the afternoon off because it was 32 degrees C. I suppose in addition to cooking the pilots and any passengers, the amount of weight the airplane can take no longer makes sense to do the trips from a business standpoint. Personally I don't mind cooking in the airplane. Once I figured out the vents its actually not too bad anymore, and its either sweating it out in the airplane, or sitting in my house on the ground sweating it out.

Yesterday I got to see something new. There's a small forest fire burning about halfway up the coast on the way to my usual stop. Its not really anywhere near any civilization, so they're just letting it burn. I managed to snap some pictures.

The smoke was drifting across our route of flight, you could catch a sweet scent of campire if you flew through it. For the most part I tried to climb above though, I'm not entirely sure how much smoke it would take to cause me to starting becoming hypoxic, and while it would be nice to know, I'm not about to try.

On one trip the other pilot who flies the other airplane, a Cessna 206, was coming back from a trip at the exact same time as I was, and we managed to move in close enough together to snap some pictures. He got some video of me as well.

Today I couple a couple flights in, but by around 2 pm we called it quits, probably for the day, as there is some low cloud/possibly fog moving in. Much of my last trip coming back from the north was spent at 4-500 ft agl under an overcast cloud layer. I would have probably tried it again, but about 30 miles north of base when coming back I passed an Air Ornge medevac heli heading north, and about five minutes later he turned around because of the cloud, so it must have been getting worse behind me.

On Saturday we go south all the way to Toronto Buttonville to pick up a new Cherokee 6 we just purchased. I'm excited to see the new airplane (well new to us) - its far better equipped then the one I currently fly. It even has an autopilot and a stormscope. I love the stormscopes, its been an awesome tool in my Twin Comanche, even just flying VFR. Hopefully the autopilot works too, those are great fatigue-reducing tools on long flights.

Unfortunately even though we pick in up on Saturday, it won't be ready for a few weeks because the engine is timed out so we have to drop it off at maintenance on the way back up.

Today I retired my first logbook - all the pages are full at 739.5 hrs - whoo hoo! Its a good thing too because the binding threads were starting to all come out. It wouldn't be able to take much more abuse before the whole thing fell apart. The next flight I do will be entered into the larger professional style logbook I bought. With about 50% more pages and more lines to the page, it should be a LONG time before I fill this one up. I liked the size of my old one better, but each page would only take 11 entries, and each time the page is filled you have to do a bunch of totalling and carry it over to the next page, which is time consuming - especially if you're doing up to 12 entries per day. My new logbook can take 23 entries per page. One thing I'm not too sure about, and perhaps any 1000+ hr pilots can let me know, is how you manage to enter 5 digit flight times (0000.0) in those tiny little boxes? I have a hard enough time writing small enough for my current 4 digits to be legible! Hmm, maybe I should hire one of those asians who can write your name on a grain of rice to be my book-keeper.

Ok I'm rambling now, blog over.

Bug shield, Canadian Shield

2009-06-22T20:12:00.000-07:00

Today made for a bit of a long day. Good, but long. My duty day started at 0930, and my first flight was off the ground at Ten AM. As for flight time it wasn't a super long day, I only did 5 trips, which is one less then a usual chock full day, but they seemed to be spread out a bit more. I did a few morning flights, and then we had to wait for the train to get it, because I had some passengers to take north once they got off the train. The train is supposed to be here at 2 in the afternoon, but didn't actually show up until closer to 5:30. So I got a break from flying for a bit, but I had to cut the grass in front of the house I'm staying in, which is I guess technically part of my duties. My duties in my job description when I accepted the job includes general duties as well as flying, but I've gotten off pretty easy with the general duties thing. Other then taking the fuel truck down to the depot to get it filled up every now and then, cutting the grass has been the only thing other then flying that they've asked me to do so far, and this has been the first time. So I can't really complain.

It suddenly turned hot up here in the past week, its be near 30 degrees C almost every day, and today was no exception at around 25. So by the time I was finished the mowing I was covered in grass, hot and sweaty. It felt good, but the shower I took afterwards felt even better.

So by 5:30 I was back flying, with three more trips to do, although I wasn't aware of each succeeding trip until I returned from the previous one. Finally by 10:47 PM I was on the ground, and a half hour later back at home. Almost 14 hours from start to finish. Wow. The final flights I was not in my top form. It was a good thing its not busy that time of day, because I was exhausted and my brain wasn't functioning at peak efficiency either. Instead of the crisp, succinct nature of my usual radio calls they sounded more like, "Traffic advisory for the **** area, uhh.... Cherokee.... Golf Yankee Bravo Tango... uhh... 15 to south level two point five...". Its pretty bad when you have stop and think for a second what your registration is, lol.

Unloading the airplane and the first bit of the return leg for my last flight wasn't very much fun either for a different reason. The mosquitoes where I landed were at near-plague level. It was terrible. Even the locals helping me unload were shocked at how bad they were. I unloaded the airplane as fast as humanly possible while trying to swat away the 5 or so biting my arm all at once. By the time we had finished unloading and I had the doors to the airplane closed, they were swarming inside the airplane as well. As fast as I could I dug out my mosquito jacket from my flight bag and pulled it on to cover my arms and face, but I found out I couldn't fly with the hood covering my face because I couldn't read the instruments well enough through the mesh.

I spent some time before starting up slapping at mosquitoes to try to make a little more bearable to fly. By counting the dead bugs splattering the inside of my windshield, and the ones smeared over my pants and arms, I figured there must have been an excess of 70 mosquitoes INSIDE the airplane with me! Frig, talk about next worst thing to hell. Tomorrow I'm going to have to go clean up the mess of dead bugs on the airplane windows, for now I'm just glad to be safely in my house and away from them. Hopefully this is an event out of the ordinary that will not be a regular occurrence.

On a more enjoyable note, on Friday I made a flight a couple hundred miles into Quebec to a small town tucked into some breathtaking scenery. Unlike where I am where the landscape is completely flat and very muddy and swampy, here it was beautiful Canadian Shield rocky hills, and dozens of little lakes tucked in amongst them with clear blue water. I spent most of the flight on the way back after I dropped off my pax below 500 agl to just enjoy the landscape. It was a wonderful change from flat. I took some pictures as well, see below:

If I wasn't in someone else's airplane, burning someone else's gas I could have spent hours bombing around through those hills just for the sheer joy of it.

Light shows, and lack thereof

2009-06-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

Spent the weekend back home in London, which was nice, since the flying has been slow this month. I flew the Twin home Friday morning which was very enjoyable as well, if not a little long. It doesn't matter what kind of airplane it is 3.4 hrs is long. However I think I'm finally adjusting to switching between flying the Comanche and Cherokee now that I've got a feel for how they fly differently. I can cognatively anticipate the differences now so I'm not caught off guard quite as much when I jump into the Comanche after flying the Cherokee.

I flew back into home base Sunday night at around midnight. I haven't flown in the dark of night yet up here, it was a very interesting experience. Aside from our little town, there is quite literally NOTHING around, which meant that looking down during the dead of night revealed pure blackness. It was kind of cool, because having no visual reference save for the little town lights off on the horizon growing bigger as we got closer, it was difficult to judge altitude. I was cruising at 6500, but for all my senses knew I could have been at 500, or 20,000. The only reference of altitude I had was the altimeter. The feeling of having no gut frame of reference is difficult to describe to those who haven't gone flying - its very peculiar. It felt like I was in space. Just seeing nothingness and then our tiny little corner of civilization lit up amidst the suffocating darkness was also an interesting and lonely sight. It felt like it was the only town on earth - possibly the only piece of tangible matter on earth, and we were heading straight towards it to escape the nothingness trying to swallow us. That sounds quite dramatic but that really is how it felt. Flying at night I find always tends to give me a bit of that feeling of complete isolation - I love it actually. But until this point all my night flying experience has been in southern Ontario where even over the country there is still the odd streetlight below or lit up house - some sort of indication that I'm not the only human on earth. The ground has always been marked out below. Up here there is nothing.

But I'm back to work now. Today, admist the slowness of June, I had the busiest day yet, even if it didn't start out that way. Its downright hot up here all of a sudden, when I left on friday the daily high's didn't go much higher then 12 degrees C. Today it was up to 30 for most of the day. The skies were for the most part clear, but it got a little bit gusty in the afternoon due to the daytime heating. Near the end of the day around 9 pm there were some lightning storms that were gradually working there way south. The last flight of the day the other pilot was heading to our usual destination up the coast, with me following about 10 minutes behind. By the time I was landing there was small storm cell about 5 miles to the west of the field with lightning coming out of the clouds every minute or so. The other pilot got some pretty cool video of me on final with the lightning storm behind. Pretty cool. Needless to say we didn't waste time unloading the airplane to head back home again. The cell didn't really look like it was going to move over the field, but its still always a little bit unnerving flying in the vicinity of lightning.

It made for an interesting end of the day however. All in all logged about 10 and a half hrs today, which has finally nudged me past the 700 hr total time mark. Whoo hoo! 300 to go and I'm in the quadruple digits!

Hazards of the Job

2009-06-02T22:15:00.000-07:00

So far I've found the most hazardous part of this job seems to be on the ground, when I'm unloading and loading the airplane. The cargo door of the Cherokee has two sections to it. The first part is the main door which swings open towards the front of the airplane, and then a secondary rectangular smaller door unlatches and flips straight up to increase the opening. The problem is that since the secondary door isn't quite as high as the main part, it leaves a nasty corner protruding into the opening. I have hit my head on that corner while leaning in more times then I can count. I can still feel a bruise there actually. The worst part is that I always hit the same part of my head! Gah it makes me so angry when it happens.

Another hazard of the job is trying to avoid getting hit by pickup trucks. There was an occasion a few weeks ago that just left me shaking my head. I landed at one of the reserves with my usual load of stuff, and the truck was there waiting for me. I usually stand by the cargo door and guide the trucks in because I'm A) paranoid that they're going to hit the airplane, and B) if they don't back in far enough it creates twice as much work when unloading the freight from the airplane into the truck.

So here I was standing at the back cargo door, watching the truck back up. As this was happening however, another person approached me to ask how much we'd charge them to take them somewhere, and for the second my attention was diverted, I looked back over at the truck and the native driver had managed to back into the back corner of the wing! GAH!! STOP! STOP!!! GO FORWARD!! Actually apparently Cherokee 6's are tougher then I thought. The back edge of the wing was poking into their taillight and bending the lens cover in on the truck. Frig, crazy driver.

So they pulled forward again, and I went up to inspect the wingtip, it actually had no damage, I got lucky. Once again I walked back to the cargo door to pay more attention to guiding the driver in. You'd think after hitting the airplane he'd drive more carefully... Well after pulling forward and straightening out, what does he do? He GUNS it backwards. WHOA!! STOP!! He managed to skid to a stop about a foot short of pinning me in between the truck and the airplane.

At this point I was getting angry. FRIG MAN! You gotta be more careful! Pull forward a bit... SLOWLY. He finally managed to position the truck properly and I and the airplane managed to stay intact. Sheesh, some people make me wonder.

There was another incident just a couple days ago that left me shaking my head again. This was a different native driver. I was once again guiding the truck up to the cargo door, and he was a little off, so I motioned for him to bring it right. He turned the wheel the wrong way and backed up further moving the truck in the wrong direction. He stopped, realizing he had gone the wrong way, and straightened the wheels and pulled forward. Once again he turned the wheel the wrong way again and started backing up. He pulled forward a second time to correct it, but for the third time he turned the wheel the wrong way again. The one good thing he was doing was driving slow and being careful at least. Nevertheless he never did manage to get it maneuvered into the optimal position. Oh well, I guess that will have to do.

Mix 2 parts wind with closed runway, add in clouds, stir well.

2009-05-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Today I had probably the most eventful flight up here so far. I had to head an hour south to pick up the Chief's wife and daughter and bring them back up.

There was a cold front just south of the field travelling southbound, which brought 1200 ft ceilings, rain, and surface winds around 7 knots. It was raining lightly when I got out to the airport, so I threw my coat hood up, fueled the airplane and did my walk around. I also took out the seats I didn't need and stuffed them into the cab of the pickup. Usually we throw them in the back, or leave them by the tie-downs on the ground, but I didn't want them to get soaking wet in the rain. The flight south was fairly uneventful, it stopped raining about 15-20 minutes into the flight and the clouds started to break up and lift, but it was choppy the whole way.

The flight back was where things got interesting. By the time we were on our way back, the cold front had moved south a fair amount, so it wasn't long before we started going through some scattered showers, with the clouds broken to overcast above us at around 6000 ft. I considered attempting to get above the cloud layer and fly VFR on top to stay out of the rain and stay in air that was a little smoother (the Chief's wife is a bit of a nervous flyer and doesn't like rain or bumpy flights), but the clouds looked at least 3000 ft thick, so I decided against it, since the Cherokee doesn't have the gusto to get that high. A little we approached another thin layer of scattered clouds right at our height of 3500 ft. It looked to be only scattered, so I figured it we'd try to get on top of those, I climbed to 4000 and at that altitude we crossed overtop and were just skirting the tops of the lower layer. I wasn't high enough to get a good top-down view to see how many holes there were in the layer below me, but I'd have a pretty good idea after flying overtop of the layer, and if it was any thicker then scattered, I'd just find a hole and squeeze back down.

Unfortunately within 30 seconds the lower layer got much thicker and the layer above us got real low real fast and just like that we were into IMC (Instrument Weather Conditions, aka the soup). Alrighty then, time for a descent. As I was flying further north the clouds must have been getting lower and lower, because I was descending on instruments for what must have been a good 5 minutes and didn't break out of the bottoms of the clouds until 2000 ft (1900 ft AGL).

The rest of the flight until the last 15 minutes was spent humming along at 1500 ft with rain spattering the windshield. Within 20 miles of home I tuned in the AWOS to get the latest winds, which were being reported from the 300 degrees at 16 kts gusting to 21. So I called up the radio service, made my initial report, and advised I'd be landing on runway 32. They called back and told me it was closed, so the active runway was 06. Runways are named to the nearest 10 degrees on the compass heading they are lined up with. Therefore if you're using runway 32 you'll be facing 320 degrees magnetic. If you're using runway 14, that's really the same runway as 32, you're just facing the other way. Runway 06 faces 060 degrees magnetic. Anyways since 32 was closed, that meant that the winds were almost a direct crosswind, which makes things interesting when the winds are 16 kts gusting to 21. The maximum demonstrated crosswind for the Cherokee 6, which is the strongest winds the test pilots landed in when they were developing the airplane, is 17 kts. That means the winds I'm about to land in exceed the test pilot's max by 40%!

Well, here we go!

Normal crosswind landing technique involves banking the airplane into the wind, and then applying opposite rudder until the wheels are lined up straight to the runway. This cross control technique induces what we call a slip, which is basically the airplane flying a little bit sideways. An airplanes maximum crosswind ability is reached when the rudder can't induce a big enough slip to match the sideways motion the crosswind is creating.

The approach was gusty but so far so good, but when I crossed the threshhold and started my flare and slip, the rudder hit the stops well before my nose was straight. I've been in this situation before flying the Twin Comanche (which has a small rudder and so a low crosswind ability) and in those cases I've able to hold the airplane off the ground long enough with a bit of power if I had to, release the rudder input so the nose swings into the wind, and stomp on the rudder again. This causes the nose to swing back around straight with its momentum carrying it beyond what a smooth rudder input can bring it to. Before the nose can swing back on you, you chop the power and get it onto the ground. I'm not sure if this is the best or proper technique (if there is a "proper" technique which I doubt) when landing in a crosswind that exceeds the airplane's abilities, but it works for me.

Anyways in today's case I didn't have a chance to do that, because a split second beforehand, a gust of wind rolled the airplane to the right violently enough that the hand I had on the controls didn't have a good enough grip to hold on, so I took my right hand off the throttle and put both hands on the controls to keep the airplane where I wanted it. If I were to try my Comanche technique I would have had to add a bit of power to keep the airplane from touching down, but before I could grab the throttle again the wheels chirped on the ground. We skidded sideways on the tarmac a short second before I quickly dumped the flaps up (so we didn't go flying again in a gust) and got the airplane under control.

Whew! That's the most excitment I've had on landing in a long time! Man I love my job.

It wasn't until after we got out of the airplane and the Chief pulled up that I noticed my adrenaline pumping. The Chief must've noticed it too, cause he mentioned that I looked scared, and laughed that he used to land in crosswinds like that just for the fun of it. I'm not sure if he said it as sarcasm with the intention of agreeing how rediculous the winds were, or as a way of saying that its "no big deal". I laughed, but my pride resented that comment a little, because I don't like anyone (especially my boss) thinking I don't have the fortitude to do my job.

At any rate I was supposed to have another flight to take some fuel up the coast, but we decided to not push my luck and leave that until tomorrow.

Ahh I Love Computers

2009-05-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

My pay structure is based on a base salary pay as well as an additional rate per mile I fly. Even though my employers do the tally at the end of month for my paycheque, I have still been keeping track on my own as well. Up until now I've kept a simple tally on a spreadsheet. I made a list of all my usual trips, with a column for distance to home base beside the routes, and a column for the number of times I've flown each route. At the end of the day I'd update each route tally, and the spreadsheet would sum the numbers for me.

It has worked well enough up until now, with the three main drawbacks to it. The first being the extra time I have each day doing record keeping I hate. Also there's been a couple times where the next day I couldn't remember if I did it or not for the previous day, and have been at the risk of either not recording flights or recording them twice, since the spreadsheet was not a log, just a tally - so it could be prone to error. Lastly my tally spreadsheet was limited in the ability to track mileage that didn't involve flying back to home base.

Well, I had some time tonight, so I've just gone high-tech. For some time now in addition to my paper pilot logbook I've also kept a pilot logbook on spreadsheet in excel so if I ever lose one copy my career is still accounted for. Also keeping a pilot log on spreadsheet makes it easy to keep track of every conceivable combination of hours I need to, such as time on each aircraft type, time in the last 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months, PIC times for single engine, multi-engine, and day and night for both categories, etc since I've programmed all those functions in. Included in that spreadsheet log is also the record of the route of each flight in the form of departure aerodrome and arrival aerodrome, so the information to calculate mileage had the potential to be tracked from this digital logbook... time for some programming!

I created a database on another worksheet of every airport in the area that I visit, which included their 4 letter ident code and the latitude and longitude coordinates, which I easily found from the CFS publication (Canada Flight Supplement - a publication of every aerodrome in canada).

I also already had the formula for calculating distance between points on a spherical surface (aka earth) from a program I wrote a couple years ago, so I didn't even need to do any math research, I already had the code, which just needed to be tweaked. Two hours later, voila, no more manually tracking my mileage. The computer now retrieves the route information for each flight, cross references the airport code with the lat-long database and calculates the distance between the departure and arrival points, which it spits out in a running-total ledger style form, with the monthly total mileage at the top. I love computers.

Miles apart

2009-05-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

Today started out slow, but then I ended up having 4 trips to do. They were the usual run up the coast, except all but one were pax flights, which is unusual. I guess perhaps its people going back home from the long weekend.

The last bit of the afternoon was a little interesting because myself and another pilot flying a Navajo for the other operator up here was also doing trips up and down the coast, so we were kind of following each other around. Rather he started out following me and then it ended up I was following him because a Navajo is faster then a Cherokee 6. I play soccer with the pilot on an indoor soccer team. At one point I was ready to take off and was waiting for him to touch down and clear the runway, and when he taxied by me we gave each other a wave and he keyed the mic and said, "see you at soccer tonight" over the radio as he taxied by.

It just struck me as strange. Here we were, across a 90 mile stretch of wilderness from where we both live, and yet we're in the same place, at the same time, and just give each other the wave as if there's nothing out of the ordinary. In reality there really ISN'T anything out of the ordinary, we both do this everyday all day, but the concept of us being so far away in the middle of nowhere and it being normal to see someone you know there is just odd, lol. We treat 100 miles of wilderness as if its just a block away from where we live and we're just nod to each other as if we're strolling down to the corner store. What a strange reality when you really think about. Maybe my job gives me too much time to think, lol.

On another note yesterday on the holiday monday I took two trips south to the same place, one in the Cherokee, the other in the Twin Comanche. They are two so very different airplanes. In the Cherokee on takeoff, when you rotate, you really have to almost coax it off the ground. Rotation speed is 70 mph, and at that point when you ease back on the controls, the nose will come off, and then gradually a couple seconds later the main wheels will haul themselves off the ground.

The Comanche is quite different, in that once you reach rotation speed (Vr), its ready to fly and just a touch back on the controls and it will leap into the air. It caught me by surprise after I've been getting used to flying the Cherokee. I imagine this may be due to the different Vr speeds. Vr for the Comanche is 80-90 mph (depending on the weight), not because its not ready to fly until that speed, but because we don't want it coming off the ground too far below Vmc (minimum controllable airspeed with one engine inop). That's because if we were below Vmc and we lost an engine, we'd lose control of the airplane, so we wait until we're closer to Vmc before we leave the ground. That's multi-engine procedure. The Cherokee is only a single, so we rotate at 70 mph, which is just at the point when the airplane is ready to fly, since there is no Vmc. The Comanche wouldn't probably leap off the ground so readily if we rotated at a more comparable airspeed that we rotate at in the Cherokee.

Another difference is that in the climbout in the Cherokee it needs immediate nose up trim, without which you find you're pulling fairly firmly back on the controls to maintain Vy (best rate of climb speed). The Comanche requires immediate nose down trim after liftoff otherwise you find yourself pushing firmly against the controls to maintain Vy.

The biggest difference between the airplanes however, is the landing. The Cherokee is a breeze to land. You can just float it down, and it flares nicely until the airspeed bleeds off enough and it kisses the ground. I attribute this to the high camber wing, and the long fuselage which gives lots of space between the nose gear and the main gear. The Comanche isn't so friendly. If you flare at too high an airspeed or too aggressively, you'll balloon up until the airspeed bleeds off and then you come plummetting back down to earth. To little of a flare and you'll come in on the nose gear. Its tricky to find the sweet spot of airspeed that allows a controllable sink rate and doesn't cause the airplane to balloon. In short I'd describe landing the Cherokee to floating it down to the runway, whereas in the Comanche you have to fly it down. I found I'm quite out of practice in the Comanche technique.

Its also interesting because in the past I've gone far longer between flights in the Comanche then I just did on monday, and still been as sharp as ever because I haven't flown any other type of aircraft. Whereas in this case I last flew the Comanche only a couple weeks ago but I'm as rusty as ever because in the meantime I've been becoming accustomed to the Cherokee style of flying. Its interesting how different airplane types screw with your proficiency. I would also add that I found it easier to go from flying the Comanche to the Cherokee, then the other way around. I greased the landing in my first checkout flight in the Cherokee, but even with 200 hrs in the Comanche and it only having been 2 weeks since I flew it last I find myself rusty.

Updates and Revelations

2009-05-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

So my last post left me waiting for maintenance. I ended up staying the night there, and then headed further south to North Bay to pick up the Chief Pilot's daughter. The radio problem was only a minor issue so they were able to fix it.

I was airborne by 0703 Tuesday morning, and had an uneventful flight into North Bay. I met the Chief's daughter and she had a couple carloads of her stuff and a few of her friends there to see her off for the summer. As I was busy loading the plane, I heard from someone behind me, "Chad.", I turned around, and low and behold one of her friends/classmates was a guy I knew from way back in Sarnia. I was so stunned the first things that came out of my mouth were, "What the heck?!". lol. I shook his hand and we gave each other a more proper greeting. Once again I'm reminded of how small this world is, and how even smaller the world of aviation is.

In contrast to how small the world of aviation is, whenever I look down at the ground below me when I'm flying, it strikes me as to how geographically big the world of aviation is. To the nearest place I fly its only a 35 minute flight, but its mind boggling to think of how much distance that would be to hike, especially in the swampy terrain. It makes me wonder how much of this land I'm flying over is land that has never been touched by a human foot, and probably never will.

Once we finally made it back to base, the Chief was already waiting for me with a load ready to go, and they kept coming until 8 PM. No rest for the wicked, but I don't mind, its money in my pocket.

Wednesday was another full day of flying, but it got really windy in the afternoon, so we called it a day early, and Thursday was no good for flying at all. Friday was a good solid day of flying.

Its Saturday today, and I've had one flight this morning, but the weather is once again iffy, so we're giving it a couple hours, and we're not that busy anyways. That one flight this morning was cool however, because it gave me a very cool chance to witness some weather theory in real life, that I've never seen before. Weather is so much easier to practically apply to flying when you see it happen for real, so today I learned an awesome lesson. When the temperature is in the vicinity of freezing, and there's a warm front passing through, you can get some very interesting weather phenomina. Its difficult to explain without diagrams, so here is a crude one I drew up in 5 minutes in paint:

Warm fronts with temperatures near the freezing point are recipes for freezing rain. We had just such an occurrance on my flight up the coast. There was a warm front forecast to be in between my departure point and destination.

Note the little dashed line representing our freezing level, which is the altitude at which below that it is above 0 deg C, and above that it is below 0 deg Celcius. Remember in general the higher the altitude the colder it gets. Note how in front of the Warm front (to the right) the freezing level is closer to the surface. This is because a Warm front brings warmer air, so once the warm front has passed, the freezing level will be higher up. Even Private Pilot's learn this theory, and I have even spent a fair amount of time teaching it to students, but up until this point I've never actually witnessed it while flying, so it was quite fascinating.

At home base the temperature was around 10 degrees on the surface, but on the way I passed through the warm front into the cold side of it (from left to right on the diagram), and within a matter of minutes the temperature dropped quite sharply. While I was flying, I started passing through some rain, and since I knew freezing rain was forecast as being possible, I glanced at the thermometer and noted it at 10 degrees. Ok so I'm good, it can't freeze in 10 degree weather. When I landed however, I noticed the temperature had dropped quite sharply, down to 1 degree. Wow, that's quite the change. I arrived early due to a wicked tailwind, and it was raining moderately, so I hopped out to check that the rain wasn't freezing to the airplane. It wasn't so I got lucky. Once my passengers arrived and we got everything loaded I checked once more to make sure that the water on my plane was still liquid and not freezing. I noticed on the tail there was once spot where there was just a very thin layer of ice in a small area. It melted and broke off as soon as I touched it. I figured we'd be ok as long as it stayed liquid until we took off, cause it would be getting warmer now since we would be flying back into the warm front.

I got lucky, if it had been 2 degrees colder, we would have had freezing rain. Freezing rain occurs in the spot on the diagram where it shows its raining. Precipiation which forms above the freezing level forms as snow, but as it falls, if it falls through the wedge shaped area that is below the freezing level then it melts into rain. If that rain once again falls through the boundary of the warm front (red line), it falls back into an area that is above the freezing level. In that spot, it becomes freezing rain since the air in that area is below 0 degrees. If the air is cold enough to bring the freezing level right down to the surface, then you'll have freezing rain on the surface. In my case today it was just warm enough to keep the freezing level off the surface, and by the time I had climbed to an altitude where it would have been below zero, I had crossed into the warm side of the Warm front, and the air temp rose back up to around 10 degrees. That has always been one of the most fascinating things for me about weather theory, so it was cool to witness it in real life. Its one thing to understand the theory, but seeing it happen helps me bring all the theory into real life application, and that makes it much more useful.

Back for Maintenance

2009-05-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

I flew down south again for maintenance. The 100 hr inspection is now due. It doesn’t seem like very long ago since I last had the airplane down here for its last inspection - that’s because it hasn’t been very long. Last time we put the extension onto the inspection which allowed us to fly an extra 10 hrs before the inspection was due, but that means this inspection was due 10 hrs earlier then usual to make up the time.

I was up early this morning at 0530 to get an early start so the AME’s would have a chance to get it all done in a day, providing there’s no snags. By 0645 we were out to the airplane and by 0700 I was ready to start up and be gone. Wait I forgot one thing. I took the Twin Comanche flying yesterday and I left my GPS mount in that airplane, so I hopped down off the wing and walked across the ramp to retrieve it and suction cup it onto the window of the Cherokee. I climbed in, mixture rich, throttle in a bit, primed it, and Master Switch ON - oh crap! I must have left the Master Switch on overnight, and the battery is good and dead… IDIOT! This is the first time I’ve ever forgotten to switch off the Master, and go figure its on the day that we’re trying to get away early. The owner was there waiting to make sure I got away alright, so I sheepishly climbed back out and told him I left the Master On and the battery was dead. He kind of laughed and said we’d have to go back across town to the hangar and get some jumper cables. The owner is old-school, he mentioned that the Cherokee hand-starts ok, but it probably wasn’t a good idea since he’s got a bad knee (arthritis - he limps everywhere) so it wouldn’t be a great idea cause he’s not mobile enough to get out of the way of the prop once it starts. So we drove back to the hangar at the house, grabbed some cables and drove back to the airport. Half an hour later we’re back. The owner good-naturedly remarked how I could have been halfway there by now, but this was a regular occurrence for the pilot here last year, so I feel a little better.

So finally by 0740 I was underway. It was smooth air, and I packed a book to read to kill the time for the day, so I pulled that out. It’s a collection of all of C.S. Lewis’ books. Right now I’m reading “Mere Christianity”, which is a philosophical look at Christianity completely apart from the Bible. Quite fascinating. Lewis was himself an atheist who set out to genuinely disprove Christianity, but found himself unable to do so. Anyways this is an aviation blog.
So I was humming along, reading my book, every now and then looking up to make sure I wasn’t careening to the earth or hopelessly off-course, when the radio squelch started acting up. I would get static, and then it would turn stop, static again, turn off. Hmm, stupid thing. Sometimes you can turn the unit off and then back on again and the squelch will fix itself, so I tried that. Unfortunately, when I tried to turn the radio back on, the display stayed off. Uh oh. I could still here the static when the radio was on, but I couldn’t see which frequency I was on. I tried recycling the ON/OFF switch again, no luck. Bummer. Its not a big deal, I’m pretty sure I’m still on 126.7, the en-route frequency, but I don’t really have any way of changing the frequency cause I can’t see what I’m changing it to. For now its not a huge safety concern, I wasn't in the process of communicating with anyone, and I’m landing at a private airstrip so I don’t really need a radio for that either. Hopefully the AME’s can fix it for my trip back up though, cause I need it then.

I’m also supposed to fly to North Bay either tonight or tomorrow morning after the maintenance is finished, and pick up the Chief Pilot’s daughter, who’s going to school there, but is finished today so she’s coming home for the summer. She’s in school to be an AME. North Bay is actually WAY south for me, so I was looking forward to it, hopefully the broken radio doesn’t throw a wrench into things.

Anyways as for now I’m sitting around killing time for the day. I stopped at Canadian Tire and picked up a few things; one of them being a resistance strap for working out, those stretchy latex bands. I thought there was a weight room in the town I’m living, but it turns out there’s not, so hopefully this will provide me with a somewhat half decent substitute. It doesn’t look like they can really provide much resistance to give me a good workout though, but we’ll see I guess.
I also picked up one of those blue foam sleeping pads for camping to put on my bed. The bed I have been provided with has seen better days. You can feel the mattress springs through the mattress. It quite literally feels like I’m sleeping on a bunch of wire springs. I’m the kind of guy who’s not terribly picky about where I can sleep, I can fall asleep just about anywhere, so up until now I’ve found a way to fit the pressure points of my body into between the springs so I’m comfortable, but this foam mat should make things better anyways.

Well lucky for me I've managed to find an internet signal to borrow so I can upload this blog. I also took some video of the landing at the strip this time, and I'll get it uploaded onto here when able.

Docks Dieing and Low Flying

2009-05-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

There hasn't been a whole lot of flying going on these past 3 days. I only flew once yesterday and then once today.

Before the river ice broke up there used to be a dock sitting on the shore that they used for the chief pilot's personal floatplane during the summer. However it disappeared at some point during ice breakup. Somewhere out in James Bay (or somewhere along the way) there is a single dock on a lonely journey to nowhere.

So a new dock is needed. A few days ago the chief pilot ran down to the dump and scooped a couple old truck gas tanks to use as floaters and brought them back on a trailer. Yesterday, having nothing else better to do and needing a reason to get out of the house, I volunteered my carpentry skills to start building the dock. The owner drew up a sketch plan for me, and we ordered the lumber. The lumber didn't arrive until late in the afternoon, so I didn't actually start work on it until after I had dinner. It wasn't much to build really, and it went together easily and it was fun to nail something together again. After about an hour's work I had the framing complete. All we had to do was fasten down the floats, and then put the deck on. I had the frame all squared up and nailed to the hangar floor so it wouldn't move, and was just getting ready to start putting the decking boards on, but then the owner came by and said he wanted to get the floaters tied on first before he put the deck on. Ok fair enough, it was getting late though, and seeing how it would take a couple of us to drag the floaters over and lift the dock frame on top, and also feeling accomplished enough with having the frame done, I called it a night.

This morning was spent fastening the floaters to the frame, and then spraying the whole thing with wood preserver. By 4:00 pm tonight we got a call for a flight, so I went back to the house to check the weather. The METAR (hourly weather observation) for here was calling 5200 ft ceilings and good vis, but the GFA (weather chart) showed a warm front cutting my route down the middle, with ceilings supposedly 400 to 1000 ft past the warm front. Hmm... decisions decisions. I wanted to fly, so I offered that I didn't mind giving it a try, and if the ceilings got too low I'd just turn around. So that was the plan. By 5:00 the plane was loaded and ready to go. I watched another plane, a Piper Cheyenne take off, and he disappeared into the clouds a lot lower then 5000 ft. I estimated it was closer to 1200 to 1500 ft. Oh well. The owner one more time assured me that if the ceilings were too low just turn around. By now I'm comfortable enough to fly in weather that is pretty much at minimums if it comes down to it, but they don't really pressure me to fly below legal minimums or in bad weather anyways, which I appreciate and respect. I've heard some stories of operators who let dollar signs decide more strongly on when to make trips, and try to push the legal limits. I've heard of one such operator out of Toronto (no longer in business) who constantly pushed his pilots (to the point of insulting them if they protested) to fly even when the weather conditions were dangerous, such as icing conditions that had even grounded larger airliners (the operator flew Cessna 310's and Navajo's). Eventually most of his pilots got fed up and quit, and then eventually the company went under. This guy was not a pilot himself, he was an East Indian businessman. I guess it helps that everyone in the company I work for are experienced pilot's themselves, so they understand the game better then a foreign non-aviating businessman.

Anyways I fired the Cherokee up and checked the AWOS. It was calling ceilings at 800 ft now. Technically that is below VFR weather minimum for VFR flight in a control zone. Minimums for a control zone surrounding an airport is that visibility has to be at least 3 miles, and the aircraft has to be operated at least 1 mile horizontally, and 500 ft vertically clear of cloud, and at least 500 ft above ground level. So basically that means no less then 1000 ft ceilings. There is a nifty little tool which I'm sure I've mentioned before which can be used in a control zone served by either a radio service or a tower. This is called Special VFR. When an aircraft operates under special VFR we only need 1 mile visibility and we only have to operate clear of cloud, we don't need to worry about the 1 mile horizontally and 500 ft vertically anymore. Special VFR is not allowed to be suggested by a controller. I imagine this is so pilots who are uncomfortable flying in such poor conditions don't feel pressured into accepting such a responsibility. Pilots can request it however.

In uncontrolled airspace when operating below 1000 ft all that is required for visibility is 2 sm miles during the day and to operate clear of cloud. As far as in the wording defining the limits of a cloud ceiling, there is technically no limit, but usually the requirements to stay a certain distance above man-made objects and built up areas come into play which dictates the minimum cloud ceiling based on that. For example if I have to operate at least 500 ft from any man made property, and I only have to operate clear of cloud, then that means my minimum ceiling is 500 ft. There is no such requirement to stay a certain height above terrain that is not build up or populated, which is the case up north here in the wilderness. So seeing as the visibility was good and I could operate clear of cloud without hitting the ground, outside of the control zone I'm good to go.

So based on the low ceilings when I started up and made my initial radio call to the radio service, I was expecting them to tell me conditions were below VFR for inside the control zone and that I wasn't allowed to depart. At that point I would request Special VFR thus removing my requirment to stay 500 ft vertically away from the cloud, and I'd be good to go. However he didn't tell me that. He didn't mention anything at all about the weather conditions, he just advised me of some IFR traffic shooting an approach and told me to call rolling as usual. Hmm, interesting. I'm not sure if he just wasn't up to date on the below VFR weather, or if he saw the inevitable Special VFR exchange coming and didn't want to bother with the semantics. Oh well, not that I care. Time to go flying.

I took off and I started skimming the bottoms of the clouds at 600 ft. They were even lower then what the AWOS was calling. Oh well, they're still do-able. I had a terrible headwind so I spent the duration of the abnormally long flight bouncing along at 600 ft agl, and crossing my fingers that it wouldn't get worse behind me stranding me for the night at my destination. That'd be a bugger. I landed uneventfully, unloaded my freight and installed the seat I brought with me to bring back my one passenger.

A headwind there meant a tailwind on the way back. I took off and once again levelled off at around 700 ft (the clouds were a little higher closer to destination). We were making great time, or it at least felt like it. We were so low and doing 142 kts groundspeed - the ground underneath whipped by pretty quickly. The ceiling for the most part remained unchanged. I think my passenger was a little nervous with the flight, it was bumpy and we were flying abnormally low to the ground. He kept tapping me on the shoulder and asking how much longer. Normally I don't mind tending to passengers needs, except when I'm busy. I always kind of expect passengers to have enough sense to leave me alone when we're taking off and landing, or when I'm noticeably busy. I'm not sure if its fair to expect passengers to intuitively know that or not. Since I'm the pilot, my opinion is tainted. In this case he tapped me on the shoulder when I was busy trying to spot the airport, join the downwind, slow the airplane down, and perform the prelanding check. Normally these would be separate steps with a fair amount of time in between, but in this situation the tailwind, combined with being so close to the ground meant the airport was coming up pretty fast. I was slightly annoyed that he was bugging me when I was busy, and at the fact that 15 minutes ago I told him we'd be landing in 17 minutes. You would think he could do the math. I half turned my head and thrust up my hand indicating "two minutes".

Once again on touchdown I managed to keep from ramming the landing gear through the top of the wings and stayed out of the weeds off the side, so I guess that makes for another successful flight.

More Adventures

2009-05-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had another exciting Saturday. My first flight was a pax flight up the west coast. The weather was marginal with low ceilings and snow showers on the way up. When we got to the airport I noticed the runway was snow covered.

It was only an inch deep of loose dry snow but I was suprised when the touchdown was almost perfectly silent, it made me look good, haha. I dropped my passengers off and headed back. I took note of the ceilings and snow showers and made a PIREP (Pilot Report) to the radio service when I called inbound. The only weather station up in this area is the airport where I'm based out of, so pilot's appreciate when other pilot's make pireps of the conditions up the coast.

My next trip was East up the other coast, to drop off a passenger at that reserve. When I left the sky was scattered clouds at around 3000 ft. The flight and landing was uneventful, and in a couple minutes I was back in the air climbing out on my way home. On this trip there are couple bays to either climb up high and cross over, or go around. When I'm empty, I like to climb higher and fly direct, because it doesn't take long to get to higher altitudes with a lightly loaded airplane. So within a couple minutes after takeoff I was already at 4500 ft, and for reasons that I can't recall, maybe a little boredom and a compulsive need to flick switches and press buttons, I tuned into my destination's AWOS (Automatic Weather Observation System). AWOS basically automatically gives the station's current weather conditions and broadcasts it on a specific frequency for pilots to listen to. It was calling 1/4 sm visibility, and 100 ft vertical visibility (essentially 100 ft ceilings). This was way below even basic IFR minimums. Crap, where the heck did that come from?

So I made the easy decision of turning around and landing again. The airport terminal building was closed for the weekend so I couldn't get to a phone, but after waiting around for 15 minutes another flight crew came out to the airport, and one of them let me borrow his cellphone to call company and give them an update of my predicament. They looked at the forecast for me, and to make a long story short, it became apparent I would be waiting there for a while, so I decided to walk into town. I could see from the air that the road from the airport into down kind of followed along outside of town first before turning left into it, and I could also see from the air that it would be a much shorter distance to cut through the woods from the corner of the airport into some houses on the outskirts. Rather then following the road, I elected for a little hiking adventure and decided to try to hike through the woods. I had my handheld compass that I bought, so I figured if I just made a heading of North NorthEast that would get me the shortest route into civilization.

My first challenge however was crossing a 10 ft wide ditch filled with water. I walked along it for a few hundred feet and found a spot where I might be able to cross without getting wet. It was a pile of bushes and then a snowbank making somewhat of a bridge across the ditch. Carefully I climbed across. On my last step before I was clear, my foot broke through the snowbank and I went up to my shins in water. Crap! Oh well, not much I can do now. I set off into the bushes. Well even though most of the snow everywhere else was melted off, in the forest it was still knee deep, and soggy. I spent about 15 seconds bushing through branches and hauling myself through knee deep snow before realizing that this would be neither faster nor the dryer way of getting into town. So much for that. So I pushed my way back out of the forest to the road. I had to cross the ditch again... hmm. I found another spot that held a dim hope of keeping my feet dry, but I didn't have any luck. Once again I crashed through, this time with both feet, into shin deep water. Dang. Oh well. So I walked along the road for a bit and a car drove by with a couple who offered to take me into town. Sweet.

They dropped me off, and once again I got another sense of Deja Vu. This is the place I stayed a couple years ago working for Flight Exec. I had some time to kill, and wet feet, so I walked into the Northern Store, wandered around there for a bit, and bought some nice wool socks. I remember watching Survivorman and he said wool has the property of not really holding water, so it makes it easier to stay warm and dry when wearing wool. I went outside, sat down on a bench to take my soggy boots off. It felt wonderful to put my nice new wool socks on, and it was true, even though my boots were still sopping wet, my feet felt dry in the socks.

There's not much to see in this place, so for a good half hour I wandered around aimlessly, killing time, and feeling like a homeless person. Across from the Northern store there's the Lodge, a hotel and restaurant called Wavies. And that is the extent of downtown. The lodge is actually quite nice considering where it is, its got a nice riverfront view, with a huge vaulted ceiling in the restaurant. I sat in the lobby for a couple hours, called Flight Service to get an update on the weather, with which they gave me bad news. Once the snowstorms at home base cleared up, they were supposed to move east to where I was now. The weather briefer didn't think I'd be able to make it out of here VFR until late tonight. Well our operation only flies day VFR, so that's no good. I called company to both give them an update on my situation, and try to formulate an action plan. After that, I wasn't really hungry, but it was 6:00, so I ate dinner anyways, just to kill time. I'm lucky I have a fast metabolism, cause when I'm bored, I eat.

I had a 1/4 roasted chicken, which ended up being a little overcooked and dry, but the fries were good. More waiting. I also noticed while waiting that it started to snow, quite heavily. Crap. By 7:00 I called company again to get an update. The weather at home had cleared, but as the weatherman said there was supposed to be a cold front in between along my route bringing bad weather. Looking out the window where I was it looked overcast, hard to tell the cloud height, but no snow, so we agreed we'd wait another half hour and see how things were then, and I'd depart. Pretty much as soon as I hung up the phone it started snowing again, and I couldn't even see across the river. Crappy deal. Oh well, we'll give it till 7:30. At 7:30 the snow seemed to lighten up again, so I called company one last time, and we agreed that I'd make a run for it. I crossed my fingers that the snow didn't freeze onto my airplane. By this point the hotel front desk had closed, so I don't even think I could even get a room anymore if I needed it for the night.

Off I went again walking back to the airport. I got about 2/3 there, and someone came by and offered to give me a ride. Sweet. We made small talk for a bit, he knew the guy I dropped off today. He was on his way to the airport as well, he was ground crew for a medivac helicopter that was coming in. He also mentioned that my airplane was an ice cube. Perfect. We got to the airport, and sure enough, the entire airplane was covered in 1/2 inch sized droplets of ice frozen solid onto the skin. Did I also mention that it was -8 below, 7:50 pm, with the sun setting at 8:45, and official nighttime at 9:15. Sweet. Luckily a couple days ago I threw a hand scraper into the back of the airplane "just in case". Feverishly I started scraping the ice off the airplane in a rush to beat the sunset. It's about a half hour flight back, so if I can take off before the sun sets, I'll make it time before official nighttime.

As I was scraping, and wondering who's idea it was to become a bush pilot, the medivac chopper came in and landed, and they offloaded what looked like a hypothermic passenger. They were wrapped head to toe in one of those hypothermic bags. It was a sobering reminder to make sure I scrape the ice off properly. Its a tedius job, to get every bit of ice off all of the critical surfaces, but I didn't want to end up off the end of the runway, as a medivac patient because I didn't clean the airplane off properly. I'm not a fan of becoming a statistic.

Without a minute to spare I had the airplane clean and ready to start up. It was snowing again, but only lightly, so visibility was still ok. I had no way of knowing what the ceilings were. I did my runup, taxied out, and pushed the throttle forward. Ceilings were ok with a couple hundred feet to spare. Minimum VFR ceilings didn't allow me to climb high enough to fly over the bay however, so I had to go around. When I got closer to home, it started snowing again, fairly heavily, but it was cold enough that I didn't pick up any icing. I could see the snow when I turned my landing light on, but the lights of the town came into view about 8 miles back. It was pretty well dark by now. I flew overhead the field and joined the downwind, and I could see the headlights of a truck on the ramp, I knew it was company waiting for me.

All ended well, I landed safely, and I got to sleep in my own bed.

2009-05-01T21:12:00.000-07:00

I had both an eventful and interesting day today. I'm not quite sure where to start, so I suppose I'll go chronologically. Beware this may be a lengthy post.

My day started slow. I knew I had a bunch of trips lined up, but it was supposed to snow in the morning, which it did. So when my alarm went off I woke up and immediately knew I had to look out the window. I tried to imagine what it would look like out the window and draw a conclusion from that so I didn't have to get out of bed (it seems reasonable when you're still half asleep), but using that method I could not ascertain an accurate observation as to weather or not it was ok to fly, so I had to haul myself out of bed and to the window to have a look. Yep, it was snowing, pretty hard in fact - and its May 1st. No flying yet, oh well, I'm going back to bed.

So an hour rolls by, and what seems like a more reasonable time to get up arrives, so I get up, even though its still snowing. I milled about the house for a bit, had a shower, got dressed, and before I knew it the chief was knocking on my door asking if I could go gas up the Cherokee and then take the fuel truck to get it filled up. During the morning routine the weather had indeed cleared up. So, as I've learned, even though he didn't actually ask me to get ready to go flying, chances are that before I get an opportunity to return to my house it will be time to take to the skies, so I got my bags ready, made some sandwiches and packed some food, and headed out.

I got down to the airport to gas up the plane and the Chief was already there scraping the snow off the airplane. What a guy, I always appreciate help. I pulled the fuel truck up and started fuelling. Empty. Dang, there was no fuel left in the truck, I was hoping there'd be enough before taking the truck itself to get refuelled, cause then we'd have a completely full fuel truck for the weekend. Oh well, off I go to the fuel depot. When I got back to the airport, most of the snow was melted/scraped off the airplane, except for a stubborn little chunk inside the propellor spinner. We spent about 20 minutes scraping, tapping, and melting that chunk out from inside the spinner so there wouldn't be excessive vibration with the engine running due to the off-balance spinner.

Finally by noon I'm under way for the day, and just as I expected I didn't really have a chance to go home, so lucky thing I'm already good to go. The winds were very strong at 20 knots, which made things a little more fun and interesting with the landings, and there were spotty snow showers in places as well. Most of the airports up here have only one runway, so its almost guarenteed there will be some sort of crosswind component. My first trip was up the coast to a small mining town.

On the way up there was a Hawker twin turboprop aircraft inbound on the reciprocal track as me going outbound, so on my departure I stayed at 1000 ft while he passed over me at 2000. It was a cool sight to see this big twin turbine bearing down on you at 12 o'clock. I didn't think about grabbing my camera in time, it would have made an awesome photo.

The mission was to land there, pick up an Canadian Forces Ranger and bring him and his stuff across the river to the other small town about 8 miles away. Each town has an airport, but since the ice road across the river has melted but its still too icy for boats, an airplane is the only way. This guy was an instructor for the Canadian Forces Rangers. I talked to him for a bit and I guess they're up here training and getting ready for the spring thaw, in case these communities flood and that have to evacuate the residents. Who knew? Can I say I've served my country now? I was responsible for relocating the Canadian Forces equipment and personnel (singular) to a different location. I guess when they only need to move one guy, a bunch of cots and radio equipment, it makes more sense to hire a Cherokee then fire up a C-130 Herc. I felt pretty important flying a guy in Canadian Forces Camo greens around. He was an older middle aged man, and he seemed to enjoy the short flight, despite it being terriby bumpy due to the strong winds. I made two trips across the river, the first to bring him and half of the equipment, and a second trip to bring the rest of it.

After that I was to bring two passengers back to home base with me. On the way back the same thing happened, a Turbo Beaver passed almost directly overhead of me. This time I did have my camera ready. I kind of wondered what my passengers would think about the pilot taking pictures of airplanes and not flying the airplane, but they didn't seem to mind. My front pax asked me if I got the shot, to which I nodded yes. A Turbo Beaver is a cool airplane, its just not quite as intimidating as a big twin turbine, so the picture wasn't exactly what I was hoping for. Oh well.

My next trip was back up the coast to the reserve to bring some passengers back. Origionally the intel I got was it was supposed to be 3 adults and two kids. However when I showed up there were two vehicles waiting for me, a minivan and an extended cab pickup truck. It turns out these people were expecting to bring 4 adults, 3 children and all their baggage. The Cherokee only has six seats, and while its reasonable for a child to sit on an adult's lap for the flight, there is a certain amount of reason that has to be excercised. They had expected that 3 of the adults would have the kids on their laps, including an adult in the copilot seat with a child on their lap. This is a big no-no since its easy to understand that a child in someone's arms in the cockpit can be a very deady hazard simpy by the fact that I would not have full movement of the controls. I'm sure we could all think of at least 3 other hazards associated with baby's in mother's arms in cockpits as well. So anyways 8 people (including me) in a six seat aircraft was pretty much an impossibility. Next you should have seen the amount of baggage they brought along. It was enough to fill the airplane with no seats installed at all! I tried to explain it to them that there simply wasn't enough room, but they didn't seem to understand the problem. I suppose I could have made my point well enough by asking one of them to pack the airplane, and then they would have seen the unsolvable volume issues, aside from the fact that care must be taken to load the airplane within its center of gravity limitations.

Anyways after more explaining then I thought would be necessary, I managed to get across the point that either all of them could come but they'd have to leave most of their bags, or only some of them could come and we could remove a couple seats and fit in most of their bags. They eventually came to the conclusion that one of the family's wouldn't go at all. Sweet. That made it much easier for me to only have to fit half the stuff and half the people in. I suppose I should have felt bad that they had to cancel their trip (I'm not sure where their final destination was), but I don't have much sympathy for people who think its realistic to charter a small airplane at a small airplane price and expect it to carry what a large airplane does. I mean come on, they needed a pickup truck and a minivan to get everything and everyone out to the airport! Sheesh.

After that trip I had two more trips up the coast before the end of the day. These were freight trips. By now the winds that I had been wrangling with all day had calmed down significantly. Too bad, I was enjoying them. One thing I have noticed now that the snow on the ground is started to melt is how much of the terrain is actually wetland. All the open treeless areas I think I mentioned in a previous blog is treeless because its actually swamp area. Turns out there's fewer spots then I thought that would make an ideal put-down area in case of engine trouble. Surviveable probably, but not ideal.

So I did my last two trips, with the sun starting to set and a good amount of fatigue setting into my body. After I landed from my last trip I parked the airplane, pushed it back into its place, fuelled it up for tomorrow, put the wing covers and engine blanket on and heater in, and done. Time to go home. Not quite done yet though. I now have a crapload of log entries to fill in at some point tonight, make dinner, and write a blog. Goodnight.

Pictures!

2009-04-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

So here are a few pictures. Top left: The Cherokee 6 I fly.

Top Right: Flying over my town... anyone recognize where it is?

Bottom Left: The maintenance strip I flew into. Not its not a road, and yes what you see is what you get. The picture was taken standing on the plane at the end of the runway.

Bottom Right: The main terminal where I'm based at...

Hanging Out

2009-04-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

So right now its Tuesday morning, I'm just waiting for the call that the plane is ready. I'm also crossing my fingers that the weather will improve, because the ceilings are at 800 ft, so its not quite VFR and there's forecast to be mixed rain and snow which is ideal icing conditions as well.

The maintenance base runway didn't disappoint. The width between the trees from side to side is about 60-80, just barely twice the wingspan of the Cherokee. I came over the trees at the threshold a little fast and ended up floating for much of the runway before I plunked the wheels down. There is a slight dip in the runway, making the middle of the runway the lowest point, which meant I was slowing down slightly uphill. That assisted my breaking and I ended up having at least a couple hundred feet of runway left between me and a floatplane parked at the end, so all ended well. When I get back I'll post some pictures I promise. I don't have the cord that connects my camera to my computer with me, otherwise now would have been a good time to do it.

After I shut down filled out the logs and gathered my stuff I took a taxi from the there to the main airport, where the company keeps a car for the pilots. Its a pimping 1990-something Buick Roadmaster station wagon, so it was nice to have wheels for my stay here.

Not much else to report. There's a small Canadian Tire here, so I spent a lot of my time in there. I have always felt a little sorry for my passengers when flying because I have a nice comfy David Clark headseat to keep the noise down, but the passengers don't have any ear protection. So I picked up a box of those little foam disposable earplugs to offer them. I don't carry passengers THAT often, so I figured a box of 80 pairs should last a while if I kept them in my flight bag for them. We'll see I guess, when they're gone they're gone. Anyways I have to check out from the hotel soon, so I think I'm going to go check in with Company and see what the plan is.

Runways and Layovers

2009-04-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Thursday was another long day of flying. I had a bunch of pax (passenger) trips and a couple freight runs as well. Most of the day was uneventful with blue skies and light winds. There was however one semi-exciting landing I had at one of the reserve's up the coast during one of my freight runs.

I was on short final and three coyete's ran out onto the runway. The runway, though gravel, is nice and long and wide to accomodate the small airline service that comes in there, so it wasn't a huge deal to add a bit of power fly over the coyete's and land long. A little further up ahead however there was also a flock of seagulls milling about on the runway, blocking the runway from the middle over to the right. Because of the coyete distraction I didn't notice this obstacle until after I had touched down, and was rolling at still a fairly high speed towards them. Nonetheless I managed to swerve the airplane, slightly violenty to the left and avoid the seagulls. Talk about an obstacle course... good thing I didn't have passengers!

On another note the Cherokee has timed out and is due for inspection, so I'm taking it down to our maintenance base tommorrow. The AMO who does our maintenance apparently has their own grass strip that we fly into, which is 1600 ft long with power lines/trees on either side and a valley in the middle, at least that's how I understand it. I'm quite looking forward to the challenge. This will officially be the shortest runway I've ever landed on. Technically speaking there may have been some runways around this length in Sarnia that I used to take the C-150 into, but I never knew their exact lengths, and certainly none of them had obstacles on either end. Its a bit of a deja vu from the Comanche annual inspection last year, as the AME I had do it also had his own short grass strip. His however was 2200 ft long, with power lines on one end, and trees about 400 ft past the other end. I am proud of the fact that so far to my knowledge, I am the only pilot who has successfully flown a light twin into that runway (one other has tried, but he chickened out after shooting a couple approaches).

This one tommorrow is however essentially 1000 ft shorter then my AME's down south. The Cherokee is a much slower flying bird, and gets off the ground much sooner as well, which makes it possible here. I won't be the first to fly the Cherokee into this strip, which takes away bragging rights, but it also takes away a little bit of the unknowns, which adds to safety. It will be a first for me however, and I look forward to the challenge.

On another entirely different note, for me there have always been a number of things, prerequisites that I have to do in order to consider myself a "real" pilot. Every time I check one thing off on that list I tend to unconsciously invent another to put on it, so that I never seem to actually complete the list making me a full fledged, legit, REAL professional pilot. When I first accepted this job, seeing as how I finally completed the BIG thing, which is have a full time job with the word "pilot" in it, I invented this new requirement - the layover. REAL pilots go on layovers and have overnight trips. So far I've only had day trips with my job, however tomorrow that changes. I get a layover! The maintenance that has to be done is going to take more then a day, which means I have to stay down with the airplane. I'm fully aware that its not going to be nearly as exciting as I think (is that a paradoxical statement?), but it does mean I get to check off the "layerover" item on my real pilot checklist. It also means I'll get to go tool around a different for a day, just because I've got time to kill. I was going to say real town, but this place by some has been called the "A**hole of the World", so its still not really a real town. Hopefully I can get some internet at the hotel I stay at (we're still in Northern Ontario here don't get your hopes up). If that's the case it won't be any worse then staying at my house here.

So tomorrow is an exciting day, I'll take some pictures of the runway once I get there so you can have a visual. I also have other pictures which I promised I'd upload, I'm just too lazy right now and its getting late. Also stay tuned for another piece of news regarding tomorrow. I'd write about it now , but like I said, its getting late, this blog is getting long, and I can't write about too many topics in one blog, because this post already has too many topics as it is.

Handholders and Weathervanes

2009-04-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

So today I had a full day of flying. I did five trips - 10 flights. The weather was blue skies but bumpy and windy all day. My first trip had me going south to pick up a couple gentlemen and about 20 dead, frozen Canadian Geese. Luckily they were all sealed up in bags - the geese. I've heard in some cases, especially flying right out of the bush, they just throw the dead birds in the back of the plane. Which would be all right if they stayed frozen... Anyways I had it good from what I hear.

My home base has an off-site radio service which handles the traffic. There are essentially three levels of traffic control in Canada. The lowest level, which the vast majority of airports in Canada use, is called an ATF, or Aerodrome Traffic Frequency. My hometown, Sarnia, has this. Essentially it is just a standard frequency that's designated for all aircraft in the area to use. There's no controller, all the airplanes taking off and landing from that airport state their intentions and actions on that frequency, and if there is a conflict with another aircraft, that other aircraft, which is monitoring the same radio freqency, will hear it and the two airplanes can work it out between the two of them. Its entirely optional to monitor the ATF within the vicinity of an airport that has one, although highly recommended. This allows NORAD (aircraft with NO RADio) to use the airport. The next level up uses a Radio Service, more on that in a second. The highest level of traffic control an airport can have is a control tower. Most people before they learn otherwise assume that all airports have a control tower. This is not so, in fact I can list on two hands the airports in Ontario that have one. Usually it has to be pretty busy. A control tower is essentially in charge of the traffic on and around the airport. They must issue you a clearance to land, takeoff, join the circuit, taxi, and go to the bathroom. Its actually quite nice. For some newer pilots, if they haven't had much experience flying within airspace with a control tower, it can be quite intimidating. Since I did all of my initial flight training in Sarnia with no control tower, I was terrified of flying into places with one, and avoided them until I got more practice flying in them with an instructor.

After you get the hang of it, it can actually become quite the security blanket, because you have someone holding your hand telling you what to do and pointing out traffic for you. The middle level of traffic control, like at the home base where I'm working now, is like I said a Radio Service, which is somewhere in between an ATF and a control tower. A Radio Service is not really air traffic control in that they can't tell you what to do and when to do, but they are someone who is monitoring the frequency and keeping track of all the airplanes in the area. All airplanes within the designated zone must be talking to the Radio Service, however the Radio Service provides advisory information only. Sometimes these Radio Services are located directly on the field and are equipped with radar and everything, other times, like here, they are off somewhere in a different town listenning in.

So far up here I have counted three different voices who monitor the Radio Service. There's two males and one female. And they all have different styles. When I say styles I simply mean their tone of voice really. Everything is so standardized with phrases and procedure there's not much room for style in how you handle traffic, but there is in how you treat it. I like the female controller here the best. She's the friendliess and most professional. That is in contrast to my opinion of the controllers down in London. In London I think there were at lease four, 3 males and one female. One controller in London sounds Australian and is quite friendly, he was my favourite to talk to there. The female controller however is often times less then friendly. I've heard her snap on other pilots for mistakes they've made, both major and minor, including me, and chewed them out. Its always an embarrasing moment for a pilot to get chewed or "talked down to" by a controller over the radio.

Anyways my next trip was eastbound to pick up a family I dropped off last week, and on departure I was talking to the female controller. I made a mental note that she was my favourite of the three, which is why I just told the above story. When I landed at destination it was a gusty 15-18 knot direct crosswind to the runway, and it was a bit of a struggle to bring the airplane down nicely, but I enjoyed every second of it. The runway is gravel, and afterwards I decided that I actually like landing on gravel.

In a crosswind landing, there's two difficult parts to the landing. The first is actually making sure the wheels touch down aligned in the direction of motion to prevent premature wear of the tires, and more importantly, to stop from shooting off the side of the runway. The next difficult part is keeping the airplane travelling straight down the runway after touchdown. Airplanes have a tendency to do what's called weathervaning in a crosswind. That when an airplane's nose wants to turn into the wind. This is because the vertical stabilizer is at the back of the airplane, so if the wind pushes the v-stab downwind, then the nose turns upwind just like a weathervane. This isn't a problem with flying, but when you're rolling on the ground it can make it difficult to keep the airplane running straight without weathervaning and rolling off the upwind side of the runway. I decided I like gravel because there's less traction then pavement. This means I can let the airplane weathervane and "skid" sideways a bit after I've touched down during my deceleration which makes things a little easier since the airplane doesn't feel so much like shooting off to one side. At any rate we are trying to prevent any skidding motion, because I imagine on gravel its still hard on the tires, but it does take the edge off landing rollouts in a stiff crosswind.

I knew from dropping the family off last week that it was the wife's first time on an airplane, and she was pretty nervous from what I heard. Last week she had a perfectly smooth day, but today was far from it. Considering that and the turbulence today and gusty crosswind I had today I let everyone know when we were strapping in to takeoff that it would be a bit bumpy today. I felt a bit bad for the wife, because it was a pretty wild takeoff and climbout until we got up a little higher to the smoother air, but she seemed ok since she was prepared for it.

The rest of the flights were uneventful. Today I logged almost 10 hrs of flight time in total, and I'm quite tired and hungry, but it was a good day.

Funny Thought

2009-04-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd mention a funny thought I had when I was flying with all my freight on Friday. It occurred to me that if I ever went down with all this freight onboard, and I survived the landing - which is pretty good chances cause there's lots of open space in amongst the groupings of trees - all I'd have to do was make a fire and it'd be nothing worse then a camping trip by myself. I'm already pretty much dressed for the weather, and I'd also have a half ton worth of food with me! What more could I want? I'd just collect some firewood, cook up some ravioli, and hang out until the search party found me, haha. Too bad I don't know how to play the guitar.

Finally Flying

2009-04-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Written April 11, 2009

So yesterday I finally started flying. The day before I did a quick checkout with the other pilot who flies for the company, and he gave me the thumbs up, so yesterday the chief pilot and I went up for a single checkout before they turned me loose.

While on takeoff however I noted the airspeed indicator was non-functional, however it was too late to abort the takeoff. If the airspeed indicator doesn’t work, this indicates that the pitot tube is clogged. The pitot tube is a little tube hanging off the underside of one wing that measures ram air pressure, and displays it in the form of knots or mph, on our airspeed indicator in the cockpit. If the pitot tube is blocked, our airspeed indicator doesn’t work. Its not uncommon in snowy conditions for the pitot tube to become blocked with snow or ice, so every certified airplane is equipped with the ability to electrically heat up the pitot tube via a switch in the cockpit to melt off any ice in the pitot tube and thus unclog it.

The airspeed indicator is one of the most important instruments in the cockpit because essentially we fly the airplane using it. Our stall speed is in the form indicated airspeed, we also use a specific airspeed to achieve the best climb performance, and to tell us when its structurally safe to lower the flaps and landing gear (if applicable). So its nice to have a working airspeed indicator.

Anyways in this case we were already past the point of no return. I should have caught this on the takeoff roll before it was too late to go airborne, but it was only my second flight in the airplane, and being not too familiar and comfortable in the airplane yet my reaction times were diminished. Not to mention the Cherokee 6 accelerates and climbs like a bat out of hell when its empty. If I was more comfortable in the airplane I am confident I’d be more on the ball. Oh well, so we did the circuit anyways. In any regard the chief pilot was happy with my performance and was content to turn me loose on the cargo runs.

Once we got back on the ground we fiddled a bit with blowing out the pitot tube to unclog it, and I took it for one more test flight circuit and the airspeed indicator seemed to be working well this time.

So finally we loaded up the Cherokee with 1000 lbs of groceries and off I went. I flew up the coast with my cargo, landed, and helped load it into the pickup truck they had waiting for me. When I got back there was another load waiting for me, so we loaded the plane up once again and off I went again, this time I had about 900 lbs of potatoes and a few cases of pop. I had three trips for the day, all the while thinking that this beats the heck out of framing houses! Other then when I’m loading and unloading the airplane, which doesn‘t even really take more then 5-10 minutes, it doesn’t even feel like I’m working. Life is good.

End of Day 1

2009-04-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I flew in, unpacked my stuff. Today has been my first full day here. The accommodations aren’t luxurious, but they do the trick, and I get it all to myself since the other pilot who was supposed to be up here with me quit. I’m getting a wi-fi internet connection off my boss’s house next door, but the connection is very poor due to the long range, so I’m working on getting my own internet.

My first experience was this morning at around 9:30. We managed to fit a snow mobile into a Cessna 206. I didn’t think it would be possible. They had to remove all the seats in the airplane including the pilot seat, which was reinstalled after the snow mobile was wrestled in. The snow mobile itself had to have the windscreen and the two front skis removed as well. It went in though, as well as a bunch of other stuff - incredible.

The plan for today was also to take the Cherokee 6 up flying to get me checked out in it, but the weather wasn’t good enough for training, so it never happened. I went and did some grocery shopping, and then refuelled the 206 when it was back. It’s a family run company, and they all, as well as me, live in houses right by the river. The river is frozen this time of year, so the 206 is on skis and they fly it right off the river behind the house. The Cherokee is at the airport.

In the meantime I have the company operations manual to study, because I have to write a test on it. I'm also studying the Cherokee's flight manual so I'll be competant and familiar with the airplane for my flight check. According to the operations manual I require 3 hours air time of initial training.

The Northern Store up here is surprisingly large. Its no Super-Walmart, but it has a reasonable selection of groceries, unlike the one in Waskagonish when I was there. It is more expensive then down south, but not as bad as I was expecting. I spent $100 for about a weeks worth of groceries as well as a number of household supplies like toilet paper and cleaning supplies. I suspect my weekly groceries will be around $50-80.

There is a cute little 8 week old Beagle pup owned by the owner of the company, which I met this morning. This afternoon as I was walking back from fuelling the airplane, she came bounding through the snow towards me, with mom reluctantly and cautiously following. I played with them for a bit. The pup couldn’t get enough of me, and would have followed me home if the mother would have let her, but the mom was shy and uneasy about the encounter, but let us play for a bit before she decided it was time to go and herded her puppy back towards the house. Very cute.

The Trip

2009-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

I’m on my way. Right now I’m the plane, its on autopilot, just heading over the south shore of Georgian Bay north of Wiarton. The sky is so far clear so its an easy flight and I have time to blog on my brand spankin new netbook (a mini laptop computer). I anticipate lower ceilings past Sudbury, and I’ll have to pay a little more attention to flying. All I see right now is the blue sky above with a few clouds in the distance around me, and an expanse of deep blue water ahead of me. I barely see any ice in the water, its mostly melted off by this time of year.

I like flying twins, they give me a warm fuzzy. Not only do they allow me to fly over water legally with no lifejackets on board, but they give me the confidence in the aircraft to do it as well. It will be an interesting change switching back to flying singles in my job, especially since it will be almost all over hostile terrain. Its going to require me to change my thinking again in that I’ll have to constantly be looking for good places to land if my engine quits - it will always have to be in the back of my mind. But for now, I’m in the Twin Comanche.

Its Sunday afternoon as a I write this, I’ve been delayed by weather 3 days now. I suppose that’s not too bad now that I say it, but its seemed like an eternity. Especially this morning, I basically spent the entire morning clicking refresh on the AWWS (Aviation Weather Website) waiting for the weather to change. It finally looks like I may be able to squeak through, so I’m on my way making a run for it.

It’s a little less then a 3.5 hr trip from takeoff to landing. Timmins is the last airport before my destination, which is about 45 min away, but thanks to the Comanche’s tip tanks, I have enough fuel to fly all the way to my destination, dink around for a bit, and fly all the way back to Timmins with fuel remaining in case the weather is no good. That gives me another warm fuzzy. Its important to always have a plan B.

I’m pretty much over the center of Georgian Bay now, and there’s a big cluster of ice chunks, it kind of looks cool. Too bad I forgot to put fresh batteries in my camera.

Its 4:03 right now, I’ve been airborne for an hour, so in about 40 more minutes my tip tanks will be dry and I’ll have to switch to my auxiliary fuel tanks. I’ll burn on those for a bit, but I want to keep a little fuel in them, so I won’t run them dry. I’ll make my final fuel selector switch over to the main tanks after about 45 minutes on them.

I also have to remember to make a position report. I’m getting into pretty remote terrain, and if I go down it would be nice to have narrowed down the search parameters for the SAR guys, giving them a better chance to find me sooner.

Gauges check all green. I’ve got a headwind so groundspeed is only showing 144 kts, so if I don’t have to fly a dogleg around weather I’ll be there in 2 hours 20 minutes.

Well I’m just crossing over the north shore of Georgian Bay now, with Sudbury about 30 nm ahead. Weather still looks great, minus the suddden light turbulence that is making it difficult to type on my netbook. The turbulence appears to have subsided now.

Here’s another cool picture. I’m flying about a hundred feet below a layer of scattered to few clouds. Once again no camera, but I have a bunch of pictures of clouds anyways. The awesome view from the cockpit doesn’t quite translate into an equally awesome photo.

Gauges check green, will expect to switch tanks in about 20 minutes. The tip tanks are nice because I can run those right bone dry since they don’t have a rubber bladder. The other ones, while they can be run dry if I wanted too, its better to leave some fuel in them.

I’ve now climbed 500 hundred feet so I could get on top of that scattered layer of clouds. Its always smoother above cumulous clouds then it is below. For now the layer is only few to scattered, so its okay to be on top, but I’ll have to watch and make sure they don’t close in on me and trap above the cloud layer.

I’m over Sudbury now, I can see the smoke stacks below me. Once I’m on the North Side I’ll call London Radio and make a position report. Actually I might as well do it now.

Done. Now SAR knows I’ve at least made it past Sudbury.

The cloud layer seems to be getting a little thicker now. Its now definitely a scattered layer, looking like it might turn into broken shortly. I might have to descend through a hole shortly to get underneath.

I expect my engines will start sputtering shortly, meaning I’ll have to switch the fuel tanks over. Whenever I have passengers I usually try to warn them that the engines may start surging shortly and that its nothing to worry about so they are not terrified when it starts happening. Its caught me off guard in the past before when my mind was occupied with other things, and …

Ok I’m now below the cloud layer. I’ve made a spiral desent through a hole in the clouds, and I’m now at 2500 ft above sea level, down from 5000. Its much bumpier down here, so I may have to end my blogging here.

As I was saying though, running a tank dry can really catch you off guard if you’re not expecting it! The first thing you brain tells you is "engine failure!", and just before you crap your pants you remember the fuel tank just needs switching over.

Anyways I must be going now.

5:31
So I’m down to 2000 ft, cruising underneath the clouds. The weather is stable enough for me to pull out the netbook and write a quick update. I passed by Timmins about 15 minutes ago. Oh I see Cochcrane off my left wing. Less then an hour to go.

Ok as I was typing that the cloud layer lifted a couple hundred feet, and now I’m at a more comfortable 2200, about 1400 ft above ground level. Much of the last hour was spent skirting hills and treetops 400-800 ft above the ground, but now the terrain is dropping away a little bit, so I have some more room to play with.

I passed a lone lookout tower on a hilltop in between Timmins and Sudbury, which I marked on my GPS. I couldn’t see any roads leading up to it or anything. It would be quite the trek to get to, I wonder what it was there for, and how old it was. How erie. I always think things like that are so cool. They have a past and a story to tell and it makes me wonder.

Well in another 30 minutes or so I’ll begin landing preparations, and I don’t have much else to talk about at the moment. Once I get settled in and hooked up to the internet I’ll upload this blog and maybe write another. Peace.