Sulako's Blog

2012-01-07T07:16:00.001-05:00

I leave the plane out for one single night in New Jersey, and this is what happens. I keed, I keed - she's down for her ten-thousand hour inspection. She will be in pieces for about a month while the mechanics do their thing. This is a huge inspection and they will be doing stuff I haven't seen before. For example, taking the tail off. Lots more pics and vids to come.

2011-12-28T09:49:00.012-05:00

This continues from my last two (non-reindeer) posts, so read down to catch up.

I got a whole whack of information in this post from AvCanada, specifically the accident speculation thread. Stuff in quotes is taken verbatim from the discussion thread.

This is the ILS approach chart for Runway 35T into Resolute Bay. Do NOT use this to navigate, it's out-of-date now.

This is what the ILS into Resolute Bay looks like. The ceiling in this approach was 1,300':

On August 20th 2011, First Air flight 6560 was a 737 travelling from Yellowknife to Resolute Bay with 15 people on board, including four crew members. They called about 4 miles final for the runway, and then crashed a few minutes later. The aircraft appears to have been under control, and the surviving passengers reported nothing unusual right up to the point of impact.

The accident report hasn't come out yet, and the following stuff is entirely speculation - I want to make that clear. But I'm going to speculate.

METAR CYRB 202000Z 18009KT 8SM VCFG SCT003 OVC005 07/07 A2986 RMK
SF2SC5 VIS E-SE 3 FG SLP116=

The weather at the time of the accident was foggy with low (300') scattered and (500') overcast layers. People on the ground couldn't see much at all, but flight visibility can be very different from ground visibility.

We do know some things: The crew was still in control on three mile final, the engines were running, the aircraft is oriented parallel to the runway and level with the horizon, and the wreckage is strewn across a large area. If it had stalled or a mechanical failure had caused it to rapidly descend it would leave a much smaller impact area. That has all the hallmarks of classic CFIT, or 'controlled flight into terrain'.

Here's a Google earth view of the area around the accident. The wreckage trail is represented by the yellow line. The gully leading down from the nose of the aircraft at the end of the wreckage appears to contain the same washed out sort of area in google and the photo. The two red circles outline similar geometric forms. One is the approach end of 35T. The other is a road structure on a slightly sloping flat area elevated above the airport by about 325 feet and one mile to the right of the centerline of the runway. The lake to the southeast of the wreckage trail could appear in certain cloud arrangements to be similar to the shoreline on the approach to 35T.

The aircraft would have been between two layers of clouds with approximately 200 feet between layers, with the bottom scattered layer at 475 ASL and the top broken layer at 675 ASL. Some of what was a scattered layer from the weather observation point may have been broken in the hill above.

Now here's the thing: Even with the local terrain being a bit confusing, there should have been no problem finding the runway and landing with any normal kind of ILS approach, with a 500 foot ceiling. ILS tolerances are pretty tight, and it would be really hard to conceive why the aircraft would have been a mile to the right of its course, and more or less on runway heading without any abnormal indications to the crew.

Let's add some more information: here's another picture of the accident site, this time with the Resolute VOR location plotted. This one chills my bones.

It turns out the ILS was functional on that day, but suppose the crew didn't get a glideslope indication and decided to fly the Localizer only approach. That takes them down to 540' ASL. The ridge they hit was 653' ASL.

The step down approach (localizer) really comes into the equation if the aircraft is mistakenly inbound on the 167T radial from YRB. In that scenario, the crew believes it is tuned to the ILS, can't get glideslope, and switches to a localizer approach with the final drop only 160 feet four miles back. They keep tracking the 167T radial as if it were the localizer. They don't have glideslope because they're tuned to 112.1 instead of 110.3. Their DME is coming off the VOR.

"In the mistuned VOR scenario, they have to have POKAN on the 167 radial at 4 DME, a mile east of proper track. Then do the procedure turn and fly back inbound on the false localizer. Maybe they left the VOR eastbound with 167 already set on the OBS, flew it needle centered to the false POKAN, did the PT and re-intercepted inbound. Get no GS, maybe call it in U/S, and fly the localizer approach instead. That scenario ends exactly where the accident happened.

I can't see a late tuning of the VOR and nobody noticing that the needle moved when the OBS was turned. If they'd been tracking 167 outbound to Pokan, and then set up the inbound course on the CDI, they wouldn't have noticed it so much as they would have been in the PT where they would expect it to be deflected."

An added factor now: Has anyone noticed that there is no missed approach point for the LOC/DME approach on the ILS/DME 35T plate? Not on the DND copies anyway. Take a look.

A second factor: Notice how the VOR isn't even depicted on the ILS chart? Why on earth would the crew have it tuned in? Well, a couple of possibilities exist. There was a temporary military control tower at Resolute that day, coordinating aircraft that were participating in a mock search-and-rescue exercise. The control tower was asking other aircraft for their radial and distance to the airport, and the accident aircraft had reported that information to the control tower fairly late in their approach. In order to report that information they would have had to tune in the VOR. The other possibility is that maybe they were using the VOR to navigate to the airport before commencing the approach.

"Another Canadian carrier used to have an unofficial procedure on the 737-200. If you wanted to retain the DME display while doing an ILS, you would tune #1 to the ILS and #2 to the VOR. Then you would transfer the display [overhead switch] to "both on 1" Now, both pilots would have their HSI displaying the info from the #1 radio, and the dme would readout from the vor still tuned on the #2 radio. This practice was banned after a crew mistakenly switched "both on 2" during an approach to Prince George. Thinking they were tracking the LOC, the aircraft descended towards the YXS VOR and very nearly had an accident. [With both radios tuned to the ILS you would not have a DME readout and there is no DME hold switch on the 200] The practice of transferring the display was then banned and to be used only in case of radio failure. Keep in mind that was another air carrier, not First Air."

Here's a pic of the panel from the actual accident aircraft.

Hmm, same switches.

But wouldn't their GPWS (Ground Proximity Warning System) have saved them? The 737 in question was equipped with an older model, which basically gives no warnings once the landing gear is down. GPWS will only give you two calls "500'" and "Sink Rate", whereas the newer Enhanced GPWS will give 1000', 500' 100', 50', 40', 30', 20', and 10' above ground calls. This late in the approach, the gear would have been down.

So here's my speculation: With the knowledge that the military was asking for radials/DME bearings prior to the crash, maybe the VOR was tuned in, thinking they had the ILS frequency up. Now to those of you who fly IFR, how often have you made a late change in the approach? It happens to me once in a while. If you thought you had the ILS tuned in and once on the approach you had a G/S flag, it would be a fast and easy brief to re-brief for the LOC only approach and continue to the higher minumums (especially in an environment such as the Arctic airports)...if that was the case here, the LOC only minimums still would have put them into a hill if they were tracking the VOR.

One final pic:

This was taken on the LOC DME BC approach to rwy 17T (the accident runway, just landing in the opposite direction) in 2009. The distance to the rwy threshold is less than 1.5NM. Can you spot the runway? Imagine looking for that in low cloud and fog, let alone adding being on the wrong approach frequency.

Lots of links in the accident chain on this one, and again the final report hasn't come out yet - but if it went even remotely close to how I think it went, you can see the tragedy that resulted from a bunch of different factors that added up all at once.

2011-12-26T09:05:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Lisa, myself and the angriest and smelliest reindeer ever :)

2011-12-21T14:42:00.002-05:00

I'm referencing my last post, so read down to get caught up.

Those of you who guessed there may have been some confusion with the Teterboro VOR and ILS frequencies, you win a cookie!

The inbound ILS course was set, but when the non-flying pilot read the chart and saw the TEB frequency in the 108 mhz range, he thought "108 is an ILS frequency", and tuned it and identified it. It's not quite that simple,so I'll paraphrase from Wiki:

VORs are assigned radio channels between 108.0 MHz and 117.95 MHz. Turns out the first 4 MHz is shared with the ILS band though. To leave channels for ILS, in the range 108.0 to 111.95 MHz, the 100 kHz digit (the first decimal place) is always even, so 108.00, 108.05, 108.20, and so on are VOR frequencies but 108.10, 108.15, 108.30, and so on, are reserved for ILS.

I didn't know that, but now I do. 108.4 would be a VOR because the .4 is even, where 108.9 would be an ILS because the .9 is not. I learn something new every day, and it's a good way to add a cross-check to the frequency being selected.

As we weren't expecting to see a glideslope indication (the G/S being out of service on this particular day), no warning flares went up right away.

Fortunately for us we were in good weather so we saw the airport a fair ways back, and got aligned with the runway, then discovered our mistake. Also fortunate for us, we were in a radar environment with ATC services, so if we had gone off-course in any major way (or even a minor way, this being among the busiest airspace on the planet), ATC would have let us know.

So how do we prevent this from happening again? Well, with SMS we ask ourselves a bunch of "whys".

Why were we off course? The wrong frequency was entered by the non-flying pilot on the approach.

Why was the wrong frequency entered? The non-flying pilot misread the chart and didn't see the correct frequency.

Why did he misread the chart? From his previous flight experience, he assumed a 108.** frequency would be an ILS (the desired approach), and didn't read further to the right of the chart where the ILS frequency was. It doesn't help that most people read from left to right, and the box on the left was the VOR, while the box on the right was the ILS. A contributing factor was that this was his first trip into the airport.

Why didn't the other pilot catch that in the approach briefing? Because our SOP's dictated that the non-flying pilot is solely responsible for entering the approach frequencies into our radios. A contributing factor was the Glideslope was out of service, so nobody was expecting to see it, the lack of which normally would have been an early indicator of something not-quite-right on the approach.

A-ha! The first part of that last paragraph seems to show a weakness on the part of our procedures - we had just one pilot in charge of confirming the information in the box, and while it had served us for a decade, this incident showed us that it could be improved. I immediately issued a memo stating that from now on, both pilots shall confirm the proper radio frequency is entered into the navigation radios prior to the start of the approach. We have added standard phraseology to our approach briefings "Radio tuned and identified to ***** (whatever the appropriate frequency is), Confirm?" The other pilot will physically point to the approach chart with the desired frequency and then to the nav radio, then both will listen to the proper approach ident, followed by "Confirmed". This will put both pilots more in the loop when it comes to entering this data into the box, which will add an extra layer of protection into our approach procedures.

Tomorrow we will talk about another aircraft that *appears* to have made a chillingly similar error, but with considerably more tragic results. It's pretty fascinating, and from our recent experience I totally get how it could occur. I'm talking about First Air flight 6560, which crashed in August of this year. More tomorrow.

2011-12-18T10:17:00.003-05:00

Something happened recently that I want to share with you. We made a mistake, and learned from it. As part of our SMS (Safety Management System), when we make mistakes we try to identify the root cause, and then come up with a way to mitigate the situation so we don't make the same mistake in the future.

We fly to KTEB, Teterboro New Jersey, a lot. It's where most of the corporate jets go when they have passengers who wish to do business in downtown Manhattan. It's about a 30-40 minute drive from the airport to Wall Street, and the airport has less congestion than Newark, JFK or La Guardia.

A little while ago, the plane did a KTEB trip. It was an early-morning departure, and the weather was fine. The approach in use was the ILS (Instrument Landing System) to runway 06. On a full ILS approach, the radio signal lines you up with the runway and also tells you when to descend, and if you are high or low on your descent angle. The ILS approach is the most common instrument approach in most large airports, because most airplanes that use it can fly down to 200' above the ground without looking outside, and on some advanced ILS approaches, some sophisticated airplanes can use the radio signal to fly right down onto the runway without looking outside at all - pretty handy in places like Boston or Vancouver where it can get pretty foggy.

The only unusual variable on this trip was that the ILS for runway 06 had the glideslope radio signal out of service, so the approach only offered lateral guidance, ie it would only line you up with the runway, and you had to use alternate methods to calculate when to descend.

http://www.airnav.com/depart?http://204.108.4.16/d-tpp/1113/00890IL6.PDF

That's a link to the ILS approach onto runway 06, so you can follow along in glorious hi-res if you have a .pdf reader.

This next part is kinda technical, and I can`t figure out how to make it less so for non-pilots, but I`ll have a summary afterwards so bear with me.

The approach is pretty straight-forward - Air Traffic Control will give you radar vectors to intercept the inbound track, which is an angle of 060 degrees to the airport. They usually angle you so that you intercept the approach track at Vings intersection. Now there are a few ways to verify that you are at Vings intersection. One way is to put the waypoint in your GPS receiver, another way is to put the 294 degree radial off the JFK VOR and the 080 degree radial off Solberg VOR and fly over where they cross each other, but another way is to dial in the TEB VOR and when you are on the localizer and at 12.5 DME (taken from the VOR), then you are at Vings. The last way is the way we chose to identify Vings.

In our SOP`s (Standard Operating Procedures), the pilot flying (the guy in the left seat) will brief the approach and the non-flying pilot will tune and identify the radios. This was done, but as the plane approached the airport, it became obvious that the airplane wasn`t quite where it should be. The weather was good, so the pilot flying was able to see the runway about 20 miles back, and lined the airplane up with it nicely.

The thing is, the navigation radios were saying that the airplane was pretty far to the left of the runway, and this caused some confusion in the cockpit. I happened to be sitting in the back on this flight, watching the flight crew, and I was also confused for a few seconds.

Take a long hard look at the approach plate, and see if you can figure out the mistake that was made. Keep in mind that the glideslope was out of service for the ILS, so we weren`t expecting to see any glidepath information, nor did we.

//edit - to add a little information, the plane was showing off-track by only a few degrees, but our localizer indicator was showing nearly full deflection even though we were lined up with the runway. As mentioned earlier, the weather was fine so the briefing was for the visual approach backed up by the Localizer (the localizer is the ILS system without the glidepath system). The pilot flying had flown this approach probably a hundred times in the past few years, but this was the first time the non-flying pilot had been into Teterboro.//

I`ll talk about what happened next tomorrow.

2011-11-19T09:56:00.002-05:00

See how many contributing factors you can identify in this particular gear-up accident. Full-screen and 1080p for maximum detail.

I'm not gonna judge - I have been in situations where I was distracted enough that the gear warning horn was what saved me from a similarly embarrassing landing.

2011-11-18T10:36:00.003-05:00

The portable XM iPad weather works great on the ground and in my car, but we don't fly til Sunday so I won't have an airborne assessment for another couple of days.

Let's watch an airplane get hit by lightning while we wait. The difference here is that the airplane is parked on the ramp. Watch it in 480p and fullscreen so you don't miss the tiny details.

From a post on AvCanada by ktcanuk called "Why your bags are delayed in a thunderstorm" :

"An AeroRepublica Embraer 190 hit by lightning in Medellin, Colombia at the gate. You'll need to watch it several times to see all of the action; It’s only about 10 seconds duration. Three key things/areas to watch. First watch the tail of the aircraft as the lightning bolt hits the vertical stabilizer, do not blink, it happens that fast. Next, watch the nose of the aircraft where ground crew walk up to and under the nose of the airplane, then quickly retreat. Then, look just to your left of the nose gear. That brown square on the ground is a metal plate imbedded in the concrete, with an access cover in it. The lightning strike exits the airplane onto the metal plate, which sends the access cover flying through the air toward the tug on the far left."

2011-11-11T07:19:00.003-05:00

The iPad has truly revolutionized aviation. I can use it as a moving map, look up airport data, file flight plans and do all sorts of useful and relevant activities.

'real' iPad post coming up next week when our airborne XM weather hardware arrives- I just ordered the Mobile Link package from Baron Systems - it will apparently stream XM weather from the receiver via wifi to my iPad. Gonna use the Foreflight Mobile HD app, which has geo-referenced US approach charts, Canadian charts, and will display the weather right on the charts. At least, that's my hope. We have on-board XM weather already, but it's through a 6-year-old tablet PC that's cranky at the best of times, so I'm hoping for something a little more stable. Next week will tell!

2011-11-04T20:41:00.004-04:00

This is why people fly private.

I'm in Orlando at the moment, after dropping the plane off here for a few days, and I'm trying to fly home on Air Canada. As you can see from the pic, the flight is delayed. No big deal there, I understand that planes go mechanical and that sometimes weather can be a factor.

Here's what angers me though: The display is essentially useless: there is no revised ETA. Oh, and no actual human being to talk to either. I took this pic AFTER our scheduled departure time, and we still haven't seen a gate agent or AC rep. If I displayed a similar lack of concern for my clients I'd be out of a job pretty freakin' fast, I can tell you that.

Oh well, at least I can more fully consider my options next time I book a commercial airline ticket. Yeah, I sound bitchy - I'm away from Lisa and Nolan for the first time since he was born, and I don't know when I'm getting home. C'mon Air Canada, get your act together!

I'm fairly proactive when it comes to stuff like this, so I sent a copy of my pic to the Air Canada customer feedback website. This is the reply I got:

------------------------------

Thank you for contacting us.

This is to confirm that we have received your correspondence and there is no requirement to re-submit your information. Our processing time is currently 20 business days for general customer concerns, 30 business days for baggage related issues and up to 4 weeks for baggage tracing. We will make every effort to respond sooner.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as you await our response.

---------------------------

Oh Em Eff Gee. Why even have a customer feedback website if you are going to have delays like that? It only enrages me further...

//continues to grumble about the sorry state of airline travel under his breath...

2011-10-25T14:52:00.005-04:00

First of all, here's a pic of Nolan being philosophical while wearing a monkey hat. I'm absolutely in love, even though he's currently living life on Australian time :)

Now this is kind of a total bait n' switch on my part because this next Youtube video is one of the most tense and disturbing things I have ever listened to. *SPOILER* The guys live. I'm saying this ahead of time because otherwise it would be pretty unbearable listening. I found this video posted on AvCanada.

This is a Mitsubishi MU-2 in severe icing, over the mountains, trying to make it to Kelowna BC. Kelowna is in a valley, with high mountains all around.

The MU-2 has gotten a pretty bad reputation in icing, in fact it was subject to a full icing recertification review after some high-profile accidents. The review found that the MU-2 was properly certified for flight into icing, and that it's perfectly safe to fly in light-to-moderate icing as long as you follow the proper procedures. If you disrespect the airplane in icing, you will hear the angels singing sooner rather than later. I'm absolutely NOT saying that's what happened in this situation, it sounds to me like they were doing everything right but got caught in severe icing, which by definition will even overwhelm icing equipment that's working properly.

If you check the first part of this video, you'll hear the the guys picked up a lot of icing, and it caused a propellor imbalance. That can cause some serious vibration, to the point of the prop departing the aircraft. The only solution is to reduce power (and descend), or keep the power up and hope the plane doesn't shake apart. A hell of a choice.

I flew the MU-2 for just over a thousand hours, and my older blog entries are full of stories about it. A beautiful machine, but particularly unforgiving.

2011-10-17T11:11:00.001-04:00

Welcome Nolan! Weighing in at 7 lbs 5 ounces and scoring a perfect 9/9 on his APGAR test, he entered the world at 830 this morning with a mighty roar. Happy birthday to our champion son! Man, I have never felt an adrenaline rush like that before in my life. I have also never cried like that before in my life. Such a primal rush! Both baby and mom are doing great - they are napping and I'm riding an endorphin high that's taking me into low-earth orbit.

Now back to staring at him while he sleeps...

2011-10-13T09:04:00.002-04:00

*Update* From yesterday's post. We got back from the Doc's office just now and baby Balthor* is scheduled to make his debut blog post on Monday at 8am. My last sleep-in weekend! Ever :)

2011-10-12T18:19:00.005-04:00

We are totally set for a home birth, so that's cool. We completed all the checklists, bought all the accessories (sheets, towels, tarps for our bedroom, beer-for-daddy, etc) and are totally set to have our son in 3 weeks! Except for one thing...

We spent a whole whack of time at the hospital yesterday and today, and after taking most of Lisa's blood and most of my sanity, the doc told us a word.

Choleostasis. Ko-leo-stasis.

Big word, right? It translates to "itchy hands and feet at the end of pregnancy, with possible side-effect". Sometimes when a woman is near the end of her pregnancy, her hormones make her liver angry. The angry liver beats up on her gallbladder, which screws up the ratio of gall-bladder salts that it produces.

Fun fact: when your gallbladder salt ratio gets screwed up, it makes your extremities itch like a mofo. It's absolutely unbearable for her, and it gets even worse at night. In fact, we have a big Tupperware container that I fill with water and ice packs, and we get up a couple of times in the middle of the night to soak her feet and hands so she can sleep again for an hour or two.

Unfortunately there is a possible side-effect for our son, and even more unfortunately, the side-effect is 'possible late-term stillbirth', especially if Lisa carries past 38 weeks. The odds are still low, but they are above zero so we are going to err on the side of caution. Lisa is currently at 37 weeks and 2 days, so we are meeting with the obstetrician tomorrow to discuss when she's gonna induce Lisa, which will be before next Tuesday.

Inducing is carried out at the hospital. Oh, as an added bonus they tell us that baby Balthor* will likely enter the world via Cesarean due to (whatever the hell it was the doc said this morning when I was zoned out and not paying attention - I think it had something to do with itchy hands and feet though).

Heck of a thing to go from anticipating an uneventful home-birth to getting ready for a Cesarean in the hospital. At least the end result is a healthy baby, and that's really the point of all of this, isn't it.

Last but not least, we got to see a whole bunch of awesome ultrasound footage of him in the past 24 hours, and he's pretty damn cute. Watch out, ladies who will be graduating in 2029!

Anyway, that's my story. Now to try to get some rest for what is guaranteed to be a loooong day tomorrow, followed by a loooong 18+ years or so :) My God I'm looking forward to it!

*As per agreement between Lisa and myself, Balthor is now a placeholder name (we have a more normal one picked out) unless he enters the world and obviously is a Balthor.

2011-10-04T15:28:00.003-04:00

This is our new F/o. He passed (and did good on) his checkride today! As it was his first jet we had to do some in-aircraft training, so this is our new hire on his first flight in the actual aircraft. For the pilot-geek crowd, the Canadian Air Regulations are written in such a way that if you have not acted as a crewmember on a jet before, you have to do 3 takeoffs and landings in the actual airplane before you are signed off, which must include: normal t/o, visual circuit, normal landing, simulated engine failure on takeoff, simulated engine failure at V1, simulated single-engine landing, non-precision approach, circling approach (if applicable), and at least 1 more landing. I mean, this is on top of spending a couple of weeks at Flightsafety, doing dozens of emergency drills and sweating it out in their simulator with the computer graphics and the motion and whatnot.

You may note that I call him a First Officer but he's sitting in the Captain's seat. Yup. At our company we swap flying legs, meaning we swap between "pilot who is moving the control surfaces of the airplane" and "pilot who is navigating and handling the radios". The placement of the controls / switches / instruments in the cockpit is such that it's a lot easier to actually fly the airplane from the left seat, so that's what we do. All our flight crew are trained and qualified to perform Captain or First Officer duties from either seat, so while our new guy will be sitting in the left seat, the person in the right seat will be a qualified Captain.

Now that he's a flight crew member with us he may turn up from time to time in the blog. I asked him what he wanted to be named online and he had no opinion on the matter, so next up - a contest to give our new F/o an internet handle! Polite suggestions only please :)

2011-09-18T11:46:00.006-04:00

Yeah, it's been a while since I posted last. I have been both busy and lazy, but I have a few spare moments now so here goes nothing.

1. We hired a new pilot, and he started his training course at Flightsafety earlier this week. In this business attitude is everything and he has a good one, so we are very hopeful for a successful outcome. His last gig was as a Training Captain on the Beech 1900, which is a 19-seat turboprop used by commuter airlines. I think he will likely find the Citation 550 anticlimactic rather than intimidating, at least compared to the Beech 1900 which apparently can be a handful during emergencies.

2. Kitsch flew his first line flight at Air Canada last Monday, and I look forward to hearing about his adventures as an Embraer pilot. It's a very different lifestyle, and it'll be interesting to see how it compares / contrasts to corporate life.

3. Lisa is still pregnant as heck, so that's cool. We are less than 6 weeks from our son's predicted arrival date and I'm enjoying every morsel of rest I get in the interim. Still no consensus on a name though, so keep those suggestions coming. Lisa has agreed to 'Balthor' as a middle name if I whine enough, but that's as far as we have gotten.

4. Lisa's hometown of Goderich (where her and I met) was hit by an F3 tornado and eaten for breakfast by mother nature, so that sucked. The devastation was truly amazing, it looked like a disaster-movie set. Her family is fine, but some of the buildings they own were damaged pretty badly, to the extent that demolition may be required. Again, that sucks. One nice thing was that the company Lisa and I work for donated a bunch of money for relief supplies, so we hit Costco, drove to Goderich, and were able to deliver a lot of good stuff to families who really need it.

Oh, and I continue to fly here and there. For example, I flew to California yesterday. Here, let's talk about that for a second.

Here's a pic I took yesterday afternoon, heading toward Van Nuys airport. You know what's disturbing? See all that white fog? That's not fog, but it rhymes with fog. Mental note: take shallow breaths when inhaling air in L.A.

California was nice, but it was pretty hot. We hurried home so we could ride the ILS into Newark NJ today, which is featured below. Nothing too weird, just an ILS down to 300' with about 2 miles visibility. You can skip forward to about 6:20 when we start to get the lights...

Oh, one last thing for now - here's a special quick video I took a couple of weeks ago and then forgot about.

2011-07-29T10:09:00.005-04:00

Our iPad2 is very useful on board the airplane - we have Jeppesen charts installed as well as lots of other useful apps. The iPad2 replaces the original iPad, which I left in a hotel room in Phoenix, AZ. What I'm waiting for is an XM weather receiver that will talk to the iPad via bluetooth so that we can get airborne weather on the iPad. We already have airborne XM weather via a tablet PC on board, but the tablet is cranky and clunky.

Ideally Jeppesen puts weather on their charts as well so we can switch from the weather app to the approach app and still maintain that situational awareness. Their current app is decent, but lots of other iPad apps give you US charts with the airplane superimposed on the charts so you can watch as you fly the approach, and Jepp doesn't offer that yet.

But I digress...yup the iPad2 sure is a neat piece of hardware. Wait, what's that on the top right corner?

Seagull poop maybe?

Nope.

That's not good. That's what happens when I leave the iPad between the seats, then unlatch my seatbelt and let the buckle fall to the floor, through the iPad screen. I got a cover for it, which was inconveniently underneath the iPad when I dropped the seatbelt buckle on it.

I did that on Wednesday, and yesterday I made an online appointment at the Apple store to see what could be done. When I got there I showed the iPad to the guy and explained that I broke it because I was stoopid, the guy said "Tell you what - I'm going to give you a one-time replacement for it. This time it's free, but if you do this again it'll be $325 to fix the screen." Hell yeah I can agree to those terms! 5 minutes later I walked out of the store with a brand-new replacement iPad for the one I carelessly broke, and new-found respect and admiration for the customer service at Apple.

2011-07-21T11:00:00.002-04:00

Red Bull at night, pilot's delight. I have flown 10 of the past 12 days, which is pretty unusual, and the occasional pick-me-up comes in pretty handy - I think this particular Red Bull met its demise on the way back from Boston. I love Red Bull so hard, I seriously do.

Kitch's last day is tomorrow, so we are spending today and tomorrow paperworking and tidying up. The replacement hiring process continues, with many interviews and a couple more to come. Turns out it's pretty hard to blog about the process, at least for the moment, so I think I might wait until we pick someone before I go any further on that front.

Oh, I have used lots of the suggested interview questions / techniques that you all posted in response to my last blog entry, so thanks for those :)

2011-06-30T10:28:00.004-04:00

Okay, let's talk more about the hiring process.

For some background, scroll down a couple of posts to the 'everything changes, everything ends' one, then come on back because I need some advice.

The stakes are pretty high for me - whomever gets hired will be working closely with me, and I want to make sure we mesh well. They will also be flying with my boss, who is a great pilot, a smart guy and pretty reasonable to work for, but who also assumes that people will operate at 110% efficiency, so there isn't any room for stupidity or laziness. I like that, because I like the challenge and frankly because I'm up to the challenge - yeah, I certainly have the Captain's ego to go along with my Captain's qualifications and experience, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in this situation.

Anyway, if I end up hiring someone who turns out to be a dud, it's gonna be an expensive mistake, and my job security is pretty much directly proportional to the number of expensive mistakes I don't make, if you catch my drift.

I don't care nearly as much about flying experience as I do about personality. "Hire for attitude, train for experience" is my mantra in corporate aviation-land, and it has served me well thus far. That being said, if we hire a 200-hour wonder then they will be sitting right-seat for ages and ages until they qualify for their Airline Transport Pilot's License (which they need to fly as Captain), so there are some experience considerations involved.

My plan is to hold the interviews at a nearby restaurant or pub - I think you can learn a lot more about a person during lunch / over beers than you can sitting across from them in a boardroom. Am I wrong?

I looked online and found a valuable post at a blog called 'Pilot Notes', and I think I'll shamelessly steal some of the questions listed, but I think there are some other areas that could be covered - after all, the actual flying part of this job is a relatively small portion of the job itself - we do lots of paperwork, and we will be spending days on the road together, so want to be able to assess that stuff as well.

Now here's the whole point of this post: If you were in my position, what other questions might you be asking the candidates during interviews? Let's assume that the candidates demonstrate good technical knowledge about aviation / airplanes, so that stuff is not in question.

2011-06-29T18:12:00.006-04:00

I'm gonna go back in time for a second.

Kitsch and I were at our Toronto Pearson office a few months ago, hanging out and paperworking, when we got a phone call. It went something like this:

"Hey, do you have your plane available?"
"Sure. When? Where?"
"St. Catharines. As soon as you can get here"
"But St. Catharines is only 12 minutes away. Wouldn't it be faster for your clients to drive? Also, we are gonna burn a lot of fuel for a short flight, so it's gonna cost extra."
"We'll pay the extra cost, just get here now. You aren't taking anyone anywhere, we just need the plane. It's for a tv show."
"I love television shows! We'll be right over."

We hauled airplane butt across the lake, and landed. We sat in the airplane for a few hours as they filmed some actors getting in and out of the airplane over and over again. We watched an actor dressed up as a pilot. We ate delicious catering while the pilot-actor got shot, over and over again. They gave us back our airplane, and we flew home. The actual filming process was pretty boring, but the food was delicious and our airplane is immortalized!

Here's a sample of the result :)

For the full experience, watch Covert Affairs Season 2 Episode 4, which came out last night. I imagine the episode is likely available online or on bittorrent, but I wouldn't know for sure :p

That being said, the plane is only in the first few minutes of the show - once the pilot gets shot, it's pretty much over for us.

2011-06-28T11:50:00.003-04:00

Everything changes, everything ends.

Kitsch got "The Call" from Air Canada last week, and will be starting with them at the end of July. He is a great pilot and a good person to be in the road with, and I'm really sorry to see him go, but I understand why - he's 30 and will have a 35-year career with them if he starts now. Unfortunately it does involve some sacrifice - the shameful truth about Air Canada is that the initial pay is just a hair over 35k/year and a new hire's schedule is best described as "often, and chaotic". However, after a few years the pay and schedule start getting decent, and after a few years more it gets downright lavish ;) That, along with free travel passes and the opportunity to fly heavy equipment across the planet really makes it a no-brainer for someone interested in those things. More power to him!

Anyway, that means I need to hire a new pilot to replace Kitsch, and I need to do that pretty quickly. The most-trafficked aviation website in Canada is AvCanada, so I put a job ad there. I took it down after a few days and am now starting to go through the 342 resumes I have in my inbox as a result of the ad, electronically sorting a small pile from the large pile. I tried to make the ad realistic and descriptive so that people would have an idea of what is required, and what is offered.

Here's what I wrote - I have edited out the identifying stuff because the application time has elapsed and I have enough resumes already ;)

---------------------------------

Position: Citation 550 First Officer
Company Name:
Contact Person: Ops Manager
Street Address:
City: Oakville
Province/Territory or State: Ontario
Country:Canada
Web address:
Email address:
Phone number: NO phone calls or drop-ins please.
Apply via: Email or snailmail only.
Aircraft Types: C550 Citation II

Hmm, the airlines are hiring again. That means it looks like we may need to refresh our resume pile for a Citation 550 pilot, specifically an F/o position.

Are you smart? Are you polite when appropriate? Are you willing to live within an hour of CYYZ Toronto Pearson Airport? Are you okay with an F/o position on a light corporate jet? Do you use soap? Do you promise to read the parts below about the extra office duties and especially the part about not offering to pay for your training? Could you stand to work a bunch of long days in a row with a sarcastic bald guy? If your answers are 'Yeah', 'Sure' and 'Yup' so far, then please read on!

Absolute Minimum requirement: Functioning cerebral cortex (preferably with 'sense of humor' addon), current CPL / Multi-IFR with the right to live and work in Canada. Also, a working knowledge of MS Office. As the plane is a 2-crew turbojet, you'll need an ATPL if you ever want to log PIC (we'll discuss that after a year or two). Current C550 PPC/Type Rating an asset, but we will train the right candidate.

About us:

We are a corporate flight department for a publicly-traded renewable energy corporation, based at Pearson Airport in Toronto. We fly 90% corporate, 10% charter. The successful applicant can expect to fly 200-250 hours per year, plus or minus. Please do NOT offer to pay for your training. We will pay all your training costs at Flightsafety and you, being an honorable person, will agree to stay for 2 years. We don't pay per diems, we pay all your meals and hotel bills when on the road, and we stay at decent hotels and have the option to eat at restaurants with actual utensils. We will provide you with a nice laptop, a generous mobile phone allowance and a full benefit plan, 'cause that's how we roll. Heck, we'll even pay for your pilot medicals.

Normal work-week schedule is Monday to Friday, with the occasional weekend trip. Realistically we fly once or twice a week. Most flights are booked well in advance - in the past 6 years we have had a total of 2 same-day trip requests. We mostly fly throughout Eastern Canada and the US, and sometimes down to the Caribbean - 90% of our trips are within a thousand miles of YYZ, with the other 10% of trips being company runs to Arizona.

There's more, and this is important - we are a small flight department (2 Citation 550's) and everyone here pulls their weight on the operational side as well as the flight line.

This means flight planning trips, organizing customs / airport slots, arranging hotels / ground transportation, helping with audit preparation, billing, picking up commissary and the thousand other tiny jobs that make up a corporate flight department. For example: I'm not gonna ask you to wash the boss's car, but I may ask you to help with an Ops Manual update, or to assume some Quality Assurance roles within the flight department. This means less spare time when we're not flying, but on the upside it will certainly keep you mentally active.

Pop quiz: Did you really read the part about not offering to pay for your training and about the extra flight-department-related duties involved in this position? How about the part where you need to have a current CPL / Multi-IFR? And especially the part about no phone calls or unscheduled visits to my office or home? Cool, then let's continue...

We have high standards, and that's a good thing. Our planes are maintained by an Air Canada connector, we don't cut corners, and we expect you to bring your 'A' game. In return, you'll get a good F/o job working with good people on a good-natured corporate jet. For real: You will get treated like a capable human being, with all the respect and expectation that brings. You in?

If so, please send your resume in .pdf or MS Word format to Ops Manager, or mail it to me.

Again, NO phone calls please, and no drop-ins (this is to see if you can follow instructions).

In return, I will do my absolute damnedest to reply to all applicants within a month.

Salary:$ 50k/year + expenses + full benefits
Closing Date: June 20th 2011. Possibly hiring for early July.

----------------------------------------------------

Some of the resumes I have gotten are truly spectacular - some in a good way, and some not so much. Can you believe that one guy actually sent me a resume offering to pay for his training and to work for free? I'm not even kidding, but that's for a future post.

What I think I'll blog about next is walking through the hiring process, from resumes to interviews and beyond. Hopefully we will end up with a candidate who can handle the requirements, and who doesn't hate being featured in the occasional blog post :) Wish me luck!

2011-06-15T17:01:00.002-04:00

All Hail Baby Balthor*!! This is his portrait, taken as of yesterday when we found out he is going to be a he. He's still baking, but we have high hopes for midnight on Halloween, when he is scheduled to make his first appearance out in the world.

*Name subject to likely change/veto by Lisa

2011-05-26T05:24:00.004-04:00

Let's talk about CRM for a second. What's CRM? Cockpit Resource Management, which is basically a fancy way of saying "getting the crew members to work together toward a common goal". Good CRM is a beautiful thing - you know what the other crew member is thinking and everyone performs their duties in a synchronized and orderly fashion.

These guys take CRM to a whole new level. They are flying a C-130 Hercules aircraft at an airshow, and it's pretty amazing to watch how the 3 crew members synch up. It's the aviation equivalent of ballet.

2011-05-21T17:58:00.004-04:00

This had me captivated. It's 51 takeoffs in two and a half minutes. Watch it and you'll see what I mean.

2011-05-18T11:32:00.004-04:00

I decided to slack off and sleep in until 3:45am today. After I woke up, we did this. The eastern seaboard was all fogged up this morning, and one of the few exceptions was our destination, which was 300' overcast and 6 miles visibility. Kitsch hand-flew this one just for fun, while I jealously pouted and watched from the F/o's side.

A few things of note - for the first couple of minutes we are cruising above the final cloud layer, which was at 3,000'.

Then not much interesting happens until around 6:15, when you can hear the Ground Proximity Warning System call out "500", which tells us we are 500' above the ground. We see the runway around 30 seconds later.

At around 6:50 you can hear the GPWS freak out a little bit, yelling "Glide Slope" a couple of times. On short final we were stable and in visual conditions, and Kitsch decided to duck under the glideslope a little bit in order to make a nearby runway turnoff. It's not a big deal in a case like this where the runway threshold is displaced - you'll note that the actual runway began well before the paint markings did.

After we land you can hear the pax clapping - at our parent company it's customary for the passengers to applaud such a smooth and skilled arrival. Funny thing is, I'm not even kidding - gotta love a job where you get clapped at just for doing it correctly :)

I was lazy with this vid and didn't edit it, so the rest of it is pretty boring - we taxi into the US Customs apron and await the tender mercies of the customs officers. As I'm writing this from my hotel room, clearly things went okay :)

2011-05-16T11:16:00.002-04:00

A trio of landing videos for your enjoyment / criticism :) As per usual, 720p and full-screen makes it cooler ;)

This one was at KRDU, Raleigh-Durham. They switched runways on us twice while we were on final, and we ended up aiming at runway 05, 5 miles back at 5,000'. A normal glideslope height at 5 miles would be about 1,500' above ground, so we were about 3x that, yee-haw! We were empty, so Kitsch pulled the power to idle, dropped the speed brakes and the plane took the express elevator down. The Citation 550 can descend pretty much vertically if we need to, and you might note (through the wind noise) that we actually had to add power on short final to make the approach. That's also good airmanship in our jet - the engines take a little while to spool up, so if they were at idle power and we had to go around suddenly for some reason, we might be at a bit of a disadvantage. I like to keep the power at around 55 - 60% until we are at 50' and crossing the runway threshold, just in case.

This was coming back home on a cloudy day. I forgot to turn on the camera until we had already mostly broken out, but there's about 2 minutes of ok footage, and I didn't completely pooch the landing so there's that too ;) Not too challenging overall as the winds were light, and theceiling was 1,000' (we can get down to 200' without having to look outside) but it was still kinda fun. About 2:10 into the video you'll see a big cloud-generating building in the distance. You might wonder why they have a cloud-generating building so close to the runways - I did, and then found out that it's the power plant for the airport. I guess they need it nearby, but on foggy days it can really add to the overall overcast.

This last one is landing on runway 23 at Pearson, also known as the opposite end of runway 05. We did this one a few days ago, on a smoggy, hot, thunderstormy day. The ceiling was 9,000' but as you can see, the smog made for some pretty poor visibility. The approach was fairly routine, but they kept us in pretty close so we got to turn and drop like a stone during the last couple of minutes. Always fun for the flight crew, sometimes less fun for the passengers. The thing that concerns me the most is thinking about the fact that I breathe that same polluted air.

2011-05-14T14:31:00.002-04:00

Things you don't expect to see at the airport in Quincy, Illinois, part 1.

2011-05-10T15:55:00.005-04:00

In this pic (taken from Aviation Explorer), an unfortunate pilot is encountering three different types of turbulence, and presumably encountering turbulent conditions in his underwear as well. I'm not actually sure if that last part makes sense, but I'm gonna go with it.
What the hell is turbulence anyway? Here's the short answer: it's when the air around your airplane changes direction and/or speed quickly. It's a fact of life for a pilot, so I'm gonna yammer on about it for a little bit more.

Turbulence is caused by 4 basic building blocks, which can act separately or join forces in an orchestra of suck (as per the picture above). The components are Mechanical, Thermal, Wake and Wind Shear.

With mechanical turbulence, the wind travels along the surface of the earth and hits various objects, like trees, buildings, mountains and whatnot. The air moves around the objects and becomes turbulent. As you fly over (or behind, relative to the wind) these objects, you get bumped about.

A description of thermal now: On a warm day, the ground gets hot. The hot ground causes the air above it to heat up, and that air rises. The rising air screws up the smooth ride for airplanes flying through it. One rule of thumb that works is if there is a layer of puffy clouds on a hot day, the thermal turbulence will only rise as high as the cloud layer and the ride above the clouds will be thermal-free.

Wake turbulence is caused by other aircraft. While an aircraft flies to and fro burning fuel and money, the lifting surfaces displace a whole lot of air and the engines blow air out the back end at high speed. All this air takes a little while to settle down, and if you fly close behind another aircraft you could be exposed to its wake. Depending on the size and configuration of the offending aircraft, it can be nearly imperceptible or it can be the aviation equivalent of being in a canoe out on the water as a supertanker goes by at high speed. Generally an aircraft that has flaps lowered and is at a low airspeed generates the most wake turbulence. Boeing 757's and 767's are nice planes, but are notorious for their unpleasant wake characteristics.

Wind Shear is caused by an angry god who wants to smite you with thunder and lightning, and by other stuff too. When the direction or speed of wind changes significantly within a short horizontal or vertical distance, the boundary areas will be bumpy. A rough ride caused by flying through a thunderstorm or crossing through a jet-stream boundary area would both qualify as wind shear turbulence.

Back to that pic at the top for a second, hopefully now it makes a little more sense - first the pilot encounters turbulence in the forms of thermal, then mechanical, then wind shear. Good thing no other planes were in the area or he coulda had 4/4, a perfect score (if you hate your airplane's wings).

In Canada, we report turbulence based on 3 levels of intensity. The following is shamelessly stolen from the Canadian AIM:

Occasional: Less than 1/3 of the time. Intermittent: 1/3 to 2/3. Continuous: More than 2/3.

--------------------------------
Light - Turbulence that momentarily causes slight, erratic changes in altitude and/or attitude (pitch, roll, yaw). Report as “Light Turbulence”.
*OR*
Turbulence that causes slight, rapid and somewhat rhythmic bumpiness without appreciable changes in altitude or attitude. Report as “Light Chop”.

Occupants may feel a slight strain against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects may be displaced slightly. Food service may be conducted and little or no difficulty is encountered in walking.

Not a big deal for most people, but it gets bumpier ;)
---------------------------------
Moderate - Turbulence that is similar to Light Turbulence but of greater intensity. Changes in altitude and/or attitude occur but the aircraft remains in positive control at all times. It usually causes variations in indicated airspeed. Report as “Moderate Turbulence”.
*OR*
Turbulence that is similar to Light Chop but of greater intensity. It causes rapid bumps or jolts without appreciable changes in aircraft altitude or attitude. Report as “Moderate Chop”.

Occupants feel definite strains against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are dislodged. Food service and walking are difficult.

When it's moderate, you know you are flying through the air in a small metal tube. White-knucklers will be having a bad day, and the occasional beverage might end up on the floor or walls.

Here's a video of moderate chop that I took a little while ago - you can really only tell it's a rough ride 'cause the camera is shaking.

---------------------------------
Severe - Turbulence that causes large, abrupt changes in altitude and/or attitude. It usually causes large variations in indicated airspeed. Aircraft may be momentarily out of control. Report as “Severe Turbulence”.

Occupants are forced violently against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are tossed about. Food service and walking impossible.

You'll notice there is no "Severe Chop" - at this level it's all just lousy.
---------------------------------

We do our best to avoid turbulence - at cruising altitude sometimes all it takes is a climb or a descent of a couple of thousand feet to change a rough ride into a smooth one, or we might alter our route laterally to avoid an area of widespread unrest. If we have no choice but to fly through a zone of turbulence, we can also slow down. As our airspeed increases, our lifting surfaces are capable of generating more lift. This is good, but only to a point. Airplanes have an airspeed called 'maneuvering speed' (Va), below which a sudden intense gust of wind will cause the lifting surface to stall (and unload) rather than producing so much lift as to cause structural deformation. Depending on the situation, you might prefer to have a stalled wing or tail instead of having them depart the aircraft, but then you are dealing with a stalled airplane and that can have its own set of complications. Anyway, maneuvering speed decreases with weight and if you wanna totally nerd out, as a general rule the reduction in Va will be half the percentage reduction in aircraft weight. Another important note is that Va is also only predicated on full deflection of the controls on a single axis, and some forms of turbulence (ie thunderstorms) can cause intense stresses in multiple directions, which can easily result in catastrophic structural damage at speeds below Va.

What prompted this post?

This is a Citation that I was flying for another company a while back when we got a taste of severe turbulence. The skies were clear, but a strong frontal passage had caused lots of wind shear and mechanical turbulence, and it had been reported as severe by other pilots just ahead of us. I slowed down to our maneuvering speed, cinched up my seat-belt and shoulder harness, told the pax to hang on, and waited for it. Going through about 8,000 feet on the descent, we hit the wall. I was hand-flying (I prefer to hand-fly if it's gonna be really bumpy, so I can tune into what the plane is doing a little better) and the plane started to act like she'd been tasered. The severe bumps were only for a few seconds, but during that time, the oxygen masks in the back deployed uncommanded. The above pic is of a nice mechanic packing them back into the ceiling. The plane was fine - we were nice and slow when we hit the bumps and there wasn't any structural damage or anything, but it kinda got my mind on the subject.

I hope all your airflow is smooth, and your oxygen masks only deploy when you ask them to :)

2011-04-21T16:32:00.002-04:00

I think pregnancy agrees with her. I mean, except for the barfing and sleep disruption, which are symptoms she apparently has also. Yes, I'm terrified, thank you for asking ;)

2011-04-13T11:06:00.002-04:00

A quick update to the A380 video I posted recently. A guy on AvCanada posted a pic that shows the wingspan of the A380 superimposed over a Google Earth view of the accident scene.

The wingspan is the yellow line with the red dots at each end, near the bottom left corner of the picture. It looks like there should be enough clearance if the 380 is on the center line of the taxiway and the RJ is north of the the road. Hmm.

2011-04-12T04:48:00.006-04:00

This happened last night, when an Air France A380 was trying to depart JFK for Paris and its left wingtip caught the tail of a Comair RJ. No injuries reported, so that's good, though if I was in the RJ cockpit I'm thinking the seat upholstery would likely need to be replaced. It does makes me take the "please keep your seatbelts on until the plane has arrived at the gate" warnings a little more seriously too.

How did this happen? I'm sure there will be a report, but right away I see there are a few things of interest:

- The A380 seemed to be going faster than a normal taxi speed, but it also seems like the video might be sped up a bit.
- It was at night, so visibility wasn't the greatest.
- The widest runways at JFK are 200 feet across.
- The wingspan of the A380 is just over 261 feet.

Looks like they might want to revise the procedures for handling the A380 when other aircraft are in the neighborhood. From the way it completely manhandled the RJ, I'm not sure the A380 would even notice if they ran over our Citation 550. I bet I would though, so I'm making a mental note to give it at least 131 feet of lateral separation on the ramp if I ever come across one.

Update: Here's the ATC audio, and a couple of pics

2011-03-16T19:04:00.004-04:00

A shout-out to Kitsch, who successfully navigated the Transport Canada vetting process (as seen above) and will be our next Chief Pilot!

2011-03-11T13:19:00.006-05:00

My heart goes out to those people affected by the earthquake (and subsequent tsunami) off the coast of Japan.

FlightGlobal is reporting that Japan's Sendai airport is detroyed by the tsunami.

Lots of pics here:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/photos/2011/03/11/3161999.htm

The NY Times also has some breathtaking pictures of the destruction.

2011-03-11T08:21:00.003-05:00

Last night's return flight to Toronto was a bit more interesting. A low-level jetstream was causing severe turbulence in a line south of Rochester NY to Buffalo NY, and we were flying right along the northern edge of it. We didn't get anything too bad, but I kind of hate sitting in solid cloud for 2 hours, waiting for the bumps to get bumpier. I was a bit under the weather so Kitsch flew us home. The ceiling in Toronto was better than forecast, it was 400' and 5 miles visibilty while we were expecting 200' (or lower) and 1/2 a mile vis, so it worked out fine.

We landed on runway 05, which is my favorite in Toronto because a) it's close to our home base FBO and b) it has pretty wickedly bright runway lighting. Our rules say that we can continue our approach if we see the runway lights, and I have yet to encounter clouds in Toronto that were so thick the runway lights weren't visible through them. I mean, if we did we'd go around and either try again or go somewhere else, but it has yet to happen.

I started the video close to the decision height - the previous 2 hours was solid cloud with occasional rain and that's not very fun to watch.

You can hear the GPWS (ground proximity warning system) voice call "five hundred" (feet above ground) about 20 seconds into the video.

Oh yeah - my camera's batteries croaked just as we were decelerating on the runway, but you get the idea.

//I'll work on a non-landing-video post today.

2011-03-09T11:25:00.003-05:00

By request, here's a video of our ILS into Boston this morning. select 720p and embiggen it to fullscreen for maximum fun. The weather was fine - 2,900' overcast with decent visibility underneath - but a gusty crosswind from the right kept it from being boring. This is runway 04R. They were using runway 09 to depart airplanes, so from time to time you might see other airplanes blasting off across our runway from left to right.

Kitsch hand-flew the approach, I played on the radios.

For those of you who care - there are 4 lights just to the left of the runway, called PAPI lights. They are used when flying the visual approach - if you are on the correct glide path, two of the lights will appear white, and 2 of them will appear red. If you see more white lights, you are a little high, and if you see more red lights, you are a little low. An ILS approach may have a slightly different touchdown point on the runway, and the PAPI lights may indicate a different picture than the instruments on board the airplane - for example, on runway 05 going into Toronto, the PAPI lights will show 3 or 4 red lights while the Instrument Landing System shows us as being on the glidepath. If we are flying the visual approach, we'll fly the PAPI lights, and if we are flying the ILS we'll fly the electronic glideslope indication in our airplane.

A person in the comments section asked about the construction cranes on an island just before we landed at Boston - they are actually loading cranes used to put shipping containers onto ocean-going vessels. The person expressed surprise that they are allowed to be placed so close to the runway. As far as the cranes - they are maybe 50 - 70' above the water, and maybe 1 1/2 miles from the threshold - you can hear the radar altimeter lady say "500" as we are passing them, so she's telling us we are 500' above the ground at the time. If you are low enough to hit the cranes at 1 1/2 miles back, you have bigger problems than the cranes, like hitting the water. If you stay on the correct slope, you will have plenty of vertical clearance over them - at a 3 degree glideslope, you will be 300' above the runway for every mile back you are.

If we are taking off, we are assured of vertical clearance over any obstacles in our departure path as long as we adhere to the appropriate departure procedures, which is normally a climb gradient of 200' per horizontal nautical mile. In this case, the required climb gradient on runway 22L (the reverse heading of the runway we landed on) is "standard if tower reports no tall vessels in the departure area". However, on runway 22R, which is just a couple of hundred feet away from it (and in fact a bit closer to the loading cranes), you need a higher climb gradient than normal to assure obstacle clearance. In that case, you need to climb at 320' per nautical mile until you are 600' above sea level. If we were departing on that runway and the weather was bad, we'd consult our airplane charts to make sure that at our takeoff weight we could climb at that climb gradient even if we lost an engine right as we took off.

That actually would be a good subject for a pilot-geek-post - the things we do in low visibility conditions to assure obstacle clearance. If the weather is good, we can just turn to avoid things like cranes and buildings and mountains, but when we can't see outside due to fog etc, we follow a whole complicated set of rules, and the math gets a lot more in-depth (we have an app for that :p). I will start on a post like that some time in the near future.

Anyway, this morning was a nice, routine flight. Now off to a yummy seafood place for lunch! :)

2011-02-19T16:42:00.004-05:00

For my second video of the day, here's one where a flight instructor intentionally shuts the engine down on a student for forced approach practice. I think I'd probably beat the instructor unconscious after the landing - shutting down a healthy engine is just plain retarded. What if another airplane was on the runway or a moose ran out, or what if the student screwed up the forced approach? The mind boggles.

2011-02-19T16:17:00.002-05:00

Australia's Helicopter Cowboys. Pretty breathtaking - I'd be scared to do this in a video game, let alone real life. They lose an average of ten (TEN!) helicopters per year to crashes, and unfortunately not all the pilots walk away either. I wonder if they can even get insurance?

2011-02-15T18:34:00.003-05:00

Well, I certainly didn't like that. Blogger toasted my blog for about a day - apparently I did something to set off the spam alert. My guess is that it didn't like me logging in from Toronto, then Quebec City, then Montreal within a few hours. Anyway, I begged shamelessly to have it restored. And so it is! The first thing I did was make a complete backup of this blog, which I had never done before. You know, just in case. More flying stuff coming up soon!

2011-02-01T15:05:00.007-05:00

Here's the other ILS we did yesterday. This one was considerably less challenging from a technical perspective - the ceiling was 1200' and the visibility was 2 miles. The only notable thing was the direct crosswind from the left at 25 knots, and you can see a classic crosswind landing technique being applied here - drop a wing into the wind, keep aligned with the runway using rudder. Touch down on the left main gear first, then the right main gear, then the nose gear. Other than that, not much to it. Like yesterday's post, a few minutes of boring "solid IMC" was removed from the middle of the clip.

Now onto the gross stuff - I have two things that may cause you discomfort. They are both kinda gross, you have been warned!

The first one happened last night - I got back from supper and passed out on my hotel room couch while watching Oprah reruns, and woke up around 1am. I decided to reposition to my bed, but first I had to brush my fangs. I didn't want to turn the lights on and destroy my melatonin buildup, so I fumbled around in my overnight bag for my toothbrush.

Instead, I found my razor. If you look closely, you'll see that I actually peeled back a long thin strip nearly all the way to my first digit. Atomic hangnail! So much blood! I feel bad because the people will likely have to steam-clean the carpet before they can use the hotel room again.

Now for the other disturbing thing, and it's mostly because it showcases my bloated ego.

I found these at a pilot supply shop at my current airport. After chuckling and thinking "who on earth would buy these", I immediately bought them. Lots of people have what it takes to be a Captain, but only a certain few have what it takes to be a dictator! I'm officially a terrible person :)

2011-01-31T12:56:00.003-05:00

This was our excitement this morning, an ILS to minimums, in this case 200' ceiling and 1/2 mile visibility, somewhere in Texas. For maximum coolness, set the video to 720p and full-screen it (it may take Youtube an hour or so after I post this to process the video to 720p). At 2:02 you can hear the other pilot start to say "And minimums" when I interrupt him and call the runway lights in sight - we were about 1 second from going missed approach when we saw the runway, so hooray for us!

I cut about 5 minutes out of the middle of the video - it was boring - you can see the jump around the 1:50 mark when the clouds get a lot darker.

We did an ILS in Arkansas before this one, I'll post that later on today when I'm done flying. We still have another leg to go, we are heading west for a few more hours before we stop for the night.

2011-01-24T20:15:00.002-05:00

This will bake your noodles. Go full-screen, then use the mouse to look around.

It's part of an ad for a high-end fly-in fishing resort in British Columbia. I don't know if I'd pay the big bucks to catch a fish, but I do know I like the video and the technology behind it.

As a side-note, the song is "Hallelujah", written by Canadian poet Leonard Cohen. It was part of our wedding ceremony when Lisa and I got hitched.

2011-01-15T06:44:00.002-05:00

We did this last night. Coming home empty, we were over the field at 6,000' when ATC said "I can put you number one for the runway if you can keep it in tight. Can you keep it in tight?". After giggling a little, we replied "Yes, yes we can". The landing worked out pretty good too, I get lucky once in a while :) I wish my camera was better at night, but for $150 I'm not gonna complain too loudly ;)

2011-01-05T16:33:00.034-05:00

Picture frenzy! These pics have been accumulating on the iphone for the last couple of months, and it's time to post them in no real order whatsoever!

Spiritual warfare checklist found in an FBO in Nassau.

Some random gorgeous islands in the deep Caribbean. I can't get over how clear the water was - you could see all the way to the bottom from 38,000'.

Turks Head beer, quaffed in the Turks and Caicos.

Instrument panel found in a Supercub in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Appetizer platter in Deer Lake, Newfoundland. Served to you in an actual kitchen sink.

Magazine cover in Halifax. I'll try to remember to follow up on this one.

Pad Thai in Montreal. Yummy!

At an FBO, a couple of ramp attendants were wrestling in the coffee room while I was making some hot tea. One of them pushed the other one into the wall. They then both asked me to forget either of them was around, and fled into the nearby hangar.

On the beach in Punta Cana, feeling quite pleased with myself.

Same place, watching a Russian couple. She was thirty years his junior. Most days she wore high heels in the sand, but this day she was barefoot. She wrote in the sand with her feet - just her name though.

Some caterers shouldn't. We ordered a 'veggie tray' for our customers. This is what arrived. Yummy tomato slices and whole lettuce leaves. You don't wanna know how much they charged us for this...

Bacon-covered steak at '29 South' restaurant in Fernandina Beach, Florida. One of the best restaurants I have ever had the pleasure of dining in.

Sure they forgot to fuel us and we ended up being late, but hey, free cookies and ice cream! All is forgiven, Signature FBO in Miami.

Check gear down.

I told the other pilot not to order a Caesar salad at a sushi bar, but he insisted on it. Serves him right - who does that?

A lobster corndog with vodka horseradish ketchup. This is what love tastes like.

We explored an abandoned gas station in Georgia. If anyone who views this is in a band and wants to use this as a CD cover, I'd be honored. Because I think this looks like it could be a CD cover.

A sign you won't see in anywhere in Canada.

Watching the prairie give way to the desert, west of Kansas and east of Arizona.

Random incredibly beautiful view from 38,000'. Snow in the mountains!

This hotel room featured an ever-stocked beer fridge, snacks and free pornography. I blurred the picture to hopefully a PG-13 rating at most.

I took this while doing a checkride on a guy in a PC-12 recently. He was upgrading from First Officer to Captain. He was nervous as hell but did just fine on the ride. You never sleep more soundly than the night after a successful checkride.

Random skeezy bar in the Caribbean. In a stunning reversal of normal rules in the Caribbean, food was dirt cheap but beers were $9 each. We won't be back.

Catching up on current events during a 4-hour cruise portion.

Duck Wellington in St. Louis Missouri. Much better than the Missouri coconut shrimp.

Sweet old Mercedes crew car in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Checking out Fort Clinch in Amelia Island, Florida. Lots of dressed-up people who stayed in character the entire time. Pretty great actually.

I imagine this is the house beverage in Hell.

Fantastic breakfast in Montreal.

Attending a friend's wedding. Me being blurry, Lisa being gorgeous.

2011-01-04T05:06:00.003-05:00

This video was posted on Liveleak, the date is December 11th, 2010. This is a cockpit view from an ILS approach to runway 06 in La Havana, Mexico. It's a scheduled airline flight, the airline in question is Click Mexicana. I *think* the airplane is a Fokker 100. I *know* they landed in a thunderstorm and I also *know* there's no way in hell I would have continued the approach, not with the thunder and the lightning and the strong possibility of low-level windshear and whatnot. Maybe I'm getting cowardly in my old age - I'm totally cool with that.

2011-01-02T22:19:00.006-05:00

First of all, Happy New Year! Lisa and I celebrated with some of our friends in a pub nearby Goderich, and the night was typically epic and bizarre, much like going on a roller coaster ride in an abandoned and condemned theme park during an earthquake (I took pics, but I'm not sure I can post them). Our Twilight-Zone experience aside, I hope that your 2011 is healthy, happy and prosperous, and that your New Years eve party wasn't nearly as disorienting and terrifying as ours was :)

Anyway, this is what the Turks and Caicos looks like, in 720p glory. Today (Jan 2nd) we took a Bravo to MBPV, Provenciale International. It was just before dark, but the water still had some pretty amazing colors.

Along the way we stopped in Nassau for some gas, and it ended up being a total gong show - the radar was out and they were doing 10 minute spacing between all IFR traffic, which resulted in us sitting on the ramp for a couple of hours before we were allowed to get airborne. Good thing for us we were flying empty, heading here to pick up some folks and bring them back to the Great White North. After we arrived here our pax called and changed our itinerary for tomorrow - I'll certainly take some videos of our flights tomorrow because they should also be pretty stimulating. More to come!

2010-12-25T10:34:00.003-05:00

Santa brought smoked bacon (possibly reindeer) with brown sugar. Best Xmas ever! My special Christmas elf and I hope that all of you have a great holiday season with lots of goodies and good times!

2010-12-19T19:23:00.005-05:00

I was in a few places in New Hampshire last week, and we ended up spending the night at one of them. Another pilot and I went for a few beers at a Chinese food place right by our hotel, and we spent a couple of hours talking about our dreams and our realities. They gave us fortune cookies at the end of the night, and this was mine:

The other guy's cookie said 'stay away from trees'...

2010-12-16T11:08:00.006-05:00

Here's a recent accident report from a medevac flight up north - everyone was okay, but the airplane is a write-off. Too bad, it was the first MU-2 I ever flew and I liked the old girl.

CADORS REPORT

From the report:

---------------------------

Narrative: The Mitsubishi MU 2B60 aircraft was concluding an IFR flight from Geraldton (Greenstone Regional) Airport (CYGQ) to Armstrong Airport (CYYW). The aircraft landed on runway 30 and encountered an unexpected amount of snow on the runway. The aircraft was unable remain on the runway and came to rest 50 feet south of runway 12/30. There was damage to the landing gear and propeller. There were no reported injuries and all agencies were notified.

UPDATE: a Mitsubishi MU-2 registration C-GAMC was a medevac flight en route from Geraldton to Armstrong Ontario. Earlier in the day the crew checked a NOTAM for Armstrong which indicated that the runway was 100% snow covered, but that snow removal was in progress. Believing that the runway would be clear upon their arrival, the crew conducted a night VFR approach with precision approach path indicator (PAPI) guidance to runway 30. When the aircraft touched down the left main wheel dug into the snow covered surface of runway 30 and veered off to the left eventually departing the runway surface. The aircraft sustained substantial damage to its fuselage, right wing and right propeller. The runway had not been plowed. After the accident, Nav Canada personnel were unable to contact airport operations personnel, and issued a NOTAM to close the airport.

--------------------------------------------------

Man, that sucks. The Armstrong airport is a small airport, north of Thunder Bay, Ontario. It's 4,000 feet long, and covered in ice during the winter. Here's a Google Maps link:

View Larger Map

With smaller airports like this, there aren't a lot of services, and frequently there is nobody around when the airplane lands.

Let's take a closer look at some of the text in the accident report:

"Earlier in the day the crew checked a NOTAM for Armstrong which indicated that the runway was 100% snow covered, but that snow removal was in progress. Believing that the runway would be clear upon their arrival, the crew conducted a night VFR approach with precision approach path indicator (PAPI) guidance to runway 30."

Turns out, snow removal wasn't in progress after all - in fact, the airport personnel had departed the airport and couldn't even be reached after the plane crashed - Nav Canada had to issue a NOTAM closing the airport after the accident.

Anyway, when the crew touched down they landed in a pile of snow and lost control of the plane. That's a hard situation, and I'm left wondering to myself what they could have done differently. I guess they could have done a low approach over the runway to try to ascertain whether or not some of the snow had been removed, but I wonder how much information you can really get while flying over a small airport runway at a few hundred feet at night - even if the runway is plowed, it's gonna be covered in ice, which looks just like snow from above.

I'm sure they called the appropriate unicom frequency before they tried to land, but they wouldn't have expected a reply anyway - it was dark, and at night, and at lots of northern strips there either isn't anyone there, or the airport operator person is sitting in the snowplow out on the runway, and the plow may or may not even have a radio.

It reminds me of a near-accident we had in the MU-2 during a summer flight in 2004 - we were going into a northern gravel strip called Ogoki Post, and we knew from a notam that the runway was being graded and smoothed. No sweat, we flew over the field and saw that the road graders had graded a strip right down the middle of the runway for us. They didn't have radios, but they saw us do a low pass, and they pulled off to the side of the runway for our landing. We had a nice smooth approach, and upon touching down discovered that the road graders had spread a foot of loose gravel over the entire runway, and had plowed the middle section down to maybe about 6 inches of loose gravel. Note: 6 inches of loose gravel absolutely sucks as a landing surface. We nearly lost control of the plane - the nose gear was whipping back and forth in the gravel so hard that the rudder was smacking the stops on both sides like a drumbeat of impending metal-fatigue doom. We got lucky though - the Captain shoved the power levers forward and we had enough remaining speed that we were able to get airborne before we hit any of the trees on the side of the runway. We didn't bother trying again, we just flew home and had maintenance do an inspection of our landing gear and rudder (it was all okay, the MU-2 is built like a tank). It's kinda the same thing as what these poor pilots in the MU-2 encountered in Armstrong a few days ago.

I feel really spoiled now that I fly a jet which isn't allowed to land on gravel strips, and 99.9% of our flights are to large airports that have runway condition reports and snowplows that work 24/7 when it snows.

So here's my question: what would you have done if you were in the position the MU-2 crew was in a few days ago?

2010-12-10T15:02:00.017-05:00

I'm at the office as I write these words - taking a break from coding bills and updating some manuals. My plane is down for an engine hot section, which is what I'm gonna babble about today.

Our plane uses Pratt & Whitney JT15D-4 engines, which each produce 2,500 lbs of thrust. This model was the first turbofan engine that Pratt & Whitney ever made, and they got it right the first time.

The overhaul period on these engines is 3,500 hours, with a hot section interval of 1,750 hours. What that means is that after a new (or newly overhauled) engine has accumulated 1,750 hours of air time, they take it apart and check out the bits of it that spin around really fast and heat up - hence the name 'hot section'. After 3,500 hours, they take the whole engine apart and replace most of the moving parts. A typical hot section cost is about $60,000 and a typical overhaul cost is about $350,000. Aircraft ownership is not for the faint of heart :)

First, let's refresh ourselves with basic turbofan operation. This is a cross-section diagram of our engine. The arrows illustrate the airflow, and the colors illustrate the relative temperature.

Basically, air goes through the main (big) fan in the front, and is blown backwards. Some of the air gets ducted along the sides of the engine and never goes through the combustion process, and some of the air goes through another fan near the middle of the engine (called the boost fan because it's not really compressing the air, it's just speeding it up a little) and starts the journey toward the combustion chamber.

If the air goes through the engine, it first gets run through an axial compressor (the dark-shaded spinning disc where the air temperature turns from blue to yellow), then it does a 180 degree turn and goes into the combustion chamber. Fuel is sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited (the air temperature goes from yellow to red), and the resulting expanded air does another 180, then starts to travel at a great rate of speed toward the back of the engine.

You'll see that the air spins another dark-shaded disk (called the high-pressure turbine because the air is traveling at its fastest when it goes through the turbine), which is directly connected to the same shaft the compressor at the front is - that's how the compressor is powered. Once the air passes through the high pressure turbine, it it blows through another couple of light-shaded disks (the low-pressure turbines, called that because a whole lot of the energy of the air has been depleted by the high-pressure turbine already and the air is moving slower), which are attached to (and power) the main fan and the boost fan at the front. Once it's done all that, the air blows out the back of the engine as straight jet thrust.

It's interesting to note that the air that's ducted along the sides of the engine (and only goes through the big fan at the front) is a much higher volume than the air the goes through the core (and the combustion process). The bypass ratio on our engine is 2.5 to 1, meaning that 2 1/2 times the volume of air goes along the sides of the engine than goes through the core.

It's also interesting to note that the airflow changes direction a couple of times as it goes through the combustion chamber - our engine is called a reverse-flow engine because of that, and it's a design that Pratt & Whitney have favored in many engine models over the years (like their PT-6 turboprop engine which is used in zillions of turboprop aircraft). One of the main advantages of the reverse-flow design is that it reduces the length of the engine; you can see in the drawing that if the red section was a straight line it would be considerably longer. Sure, it makes the engine cross-section wider, but I guess the engineering people have determined that a fatter, shorter engine is better than a long skinny one. Hmm, I'm thinking there's a joke there somewhere, but I'm gonna ignore it and move on...

These are relatively old engines, but they remain popular due to their low fuel consumption and great reliability - on this engine, there are only 6 moving parts (compared to hundreds in your car's engine) and out of the nearly 7,000 JT15D engines built (and more than 40 million flight hours), reliability is well over 99.9%

Okay, that's enough about how the engine works. Now let's talk about the hot section itself, and what they found. Fortunately for me, we got a nice shiny report on the condition of the engine, which I am passing on to you.

Phew, that's a relief. I'd be pretty concerned if the engine wasn't turning freely, or if there were metal shavings in the oil.

No cracks found in the first set of blades, which is welcome news.

The pins that hold the combustion chamber are starting to wear down a bit, but still well within limits.

Moving further inside the engine, still nothing bad to report.

A bunch of fuel nozzle sheaths need to be replaced, and so they shall be. They run about $300 each, but relative to the total cost of the hot section it's pretty minor.

This is definitely good news - the low pressure turbine is fine. Each of those blades is seven hundred bucks, so I'm glad to see they are in good shape.

This single nut needs to be replaced ($550) not because it's in bad shape, but because a newer betterer nut was created after this one was installed, and the maintenance bulletin that talks about this says the old nut has to be switched out during the next scheduled heavy maintenance (hot section or overhaul).

I obviously removed some identifying information, but in summary the engine is behaving how the engine should be behaving. That buys peace of mind, and to me that's well worth the $61.543.22 expense.

So basically that's it - the engine is halfway along the road to a complete overhaul, and it's holding together nice and tight. The overhaul will be in another 1,750 hours, during which they will pull the entire engine apart and replace damn near everything, (at about 6 times the cost of the hot section inspection). Yup, you gotta spend money to run an airplane, but as it's my hind end in the front seat on most of the trips, I am okay with spending it on stuff like this :) One additional note: at the rate we fly, we won't hit 1,750 hours more use for nearly another decade - I won't be trying to achieve that interval between inspections in my Honda Civic any time soon, but that just goes to illustrate how reliable these engines are.

2010-11-28T12:28:00.004-05:00

I'm baaack :)

I took this a couple of weeks ago, going into Spirit of St. Louis airport on the way home from Arizona. 720p and fullscreen makes it cooler :)

We are following the water on the visual - I'm flying and Kitsch is along for the ride. A nice bumpy day with a 20-knot direct crosswind. Besides that, the landing worked out okay I guess. I tried to stretch the sound along the whole video - it works fine in quicktime but in VLC media player the song ends 2 mins before the end - I liked the marshalling at the end so that's why I didn't edit the taxiing out.

2010-09-29T09:22:00.006-04:00

45 minutes into our flight this morning. Click on the pics to embiggen them.

55 minutes into our flight.

10 minutes later.

For a view like that, it's almost a pleasure getting up at 4am! Almost... :)

2010-09-28T15:16:00.004-04:00

This is a new one. This model flew yesterday in the UK. It's called the Demon UAV.

Here's a video of it flying.

So what's the big deal?

Well, it has no moveable control surfaces. That's right, no flaps, ailerons, elevators or spoilers. Just a wing, an engine and some holes.

First of all, the exhaust nozzle is moveable, so it can be vectored around to aid in directional control. Also, bleed air from an APU (auxilliary power unit, meaning a small engine) is blown through hundreds of tiny holes in the trailing edge of the wing to also help with directional control.

The military likes this because moveable surfaces like slots and flaps have edges and gaps, which are apparently total heat-scores when you are trying to have a low radar profile. Less edges to bounce off = more stealth, and that's generally what you are going for when you build a small UAV, most of which are used to spy on people in some way.

The advantages to this in a civilian application would be less moving parts, a stronger wing, less maintenance requirements and a cleaner wing which results in less drag, meaning less fuel burn.

You could control the boundary layer across the wing with air jets, which would also help change lift/drag characteristics for takeoff and landing.

We'll see if anything comes of this, but it sure does look promising. The one thing they will have to work out is how to control the airplane if the APU fails - presumably there'd be a way to store enough compressed air on board for a dead-stick landing. Presumably :) Now that I think about it, I'd also want some way to ensure that the holes don't get plugged with de-ice fluid in the winter... Clearly we are a few years away from hopping into a jet with no moving control surfaces, but the proof-of-concept is right there on Youtube, so it's not inconceivable that one day we might, assuming the advantages outweigh the hassles. I wonder how they'll rig the controls?

Flightglobal link here

Other link here

2010-09-15T09:47:00.003-04:00

I felt like I didn't give yesterday's post enough meat so to follow up the Biggin Hill accident, I want to clarify a couple of things and maybe ramble a little bit as well. Read yesterday's post first, then this one :)

First of all, in the Citation 500 series of jet we are taught that if an engine is still providing thrust, we are in no hurry to shut it down. For example, an engine fire after takeoff - the first item on our checklist is to ignore the fire indication until we climb to a safe altitude, then calmly deal with it, without rushing.

Why don't we freak out? We have no real reason to.

On our baby jet, the engines are in the back, attached to the fuselage. If worst comes to worst, they are gonna burn off and depart the airplane, which doesn't hurt the structural integrity of the airplane at all. In my previous ride, the Mitsubishi MU-2, the engines were built into the wings, so if you left an engine fire too long it could easily burn through the wing spar (which is bad), but on our jet that's not the case. Just like on lots of Airbuses and Boeings, if one of the engines falls off they will leave the airplane with reduced thrust, but they won't cause the airframe to break up. If you are going to lose an engine soon, you might as well milk it for any excess thrust you can get before you shut it down, especially if you have just departed and are close to the ground.

That's the part I really don't understand about the accident - the engine indications would have shown that the engines were still producing thrust, but I guess the vibration from the back of the airplane caused them to think that the engine indications were faulty, and that at least one of their fans was busy digesting itself. Maybe they were concerned that an uncontained engine failure might spray the cabin with fragments of fan blades - a pretty rare thing, but if it does happen, that usually means anyone sitting in the back of the plane is going to have a really bad day. The vibration must have been bad, but there's no way it would have caused the airplane to shake itself apart in the air or anything.

Why did they pick the right engine as the culprit? I don't know - they either saw something in the engine gauges that made them think it was the right engine, or they flipped a coin. Either way, we are also taught to pull the power lever back to idle to see what happens first BEFORE shutting the engine down, and that's a standard procedure for every twin-engined aircraft I have ever flown. So suppose they did that.

My take on it is that once they were convinced that it was the right engine that was sick (the left engine would have still been producing enough thrust to keep them climbing, so maybe that's how they decided it was the right engine), and when pulling the thrust lever back to idle didn't stop the vibration (again, the vibration was the air cycle machine, which had nothing to do with the engines, and it would have continued as long as either engine was operating), they decided to shut it down completely.

So far, I can see how that would happen.

The vibration continues after the right engine is shut down, the crew goes "unfortunately it appears we shut down the wrong engine" or words to that effect, and they decide to go to plan B.

Now here's the part I don't understand:

If I have the good engine shut down, I'm not even going to bother pulling the sick engine back to idle thrust as long as it's putting out a single pound of forward thrust. I wouldn't be touching the sick engine, I'd be flying as best I could on what thrust I had, and working my ass off to get the good engine relit.

In their case, the 'sick' left engine was actually working just fine, so I don't understand why they would even try to pull the thrust back at all. However, they did, and unfortunately the missing rivet head on the left thrust lever allowed them to pull the lever all the way back to fuel cut-off, killing both engines. What an unpleasant surprise that must have been.

So they are a glider then, and have maybe a minute or so before they hit the planet. The part where they had really back luck was that the dual engine failure checklist seems to say that you can try to light up both engines as long as you wait ten seconds in between, when in reality it takes 35 seconds for an engine to go from 'dead' to producing useful thrust, and even worse, if you try to light up both engines at the same time using battery power, it will kill both engine start sequences.

They try to light up the right engine, but they aren't going fast enough (200 knots) for an airstart, so they need to use the starter, which runs on the battery if neither engine is operating and they are in the air. It takes more than ten seconds, so in a panic (the ground is rushing up to meet them), they hit the left engine start button to try to get that back and running. There's no way the small aircraft battery can handle a simultaneous double-engine start sequence, so it shuts down the flow of electrons to both starters, and all that's left is picking a soft spot to land. Unfortunately they were over a bunch of buildings, so that was that.

Anyway, I find accidents pretty fascinating, and I read about as many as I can, my logic being "If I can remember to not do all the things they did that resulted in their demise, maybe I will break the accident chain links".

What I came away from this accident with are a few things:

1. Don't assume that vibration in the back of the plane is an engine. There's other stuff back there too.
2. Confirm which engine is the bad one. Is it obvious? How? Am I absolutely sure?
3. Confirm it again before touching anything.
4. Take my time in an emergency. There are only 2 things in my airplane that require split-second action - cabin depressurization at altitude, and thrust reverser deployment in flight. For anything else, I will take a deep breath before touching anything.
5. If I ever suffer a dual engine flameout, I will only concentrate on starting one engine at a time.
6. Check the thrust levers from time to time (on the ground) to make sure I can't pull the levers to the fuel cut-off position accidentally.

Any of those steps would have helped mitigate this accident, and maybe the people involved would still be with us. Unfortunately they can't speak any more, but we can still learn from what they left behind.

I don't see aviation as dangerous but I do see it as unforgiving. I'm not that smart, but I do work hard to minimize the occasions I need to beg forgiveness, and I hope the same for you.

2010-09-14T14:13:00.008-04:00

Links in a chain.

No, I don't mean handcuffs - We passed our audit, so...umm...hooray and stuff! I'll go over the specifics of the audit later - in response to some of the suggestions of the inspectors, I'm adding a whole pile of guidance material to our various manuals (Company Operations Manual, Standard Operating Procedures Manual, Safety Management System Manual, Emergency Response Manual, Flight Crew Training Manual, Maintenance Control Manual, etc) and once I'm done, I'm gonna post some of the content online so you can see what sort of paperwork is involved in keeping us airborne. That'll be a couple of weeks from now at the earliest, so until then let's talk about other stuff.

Specifically, let's talk about a Citation 500 accident that happened on March 30th, 2008 in Biggin Hill, England. A Citation 500 is the little brother to the 550 that I fly, and they share enough of the same systems that I could be qualified to fly a 500 with very little extra training.

Here's what happened:

The aircraft departed Biggin Hill for a private flight to Pau, France.

One minute after takeoff, the First Officer Radioed ATC with the following:

"We're making an immediate return to the airport, immediate return to the airport”

The aircraft was given permission to land on any runway, and the pilots indicated that they would return to runway 21, from which they had just taken off. A few second later, he told ATC that they had a bad engine vibration.

A minute after that, came the final transmission:

"And er.. we have a major problem a major power problem it looks as though we're er going in we're going in."

A few second later, the airplane struck the side of an unoccupied house in the village of Farnborough, Kent, [not the town associated with the international air show]. An intense fire quickly developed, consuming the house and the aircraft. Both flight crew and all three passengers were fatally injured. The house owners returned shortly after the accident, and as you can imagine, were treated for shock.

That sucks, right? Sounds like they had some kind of nasty engine problem that somehow brought down the light jet. The thing is, it can fly just fine on a single engine.

Unfortunately, eyewitness accounts were pretty useless at first:

Witnesses reported that the aircraft was maintaining a normal flying attitude with some reporting that the landing gear was up and others that it was down. Some described seeing it adopt a nose-high attitude and banking away from the houses just before it crashed. Some witnesses stated that there was no engine noise coming from the aircraft whilst others stated that they became aware of the aircraft as it flew low overhead due to the loud noise it was making, as if the engines were at high thrust. Two witnesses described hearing the aircraft make a pulsing, intermittent noise.

Now let's skip ahead and add a few more facts that will really bake your noodles while we are trying to figure this thing out:

1. The airframe was just fine - the wings and tail were firmly attached, and the flight controls were working correctly.
2. The airplane was correctly loaded, and was below maximum takeoff weight.
3. The airplane had lots of gas, and the gas was not contaminated in any way.
4. The engines were not damaged in any way before impact.
5. The weather was good, with light winds and scattered clouds.
6. Approximately 70 seconds before impact, neither engine was producing any power.

Wait, what?

Now here's a little history on the pilots, which may or may not prove to be relevant:

The Captain had over 8,000 hours total flying time, but had just completed his type rating on the airplane, and had a total of only 18 hours on the C500 series. On his initial checkride, he failed the "Engine Failure after takeoff" portion of his flight test, but passed it on the second try.

The First Officer had 4,500 hours total flying time, and was more familiar with the particular aircraft, with a total time of over 70 hours on that particular airplane. That's still not a whole lot of time on type.

The crash investigators certainly had a difficult job ahead of them: There were no data recorders on board, nor was one required to be. So they started going through the wreckage, sifting through the charred bits and trying to figure out what was working before the crash and what (if anything) wasn't. That's not an easy job, looking at blackened metal chunks and trying to find meaning from the debris, but their hard work eventually paid off and they found 2 things:

The air cycle machine had chucked a fit, and there was a missing rivet head on the left throttle.

The air cycle machine is sort of like an air conditioner - it takes air and heats it or cools it and circulates it through the cabin. the actual unit is housed in the tail.

Airplanes go through thorough maintenance inspections all the time. However, there was no maintenance schedule that detailed when that particular rivet head should be inspected. That particular rivet head was a physical barrier that prevented the left throttle from moving rearward past the "idle" position to the "fuel cut-off" position unless the throttle lever itself was pulled upward.

That should give you all the clues you need in order to solve this, or at least to have a pretty good idea of what likely happened. Give up? No problem, it took the investigators a couple of years to figure it out.

Now before we get to the big reveal, I've said it before and I'll say it again: accidents are usually the result of a whole bunch of links in a chain, and this case was no different.

Also, here's the emergency engine restart checklist for the C500. There's an item on it that is misleading at best:

And now the links:

1. Fresh crew, inexperienced on type.
2. Captain just got out of the simulator, and might be a little 'twitchy' after going through a whole bunch of engine-failure drills, especially as he failed that particular item on his first flight test. Nothing vibrates on a jet when it's working correctly. If a jet engine vibrates even a little bit, it's going to consume itself soon.
3. The air cycle machine is housed in the tail, right between the 2 engines.
3a. It is extremely rare for an air cycle machine to die in flight.
4. The air cycle machine ignores the statistics and decides to die anyway, and thrashes around in a relatively violent fashion.
5. The pilots feel vibration in the rear of the airplane and assume it's an engine.
6. The engine indications for both engines are normal (because they are actually operating normally) but the vibration compels the pilots to shut one of the engines down.
6a. Suppose they flip a coin or imagine some indication and decide it's the right engine that's causing the problem and shut it down.
7. The right engine shuts down, but the vibration continues because the air cycle machine is still dying a noisy death, and it's still getting power from the operating engine.
8. The flight crew decides it's the left engine, so they are faced with shutting down the left engine while trying to relight the right engine.
9. The flight crew pulls the left engine throttle back to the idle position (likely to confirm that it's the left engine that's causing the issue) and the missing rivet head (that hadn't been inspected/noticed, likely ever) lets them accidentally pull the throttle all the way back to the fuel cut-off position.
9a. Now both engines are dead. The vibration goes away, because the air cycle machine isn't being powered any more, but they have bigger problems now, namely:
10. They are at a low altitude (the airplane never climbed higher than 1,200' above ground level), with no power to either engine. Gravity sucks.

Now here's the part I really feel bad for the crew for having to deal with:

See step 4 in the "Emergency Restart - 2 engines" checklist? It says to increase the speed to 200 knots if the altitude allows. Their speed never went above 140 knots, and the altitude did NOT allow for this, which meant that restarting the engines would be more difficult and would likely require the use of the engine starters.

It takes about 35 seconds to relight a C500 engine. See step 7 in the "Emergency Restart - 2 engines" checklist? It says if the engines don't restart in 10 seconds, press either restart button momentarily.

The thing is, if one engine is spooling up but hasn't fully started and you hit the start button on the other engine, it kills the start sequence for both engines. That's likely a result of a battery limitation - an engine start pulls a whole lot of amps, and aircraft batteries are built to be as light as possible while still doing the job, so they don't have a whole lot of extra power to spare.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened - after the series of most unfortunate events that preceded both engines being shut down, they attempted to start the second engine before the first one was fully lit up again, and the start sequence on both of them terminated, leaving them with no power, no altitude and no options. At least the final part was over quickly.

As a result of the crash, 3 safety recommendations have been made. Time will tell if they are put into place.

1. Cessna should introduce a scheduled inspection of the throttle quadrant assembly system into the maintenance schedule on the Citation 500 series.
2. The Cessna emergency checklist should be amended to emphasize the importance of starting only 1 engine at a time.
3. Flight recorders should be installed on light aircraft so investigators have more data to work with after an accident.

Links in a chain.

Wiki on the crash

Full Air Accident Investigations Branch report:

2010-08-25T21:07:00.003-04:00

Ack! We have been crazy busy lately and I haven't had time to update this. For example, we just finished up an extended Transport Canada audit, which involved me answering questions (from three different Inspectors at the same time) for a total of 14 sweaty, upset-stomachey hours. Dealing with Transport Canada Inspectors during an audit is much like dealing with a bad girlfriend/boyfriend, and the joy was compounded by the fact that they went to a completely new format since the last audit (December 2008), which basically involves a stress-test of the entire operation. Emphasis on the 'stress' part. They assured me it's nothing personal, that they are giving the chainsaw-enema treatment to all their operators now, so at least there's that. Anyway, I'll detail the experience over the next couple of days, but first I gotta sleep.

2010-08-10T08:01:00.003-04:00

Here's a big pillow fight on board a Lufthansa airplane. It's nice to see passengers having fun on a commercial airliner :)

On a different note, the previous post had nothing to do with Lisa, it was about something that happened a long time ago. The story was/is self-contained.

2010-08-09T08:56:00.019-04:00

I remember once long ago, when you and I were still us. You asked me to come with you to an old cemetery to take pictures of graves that you could put on your bedroom wall, to hang beside old photos of Marilyn Monroe and your sketches of dragons. It was nearby, and you asked if I minded walking there with you instead of driving. You already knew the answer - I'd crawl to the moon for you. We arrived 10 minutes after we left your apartment, walking through the open gates and into the forest that grew around the older graves. We were the only people there, maybe not unusual for a weekday morning. We walked past huge gaudy crypts in the wealthy area, and then past hundreds of flat stones marking pauper’s deaths in the 30’s. We strolled silently, you walking up ahead like always. I liked to dawdle but I also couldn't let our distance grow too great so I hurried behind you, idly wondering why you walked with such purpose during our stroll, and why you hadn’t asked me to take your picture along the way, like you usually did. The sky was clear, and I enjoyed the sunlight on my face and the light summer wind blowing through the trees. I trotted along behind you, taking pictures of tombs with the camera you gave me for my birthday.

Then you stopped walking and stood still, your back to me, hugging yourself like you were freezing.

As I caught up to you I saw the tears on your face, and heard the hitching in your breath. I asked you why, and you pointed to the headstone. I saw only a few words before I wished I had been struck blind: She was seven years old when she left. Her mother shared your full name. And her father shared mine. You traced the letters on the headstone with your finger and turned away again, walking toward the exit gates. I then understood why you had brought me here, that this wasn’t the first time you had been at this grave site. And I realized that we would soon become strangers.

2010-07-28T19:19:00.002-04:00

I saw this on AvCanada. This is such an evil thing to do. Seriously, I think the pax should be allowed to either press charges or vigorously groin-punch the pilot for an extended period of time.

I kinda laughed a little though.

2010-07-26T19:34:00.008-04:00

More high-deffy flying frolics! The sun was shining everywhere but in the valley that held our destination airport today. That was fine, I really enjoyed this approach. ATC kept us at 23,000' the whole way here, so I didn't bother hooking up the autopilot - I hand-flew the whole flight, like back in the old days. Yes, that also explains the shaky approach and landing :)

*Update* the localizer on this particular approach is offset a couple of degrees to the left, which you can see as we ride the sky-rails on down. An ILS approach can be offset up to 3 degrees to either side and still be called an ILS. In this case, my guess is that terrain played a role in the decision to offset the approach a little bit. Here's a link to a pdf of the NOAA approach chart for the runway so you don't have to take my word for it - it says so near the middle of the top of the diagram :)

When you offset the localizer, the decision height increases, usually by 50 feet for every degree of offset. And that's your pilot-geek factoid for the day! :)

We were up extra-early this morning, and touched down in Scranton just before 8am. No, we weren't taking paper company employees :p

Notice the suicidal birds at 8:53 into the video or so - not much I can do about them at that point but hold my breath and hope they don't get inhaled by an engine. We'd still land safely but a new engine is just north of $350,000 and payday isn't until Friday, so we'd be stuck for a while.

The music is extra-geeky, it's a remix of Still Alive, which is itself a song from a video game called Mirror's Edge. It's a bit ethereal, but I liked the piano parts and the song was pretty much the same length as the video I took, so I mashed them together.

Today was a good day.

2010-07-24T11:37:00.002-04:00

Lisa's parents took us out to a nice restaurant last night, in anticipation of our 2nd wedding anniversary which is in two days. Damn, time speeds up. Someone on Facebook sent me a note saying "Beauty and the Beast", but I disagree - I don't think Lisa looks like a beast at all.

We did up our budget and it appears we have finally saved enough money to have a kid (our kid last year was a house), so I might not be posting as regularly for a while...practice makes perfect and all that.

Off to a friend's wedding now. Check the local forecast, the wedding is scheduled for 2130 GMT:

PROB30 2416/2418 11/2SM +TSRA BR BKN006 OVC025CB
FM241800 24012G22KT P6SM BKN025
TEMPO 2418/2502 P6SM -SHRA BKN020
PROB30 2422/2502 VRB20G35KT 1/2SM +TSRA BR BKN004 OVC020CB

We brought rain-gear and lightning rods, just in case :)

2010-07-20T10:08:00.002-04:00

Youtube suggested I view this video. I'm not sure I should have done so - it gave me the shakes just to watch it. Hail = not good.

2010-07-19T17:52:00.003-04:00

2 posts in one day, but this was waaay too cool to pass up. We took a look at a B-17 bomber that was sitting by the FBO in Albany.

Here's a transcription of a press release on the beast:

The Liberty Foundation’s B-17G (SN 44-85734) has an interesting post-war history. Originally sold on June 25, 1947 as scrap to Esperado Mining Co. of Altus, OK, it sold again later that year to Pratt & Whitney for $2,700. Pratt & Whitney operated the B-17 from November 19, 1947 to 1967 as a heavily modified test bed for their P&W T-34 and T-64 turboprop engines. It became a “5-engine aircraft”, having the powerful prototype engine mounted on the nose! The aircraft was flown “single-engine”, with all four radial engines feathered during test flights.

Following this life as a test platform, it was donated in the late 1960s to the Connecticut Aeronautical Historic Association in East Hartford.Unfortunately, it was heavily damaged on October 3, 1979 in a tornado, in which another aircraft was thrown onto the B-17’s mid-section. The wreck was stored in the New England Air Museum, CT from 1981 until 1987.

I did a walkaround for about 10 minutes, here you go. Pretty cool. Wait til youtube is done processing the video for the full 720p awesomeness.

2010-07-19T16:53:00.004-04:00

We are doing a tour of New York state today; we are on our third leg of four, dodging thunderstorms and eating at lousy restaurants while waiting on our clients. We are in KALB Albany at the moment - here's a video of Kitch's approach into here an hour ago, in glorious hi-def.

There was a nasty Tstorm about 3 miles north of the airport, so we elected to use runway 01, which put us south of the airport on final approach. It was +30 outside, with all the bumps that come along with daytime heating, and a few extra ones courtesy of the tstorm cel.

Gotta love the turn to final at 500'! We were avoiding certain death, or at least a few minor bumps. It looks cool too, and you can't put a price on that!

Once we got into Albany, we went to the only FBO, Million Air. I haven't been to this FBO before, but I was pretty impressed. I took a video so you can see why - this is how an FBO should be. The only downside is that a place like this must have one hell of an overhead to pay, so jet fuel here probably costs more by volume than printer ink ;) Oh well, they have free cookies.

One other thing that's cool is the upload speed of the Million Air internet connection - I uploaded 700 megs of video using their wireless in less than 7 minutes. Badass!

Here's a vid of the FBO.

2010-07-16T10:31:00.003-04:00

2 landings for your perusal, both in glorious 720p hidef. I love my little Kodak Zi-6 video recorder, I got it last year for $150 online.

Anyway, the first approach was a nice circling visual approach into MYAM, Marsh Harbour. The airport itself is out of town, so you can really get a good idea of what the 'black hole approach' is all about. It was at 10:30pm with some local fog in the area. This approach was kinda screwed up at first (not recorded on video) as the Miami controller forgot about us and we ended up losing communications with ATC for about 10 minutes while approaching Marsh Harbour. Eventually a passing airliner heard us and relayed the correct frequency to us through their ATC person, and it worked out, but the end result was that we were about 10 miles from Marsh Harbour at 22,000' before we could descend. Normally we'd be at about 3,000', so we had to dump the speedbrakes and drop like an elevator for a few minutes to get back on the proper descent angle. Our speedbrakes are fairly effective but they also rumble the whole airplane like crazy, so I made sure to let our passenger know about that beforehand so the pax didn't think the plane was coming apart when all the rumbling started.

You should fast-forward at least the first minute, it's pretty boring. Sorry for the blur, I was holding the camera instead of mounting it. As you will undoubtedly notice, a night VFR landing into a black hole airport is pretty much an IFR procedure - there really isn't much to look at outside, so we go by the PAPI lights (if they exist) or by simple math to calculate how high we should be on final approach. If there is no glideslope information then we use 300/1, meaning that on a 3-mile final, we should be 900 feet above the runway threshold, at 2 miles we should be at 600 above, etc. In our jet that works out to about 600-700 feet per minute descent rate, and you better believe that the pilot who isn't flying is constantly updating and crosschecking the distance vs the altitude and letting the flying pilot know if we are a little high or a little low. In the case of CYAM, there was a PAPI indicator to the left of the runway, so we used that as well as basic math for a crosscheck. All credit to Kitsch for the actual landing.

This next one is all Sully, it's pretty much a clone of the one I posted last week. After we overnighted in Marsh Harbour, we flew back to Toronto yesterday morning and I did a visual approach onto runway 23 at Toronto Pearson. It was nice and bumpy with a gusty crosswind of about 18 knots. In this case, the crosswind was from the left to the right, and you will see that the nose of the plane is angled to the left of the runway during the final approach. The last minute gives an idea of my crosswind landing technique - different people do it differently, but my shtick is to point the nose into the wind until the last 50 feet or so, then align the nose with the runway, drop a wing into the wind and keep the plane straight with rudder. Ideally the first wheel that touches down is the wheel that faces into the wind, followed by the other wheel, followed by the nose wheel. In this particular landing it's more like clunk-clunk-clunk all at once. Some landings you win, some landings you win a little less. It wasn't my greatest, but the plane was still useable afterward, so I'll take what I can get :)

This particular trip gave me some material for yet another post, so I'll do that soon - we did something that I have never had to do before in 22 years of flying, and I'll share what that was shortly.

2010-07-15T21:48:00.002-04:00

We flew from Newark to Marsh Harbour, Bahamas last night. On the way down, we passed this particularly fine electrical storm. See if you can count the flashes in 4 minutes! Or don't, that's okay too. Either way, it was a pretty unruly cel, and we kept well clear of it - at the closest point to it, we were 80 miles (130km) distant. Even from a distance, big thunderstorms look closer than they are because they are so large. I have zero interest in finding out how big they appear from up close.

I really can't sing enough praise to our weather radar and our satellite radar.

2010-07-14T15:50:00.002-04:00

We are currently sitting in Newark NJ, KEWR, waiting for a passenger to arrive so we can head down to Bahamas. There's lots of weather around, and our pax is flying into EWR on a commercial flight which has been delayed twice already - I'm giving it 50/50 whether or not we end up scrubbing the flight for today, and 50/50 that if we end up going south today that we end up having to stay over in Bahamas due to duty day concerns - we started our day at noon today, so that gives us til 2am to get back to Toronto. It's 4pm already, and our passenger's commercial flight still hasn't departed from it's 90-minute-away location toward Newark.

Anyhoo, Kitsch flew us here and I took a video of the ILS down runway 4R as we were dodging thunderstorms and rain on the way in. I'll tell ya, the approach controller here was a true maestro - he vectored us in between some really bad-ass cels and was able to get us nicely lined up with the runway for our final approach - from the sounds of his transmissions, he was really enjoying himself, which was cool to hear.

The video is Hi-Def in 720p, so if your computer has the oomph, crank the resolution up and go full-screen. I didn't dub a song over the audio track, so there's likely lots of wind noise and whatnot.

Now we wait...one of the joys of charter flights :)

2010-07-13T12:38:00.005-04:00

Checkride Post, Part II. Scroll down 2 posts for Part I.

I wanted to make a good impression on the 2 Transport Inspectors who would be accompanying me on the ride, so I printed out copies of the candidate's licence info, the company SOP's, the company flight profiles, the company training program, the company Ops Manual, and all the approach charts we would be using, both at Toronto Pearson and Hamilton, the nearby airport we'd be conducting most of the checkride at.

I put the twelve pounds of paper into a binder, and made a nice pretty cover on it, hopeful that a slick presentation might be an acceptable substitute for (lack of) professionalism and skill on my part :)

I was all prepared for the ride, and the weather forecast was actually threatening to cooperate, so all I had to do was wait until the next day, then drive to the airport and get it over with.

I slept really poorly the night before the ride, which surprised me, considering it was the candidate who really was under the gun - I found myself doing flying checklists and emergency drills in my sleep. When I'm the subject of a check-ride I usually have a lousy sleep the night before and end up doing checklists in my head all night, but at least I have the drills for my own airplane memorized - in this case, I had never flown up front before, and I wasn't overly familiar with the aircraft checklists, so my brain was simply inventing things, like "sleep on your side, then rotate pillow counterclockwise 1/2 turn, then clockwise 2 turns" etc. Finally 7am came, and I got ready, then drove to the airport. The weather turned out to be great (stupidly hot, but clear skies), so that was one less thing to worry about.

The candidate was already at the airport, checking weather, double-checking his weight and balance for the aircraft, and generally fretting. I did my best to console him.

"Dude, I totally understand where you are coming from. Checkrides $%#@ing suck - I have to do them too, and I can empathize. I will give you a fair evaluation, and I have no intent to make this more traumatizing than need be."

"Thanks Sully, but you gotta remember there will be 2 guys from Transport Canada looking at me the whole time, and I don't know what their mindset is."

"Oh yeah. Now I'm stressed, thanks for that."

He smiled a little, so that was nice.

After a little while, the copilot showed up, and so did the 2 Transport Guys. I recognized one of them from a previous training course - he was a good guy during the course, so that was good to see. The other guy was a fresh inspector who was attending this session to get up to speed on how monitored checkrides worked, and I introduced myself.

"Hi, I'm Sully. Nice to meet you, let's see if we can't survive this process."
He smiled.
"Hi Sully, I'm Inspector #2. I used to be in Transport Canada Enforcement, and I don't recognize your name so I guess that's a good thing. Oh, it says that the company you work for has just been assigned to me - I'm your new Principal Inspector, so I guess I'll be seeing you again when I audit you next month."
"Audit? Next month? Ack!"

So the new inspector was a guy I'd be dealing with soon when my own operation was on the line. I crossed my fingers and silently pleaded with my various deities to not let me have a meltdown during the ride, which would not bode well for future interactions with this fellow. At least I was wearing pants, so I was hoping I made a decent first impression.

I handed the inspectors their shiny binders full of relevant information, and the 5 of us (2 Inspectors, the candidate Captain and his First Officer) sat down to chat for a bit.

Here's the cheat sheet I made up for this briefing, so that I wouldn't forget to cover all the important (ie required) points:

---------------------------------------------------------

Company Check Pilot Briefing Guide

• Introductions

• How are you doing? Did you sleep okay? Are you feeling well?

• We are here today to renew your PPC/IFR. Once we are done the ground part, the flight should take about an hour and a half, depending on the mood of ATC. I imagine you are a bit nervous, but don’t be, this is going to be a walk in the park. The standards are no tougher than the ones you have already shown you can meet. The training you have been doing for the past few days is likely a lot more difficult than this ride, and it will probably be anticlimactic for you.

• In training you had multiple failures, one after the other. During the ride we will NOT have multiple unrelated failures, and we can go at a much slower pace. I will tell you if/when simulated equipment failures will arise. If some equipment stops working in real life, we will assess the situation and will either continue on with the ride or end the ride and return to a safe airport.

• During the ride, avoid the temptation to rush. If you find yourself feeling rushed during any part of the ride, ask for vectors or a hold to give you as much time as you need before moving on to the next phase.

• From time to time you may notice that I’m writing things down during the ride. My writing things down does NOT mean that you have screwed anything up; I could be writing good things as well as things to bring up during debriefing, or just simply writing down questions about the aircraft – I have only flown in a PC-12 once, so I might have some additional questions at the end of the flight just to satisfy my curiosity.

• During the ride you may think you have messed something up. As long as the ride is still going, the ride is still going, so try to put any perceived errors out of your mind and move on to the next phase.

• When we get to the plane assume it’s the first flight of the day, which means a black cockpit. Also, assume the weather is at IFR minimums, and you can expect the weather to be at or below minimums for the approaches being conducted. When you get to the DH or the MAP, I’ll tell you if you see the runway. If you see the runway, then land! Otherwise, conduct a missed approach.

• Now onto the ride sequences: As you are no doubt familiar, we have to demonstrate some required items, which we will quickly go over. We need to see a normal takeoff, a rejected takeoff, a hold, 2 approaches (one precision and one non-precision), at least 2 engine failures, and at least 2 landings. With your Ops Spec we will also need to see (circling) and a GPS approach, along with demonstrated single-pilot authority as well as multi-crew Captain authority. We will also have a few abnormal situations come up and will expect you to deal with them just like how you would in real life.

• During the ride, you will be evaluated in accordance with the Pilot Proficiency Check and Aircraft Type Rating Flight Test Guide (Aeroplane) TP 14727. Are you familiar with the standards? (heading, altitude tolerances etc)(If candidate is not, then provide candidate a copy of the flight test guide and allow candidate to become familiar with the standards)

• Fill out paperwork, consulting laminated “PRIOR TO CONDUCTING A FLIGHT TEST” card

• Do you have any questions so far?

• We will try to keep the ride as realistic as possible. The PF is generally expected to initiate the response to an emergency, but there are 2 crew on this ride, so help each other out as you would on a normal flight in real life. We want to see you work as a team, and operate according to ATC clearances, your company SOP’s, the AFM, the CARs, your emergency checklists and any and all other applicable publications. With 2 crew rides, this means that both crew’s licenses and qualifications are being evaluated, and a serious mistake on a ride could possibly affect the licences and qualifications of both crewmembers. You can use the automation in the airplane just as you would in real life, so don’t hesitate to use the autopilot when applicable to make your life easier.

• During the ride I may give you some instructions and ask you to relay them to ATC. If one of my instructions conflicts with a real ATC clearance, please follow the real ATC clearance but let me know. I will not attempt to trick you, and I will not intentionally give an illegal or bad instruction. That being said, you are responsible for any instructions and clearances that you choose to accept. Any situation caused by an incorrect action or response will not be corrected by me unless it affects the safety of flight.

• If you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask. During the ride, if you have any questions about a clearance, a ride sequence, or want to clarify anything I have said that might be confusing, please ask.

• I know it’s easy to say, but do your best to relax, and take your time.

• Any final questions before we head into the plane?

POST-FLIGHT DEBRIEFING

• This was a pass / fail, and I have a few items I’d like to go over before we are done here.
• How do you think you did (don’t let candidate only focus on errors, also highlight positive things)
• I think overall you did very well, especially (highlight above-average performance)
• Identify major / minor errors, attempt to advise not criticize
• Do you have any questions before I sign your licence?

If Pass: - Endorse Licence or issue temp licence privileges
- Complete Application for Endorsement

If Fail: - advise reasons for fail
- advise regarding re-test
- advise right to appeal to TATC
- suspend IFR rating

---------------------------------------------------

You may notice that I never mention the word "failure" during my little speech. That's on purpose. I figure it's a scary enough experience for the candidate and it would just add to the stress level - everyone who has done a checkride is acutely aware that it's possible to fail one, so why emphasize that?

After I gave my speech, we talked about the airplane for a while, with me asking various technical questions (detailed a little in my previous checkride post) and the Captain answering them. He got them all right, and on the ones he didn't have memorized, he knew exactly where to look for the answers (ie, the aircraft flight manual, or the CAP Gen section, or his company Operations manual etc).

Having satisfied our requirement to conduct a ground briefing, we then headed to the airplane. The Inspectors sat behind me and wired themselves into the audio system so they could hear the crew and Air Traffic Control. They had copies of my planned ride script, so they knew in advance what emergencies I was going to introduce on the ride. I wedged myself in between the Captain and Copilot, plugged myself into the intercom and watched as they fired up and taxiied out toward an active runway at Toronto Pearson.

I watched as they followed their checklist, and as the Captain carefully taxiied down the exact middle of the taxiways. The crew had flown together before, and they were clearly comfortable with each other, so that made the checklists flow quickly and easily.

I de-wedged myself from the cockpit and took a passenger seat for the takeoff, then went back up front to observe. We flew toward Hamilton and found a nice clear patch of sky to get our steep turns out of the way. The candidate did just fine, so we got a clearance to hold at a navigation beacon right by Hamilton. Again, the candidate did just fine. After the hold, we set up for a GPS approach to a runway, circling for a different runway. No problems there at all, the candidate circled and set himself up for a nice landing. I had other plans though - when we were 50' in the air about to land, I told him that a moose had strayed onto the runway, so the candidate did a low-energy goaround, (a mandatory requirement since an Air Canada crash in Fredericton a few years ago). He was smooth, calm and collected, and we climbed skyward. I then asked him to do a visual circuit for the original runway, and when we were downwind for landing, I asked him to simulate an engine failure. This is the part I was most curious about, and it turns out the PC-12 can glide a pretty great distance with a failed engine, so that was cool. On a single-engine ride it's not a mandatory requirement to be able to glide to a runway after an engine failure - the candidate just needs to be able to demonstrate the proper emergency drills and maintain control of the aircraft to touchdown - but in this case we had more than enough altitude to set up for a gliding arrival onto the runway in Hamilton. That was all the multi-crew stuff done, so I told him that the First Officer had eaten some bad salmon for lunch, and the Captain was on his own for the final leg back from Hamilton to Toronto. No sweat, he did all the checklists by himself and we blasted off from Hamilton back home.

This is the part that got a little interesting.

We were about 10 minutes from Toronto when ATC came on the radio and said "Trainer 1, Pearson is closed due to an aircraft emergency. Say your intentions." I pointed at the f/o and did the finger across the throat sign, indicating that he was to remain silent and let the Captain figure all this out - this sort of thing could conceivably happen when the Captain was flying single-pilot and it would provide me an unexpected but good source of additional information to help evaluate the Captain in the performance of his duties.

The Captain did all the right stuff - he knew that the weather was good so we could land at a few different airports if need be, but he still had a mission to accomplish (get us back to Pearson safe and sound), so he didn't want to give up just yet. He confirmed that we still had a couple of hours of gas in the tanks (a PC-12 with full tanks can go for about 7 bladderbusting hours if need be), so he asked for ATC to let us hold while they dealt with the aircraft mayday at Toronto. They gave him a hold clearance, and we headed toward the navigation fix, which happened to be out over Lake Ontario. He also climbed up so that we could glide to the shore in the unlikely event the engine failed during the hold, and that told me he had good situational awareness - he was able to think outside the box a little, and not just follow checklists, which is a sign of a good Captain. We did a few laps around the lake before ATC told us that the emergency had been dealt with. Once that was all good, we set up for an uneventful single-pilot ILS back into Toronto.

The Captain landed, taxiied back to our base and shut down, taking care not to knock the wingtip against the hangar door (people have actually passed a checkride only to fail at the very last minute by screwing up the aircraft parking and smoking a solid object with a wing). I told him he had passed the ride, and we all went inside to debrief.

The debriefing was uneventful - the Captain's performance was damn near flawless, so I really didn't have much to say. The Transport guys were also satisfied that he knew what he was doing, and that I knew what I was doing when I said that in my opinion that he knew what he was doing. I did the final bit of paperwork, the Captain got his license signed off, we shook hands, and that was that.

My new Principal Inspector seemed happy, so hopefully he at least won't be predisposed to put me in federal prison when my company audit comes up at the end of August. Hopefully.

Finally, here's a copy of the evaluation that I got from the Transport Canada Inspector who watched me. The marking scale is interesting - a mark of 3 indicated that I met the standard, while a mark of 4 indicates that I exceeded the standard in that particular field. I was happy with what I got - the only comment from TC was that I could have asked more questions during the ground briefing, so under "Scope of Flight Check" I got a bunch of 3's with extra bonus points for going above and beyond.

You'll see that the notes section says that the checkride was for the addition of SMEL, which means that now I can conduct PPC/IFR checkrides on just about any non-jet aircraft, and also conduct checkrides in the actual airplane rather than just in the simulator. This expands my authority, and will hopefully allow me to conduct a few more checkrides between now and this time next year, when my ACP renewal comes up again. I don't do it for the money, but I actually really enjoy the experience, and it's an interesting way to meet new people and see how other pilots fly.

Damn this was a long-winded post, but I hope I was able to peel the curtain back a little bit and give you a slightly better understanding of what goes on during a checkride from the perspective of the person doing the checking. Safe flights!

ps The emergency at Pearson turned out to be an aircraft that had an unsafe landing gear indication, but was eventually able to fix the problem and land uneventfully. We were only delayed about 15 minutes, so no huge deal.

2010-07-11T21:54:00.003-04:00

I'll finish my previous post tomorrow, I got busy this weekend with sundry stuff. We are in New Jersey tonight, and I saw a famous person as we were driving away from the FBO! A famous person from New Jersey, actually. A famous person in track pants...

2010-07-07T06:33:00.006-04:00

I had an interesting flight yesterday, but I wasn't sitting in the front. I was in fact squatting in the aisle for most of it. Nope, this wasn't in the simulator either.

Long story long: I'm an ACP (Approved Check Pilot) for the Citation 550, which means I can do checkrides on other pilots in that particular type of aircraft. I wanted to widen my scope a little bit, so I asked Transport Canada if I could get authority to do checkrides on all single-and-multiengine non-high-performance aircraft, which essentially means all non-jet aircraft. They responded with a letter saying that they would like to see me conduct a checkride on a small aircraft first before making up their minds. The letter pointed out that I have only conducted checkrides in the simulator before, and conducting one in an actual aircraft can be a quite different experience (I found out yesterday how very true that is, but I'm getting ahead of myself). Fair enough, that's entirely within their rights. I started looking about for someone who might need a checkride, and I ended up chatting with a friend I have known for a few years, a guy I flew with who later left the Citation 550 and went into management at a different charter company that operates turboprop (jet engines that spin propellors) aircraft. He mentioned that one of his pilots needed a renewal checkride, and the die was cast. I told him that a Transport Canada inspector would be riding along with us, watching me watch the candidate, and to his eternal credit he agreed to that scenario. Perhaps you're thinking "Sure he agreed, it wasn't him that was going to be flying", but that's only partially true. You see, the particular turboprop aircraft we flew on is certified for flight with one or two pilots, depending on the scenario, and my friend would be acting as the copilot on the checkride. The funny thing about being a copilot on a ride is that you don't necessarily get anything renewed at the end of the ordeal, but if you screw up you can have your license suspended. Now that I think about it, I guess that's not actually very funny, but whatever - it's how things are done in Canada.

Anyhoo, I have only flown in this particular turboprop as a passenger before, so I got my grubby paws on some aircraft manuals and did some studying so I'd at least have some decent questions to ask the candidate during the ground briefing. I prefer to ask questions that have an operational slant to them - instead of asking stuff like "draw me a diagram of the fuel pump and explain how it works", I prefer to ask things like "If you land at an airport and they accidentally fuel you up with avgas (for piston-powered aircraft) instead of jet fuel, can you fly the airplane home?" or "You are stuck at an airport overnight in -40 temperatures. The only hangar that's available is 50 feet wide by 50 feet deep by 18 feet high. Will the plane fit?" or "On your walkaround you notice that one of your two aircraft batteries is dead, but the other one is fine. Can you still go flying?" You get the idea. So I cracked open a whole pile of reading material, including their company Ops Manual and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), which provide blueprints about how they operate the airplane and the specific duties and roles of the Captain and First Officer during the flight. For example, the SOP's will list the verbal callouts that each pilot is expected to make during the takeoff roll, like this:

Captain: Full power, engine gauges are green, airspeed is alive
First Officer: 70 knots
Captain: Crosscheck
First Officer: 84 knots, rotate
First Officer: Positive Rate
Captain: Gear up
First Officer: through 400 feet
Captain: Flaps up

etc

That way I'd know what to listen for during the flight, and I'd have a better idea of what was going on. Every company has a slightly different way of operating, and differences in SOP's can be significant even if they are operating exactly the same type of aircraft - when I fly a Citation 550 for a friendly competitor I make different verbal calls and perform different actions than when I fly our Citation 550 - different strokes for different folks I guess.

Now getting back to the checkride - as it was going to be in the actual airplane, we would be departing Toronto Pearson and flying to a nearby airport to conduct our training exercises - Pearson is waaaay too busy for that sort of thing. When I do checkrides I like to make up a script that details the exercises we will be covering, along with the general order. In the simulator you can be totally specific about what's gonna happen, and I detailed a simulator script in a previous post. However in the real airplane, sometimes things happen - other aircraft are flying around the airport and you might not necessarily get the exact approach you were hoping for, or the exact runway, or the exact sequence of events you had planned out, so you have to be flexible and if you get a curveball, you might need to plan something else that covers the required items on the ride but in a different way.

On an IFR PPC checkride there are a number of different requirements, including:

- at least 2 takeoffs and landings
- a non-precision approach, and a precision approach
- a hold
- steep turns
- a rejected landing / missed approach
- at least 2 engine failures
- other emergencies as required (that part is fun because you get to decide what simulated emergencies the candidate has to deal with)
- a landing with at least 50% of the available engines failed (you can simulate the engine failures by pulling the power back on the affected engines, we never actually shut them off in the actual airplane)
- other requirements as dictated by the Company Operations Specifications

In this case, the company that operated the turboprop had a couple of addons - they did GPS approaches, they did circling approaches, and they wanted the pilot certified as a Captain in a multi-crew environment and as a single-pilot Captain.

It was time to earn my outrageous salary. I put on my thinking cap and made up a script that would cover the required items. It took me a few beers and some minor cursing but I managed to make it work in a fairly efficient way, at least on paper.

The script for the ground briefing looked something like this:

1. Explain procedures for Engine Failure in Flight, climbing through 1,000'
2. Explain procedures for Crew Incapacitation
3. Explain procedures for Engine Fire during takeoff roll
4. Discuss realistic scenario (like the questions I asked about the hangar width and aircraft misfuelling etc) and answer 5 questions relating to it.

The script for the flight looked something like this:

1. Engine start with simulated malfunction (Hung Start)
2. Area Departure, track to nearby airport
3. Steep turns
4. Hold at a nearby airport beacon
5. Engine Chip light illumination
6. GPS approach for a runway, circling for a different runway
7. Rejected Landing / Missed Approach
8. Visual circuit back to original runway with engine failure on downwind leg
9. Land
10. Single-pilot flight back to Toronto with ILS approach runway 23
11. Land, kiss the ground and endorse the candidate's license

Oh, here's a pic of a typical interior that this type of airplane might have. Pretty nice, eh. This turboprop is not small.

Now here's a pic of a what this type of aircraft looks like:

You may notice a couple of things. First, whomever painted this particular airplane (not the one we flew) probably needs a seeing-eye dog. Second, it has but a single engine. I haven't flown in a single-engine airplane for years, and as part of our checkride, I was going to ask the pilot to simulate an engine failure. Let's hope this puppy can glide better than a brick...

Oh, one last thing before I continue this post tomorrow...Transport called a few days ago and said that the TC Inspector who was assigned to monitor me was also going to bring a junior inspector along to show him how to monitor people conducting checkrides. That means there would be a guy watching the guy watching me watch the candidates. No pressure.

More tomorrow :)

2010-07-03T16:15:00.006-04:00

If your computer has the horsepower, the vid is most impressive if you click on the video, then go full-screen, then change the 360p icon to hi-def 720p.

It was a nice day a few days ago, and I managed to wedge the hi-def camera into the windshield to capture a visual / ILS approach onto runway 23 at Toronto Pearson. I talked all the way through the approach but the noise of the wind on the windshield completely overwhelmed the audio, so I added a music track instead. Hopefully the copyright police won't sue me into oblivion, I think it adds a little bit of fun to the otherwise fairly routine video. The band is Underworld btw. The video is 10 minutes long, and I won't be offended if you decide to skip it, I just like the combo of dreamy music with an unobstructed view out the front :)

The wind was a direct crosswind at 20 knots, but I lucked out on the landing, so overall it was a good day :)

We are in Quebec City at the moment and I have taken a bunch of vids of that too, which I'll post later.

Have a most excellent Canada Day / Independence Day / Summer day weekend!

2010-06-22T18:13:00.004-04:00

Lots of different layers of cloud and some morning valley-fog. Such a beautiful day today!

We got up crazy early this morning, heading east. The sky was beautiful, and because the longest day of the year was yesterday, the sun came up and kissed the plane about halfway through the flight. It was really neat to see the different layers of cloud, so I took a video. It's mostly boring, but skip forward about 1 minute to see an unexpected surprise - an Embraer commercial airliner 2,000' below us, heading in the same direction. It was a whole lot faster than us, and it was also right in the cloud layer, so it looks pretty cool, like a shark cruising just below the surface of the ocean.

The morning fog was lining some of the valleys along our way, it also looks pretty cool.

The skyline of New York off in the distance as we start our approach into Teterboro.

I took a video the ILS for runway 06 into KTEB, Teterboro New Jersey. Teterboro is where all the corporate jets go to get their pax into downtown New York.

2010-06-07T21:32:00.003-04:00

We have been in Miami for the past couple of days, and today we went to Dallas. On the way, we flew over the oil rig. You know the one. I took pics, but the windshield glare screwed them up - maybe that's for the best, you probably wouldn't sleep too soundly tonight if you saw what we saw today. The oil slick is huge, and it's everywhere. There are clouds all around the rig, but they aren't real clouds, it's smoke. The rig itself is on fire, presumably burning some of the gas that's being funneled to the top. The scale of the oil slick is terrifying to see from the air - from 36,000' we can theoretically see 233 miles until the curvature of the earth cuts off our view, and from 36,000' I could see a ribbon of oil all the way to the horizon. And that's only the stuff we can see - I have read that most of the oil is still underwater, being taken by various currents all around the coast. I saw a computer simulation yesterday that says the oil will be up the east coast of the US and Canada by the fall.

I don't have anything funny to say about this - not even gallows humor. It's just too awful.

2010-05-28T06:46:00.003-04:00

Thunderstorm season, hooray!

Pepper and I went west on a charter flight a few days ago (Kitsch was still jet-lagged from doing an LA - Toronto redeye the night before, so Pepper pinch-hitted), taking some people to do some business in the midwestern US. For those of you who aren't familiar, summer in the great plains of the United States = thunderstorms.

I took a few vids to demonstrate some of them, let's have a quick boo!

We landed, and hung out for the day at a local Marriott - I collect hotel points and currently I'm concentrating on them - I have enough to last Lisa and I through our entire next vacation, even if we pick a classy hotel. Hotel / Gas card points are a perk of corporate travel that I really enjoy.

It was a 14-hour day, so we made sure we both had naps in the afternoon, so that we'd be fully alert for the return ride. A cold front was passing through, and the heat of the day was building some truly spectacular weather monsters.

Now I wasn't able to video this next part, mostly because Pepper and I were busy little beavers at the time. At Rogers, thunderstorms were building to the point that some of them in the distance were green, like dull emeralds. You know, booming emeralds with lightning. Most of us are used to seeing thunderstorms with black clouds, but green ones are more rare, and they usually indicate something far more apocalyptic, like hail and/or tornadoes, or perhaps clouds of winged monkeys come to take us to Oz. Either way, they were building all around the airport and it became clear that we had a limited amount of time to depart before they cut off all routes in and out of our destination. Now visualize this with me: Our home in Toronto was east of the airport, but the storms were such that 20 minutes before the pax showed up, I had amended our flight plan to head straight west, then north, then back east in order to go around one line, then head north, then mostly east to go around another line, then head south, then east to go around a third line.

Our pax showed up, we loaded up, and in those few minutes, the storms north and south of us had linked up to the west, creating an unbroken line of doom. There was a thin sliver east of us, and our on-board satellite weather system (may it live forever!) showed that some of the scary stuff had dissipated enough for us to be able to climb over it if we kept our groundspeed low and our rate of climb high.

We had already picked up our clearance to head west, but that wasn't going to happen so we had to negotiate with ground control for a new clearance that would keep us out of harm's way. It took a few minutes to get, presumably because the area air traffic controllers were very busy dealing with aircraft that were diverting all over the place in an effort to avoid the storms and keep their wings on, but we eventually got clearance to head straight east in an attempt to climb over the first line of thunderstorms.

Fortunately for us, the plane was relatively light and even in the heat of the day (it was about +30c, which is 86 in American heat units) she was capable of giving us a decent rate of climb if I reefed the nose back to 15 degrees nose-up - our climbout airspeed dropped by 40 knots, but that wasn't as important as getting up and over the smaller thunderstorms that were close-by the airport.

One of the fun things about lines of convective weather associated with frontal systems is that the thunderstorms are usually hidden by other clouds, so on the climb-out we are usually flying through clouds and can't see anything outside. Our weather radar shows us the bad stuff that's mixed in with the ordinary clouds, but I'm not gonna lie and say it's not disconcerting as hell for those few minutes that you are in solid cloud and it starts to get a little black outside, and rain on the starts to beat against the windshield and you wonder whether or not you made the right call, or whether you should be immediately turning 180 degrees to one side or another. We have lots of gadgets to assist us, but there is a reptilian part of our brains that softly whispers scary things for those few moments, and we really have to rely on our training and our experience and our technology to overcome that soft, nasty voice.

Anyway, I'm sitting here typing these words, so you can deduce that it worked out fine - we kept our eyes glued to our on-board weather radar as well as the satellite weather system, as well as looking outside and turning well away from any areas of cloud that looked particularly aggressive.

In cruise flight, in between dodging lines of storms, we watched a 757 pass by us at a closing speed of about a thousand miles per hour (1600km/hr). I admired the bird as it flew past, but then felt sorry for them because they were going to have to negotiate some of the strongest storms I had seen in a long, long time. I imagine that the conversations on the flight deck were similar to a recent post by Captain Dave - I assume you have already read it, but if you haven't, check it out.

One thing that I felt bad about was hearing the strain in the voices of the flight crews heading west, and hearing the stress in the voices of the air traffic controllers who were trying to keep them from hitting each other even as they diverted all around the countryside in an effort to avoid contact with the rumbling midwestern pilot-killers. It was a stressful day for a lot of people, and I was really glad that our flight was relatively uneventful.

Once we passed by the final line, the weather was great for the last few hundred miles all the way home. Due to our exceptional cunning and skill (read 'luck'), the air was smooth the entire flight, and the passengers remained blissfully oblivious to the amazing forces of nature we observed during our run. "Hey pilot, nice flight, I'm glad the weather was good" Oh, if they only knew the planning and plotting and scheming we had to do several times enroute to make it so - but I guess one of the things I get paid for is to attempt to bore the passengers to tears during the flight, even if I'm sweating a bit.

2010-05-27T20:56:00.002-04:00

I'm uploading some videos from a recent flight, but I'm absolutely exhausted so Ima go to bed and do up the actual flying post tomorrow. Until then, here's a pic of Charlie licking her own face. I reckon it's pretty flavorful, considering the things she finds on the ground and tries to eat during our walks.

2010-05-19T07:44:00.003-04:00

This is a smoochy post, you are forewarned.

Today marks 10 years since Lisa and I went on our first date. God I love this woman.

Here's Part 1 and Part 2 of that particular adventure, for some background info.

We are a demonstrative couple - I tell her I love her many times a day, and she kisses my face about as much as a face can possibly be kissed. "Sully, come here. I need a smooch for strength!" I'm only too happy to comply. I am not afraid to get all mushy on the phone or in public (despite the rolled eyes I get from my friends or coworkers who happen to overhear me) because I want her to know how profoundly she has changed my life, and because sometimes when I see her my heart feels like it's going to burst with joy and I need to let some of it out.

Anyway, ten years. Damn. It seems like I have known her all my life (more so for her I guess) but in another way it's been a single beat of a hummingbirds wings. I notice that time speeds up when we are together, but slows down considerably when I'm on the road. I guess it's because when I'm with her I feel complete, but when I'm away there's always this...longing...and I find myself scheming about how to return home just a few minutes quicker.

A few notable events / processes that we have shared in the past decade include:

Lisa endured a whole lot of outside pressure to end our relationship, and I experienced a whole lot of anger (lots of it was justified, I'm not making excuses) from a whole lot of people due to our age difference (detailed in the how-we-met posts).
Lisa went to university and got a degree, with honors.
I went up north to fly, then came back down south, to fly.
We made it through 4 years of long-distance relationship.
Lisa got a job working for the parent company who employs me.
We got engaged, then married.
We went to France, Bahamas, a few spots in the US, and toured British Columbia in a camper van.
We lived together in a condo, a couple of apartments and a house, then bought a house of our own.
We got a puppy, and were adopted by a feral cat.
Lisa changed her hair color and shoes a few hundred times; I shaved my head and wear the same shoe style I did in 2000(Black, shiny, cheap).
We discovered the joys of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
We discovered the joys of barbecuing.
Lisa's friends, while initially suspicious (I don't blame them one bit), warmed up to me and vice-versa.
We watched with amazement and sometimes amusement/horror as various friends and family conducted their lives in all sorts of scandalous ways. We are low-drama, but it's fun to live vicariously through others from time to time, though we both agree it gets tiring before too long.
I invented about a billion pet names for Lisa, some of which are: smoochy, scuppy, scoopy, scamperpants, floofy, angel, whizzler, and a whole pile of other ones that are considerably more silly. I'd post more of them but I suspect she's already going to plan my demise for even posting the few I just did.

We have been there for each other during lots of personal and professional ups and downs, and she has been my most trusted confidante and adviser - she's a hell of a smart woman and I'm lucky to have her in my corner when I need additional perspective and/or support. Like me, her B.S. detector is permanently set on 'high', and she's not afraid to call me out on things and kick my ass when it's required. I love her all the more for it.

Oh, and you may have noticed she's not too hard on the eyes either :) That's just icing in the cake, but I'm telling you it's some beautiful icing.

I can't thank her enough for enduring the past ten years with me, and I love her more than I could possibly express. I clearly married well out of my league, but every day I do my best to show her how grateful I am for every moment I spend with her.

Lisa, you are my life. Here's to the last ten years, and here's to the next hundred!

2010-05-18T09:01:00.003-04:00

In the simulator we are currently using, the GPWS (Ground Proximity Warning System, pronounced Jeep-Whizz) doesn't have a forward-looking feature, so it only goes off when the radar altimeter starts to unwind at an alarming rate. In our actual airplane, our GPWS has a terrain database built-in and it can predict whether a mountain will be a problem a lot earlier than this system. Still, it's kinda fun to do this in the simulator, it shows us how little time we have to react in a case like this. A few seconds longer, and we would be a pancake on the side of a virtual hill.

This simulator is a Level C sim, with the full-motion and whatnot. Graphics are adequate, but my Xbox 360 totally pwns them. Too bad my 360 doesn't have a good flight sim program built around an actual airplane cockpit...

2010-05-14T20:10:00.004-04:00

Taken earlier today, on the backhaul from Baltimore. Kitsch was on assignment in California today, so Pepper was drafted as Co-Captain for this particular run. In this particular niche of flying, most pilots are qualified as Captains - in fact I can only think of one person (out of the dozen or so I have flown with over the past 5 years) who is only qualified as a first officer, and that's more to do with internal politics (in the company he works for) rather than ability or qualifications.

Moving on: Thunderstorms can grow really fast, and this was a good day to observe said growth - we flew by this particular set of storms on the way into Baltimore around 1pm when it was basically a single cel, but by 3pm daytime heating had helped the line of thunderstorms grow into an unbroken line around 60 miles long, which is what is featured in the video. The tops were at 35,000' when we flew past them, but the tops have since climbed higher. As I'm typing these words, the small line has now grown and into a widespread system of thunderstorms that look kinda like this:

The good thing is that the line of thunderstorms has lots of gaps in it, which means that with some creative vectoring, most pilots won't have to get too close to them.

Yay for summer! I like the extended daylight hours, but I'm not a huge fan of the apocalyptic weather that accompanies them.

Random babble ensues:

It was a charter flight, so we had to dress up in full regalia. Seriously, wearing a tie around my neck is the worst part of this job. Having said that, I also recognize that I'm a huge whiner.

2010-05-07T01:29:00.006-04:00

The pics are part of a trip I just did, showing us on approach back into Pearson a couple of hours ago.

We just got back from Montreal, taking some nice folks to watch a hockey game. I flew with Pepper, and we figured we'd mix it up a little bit by taking one of his planes instead of my baby. On the return leg the air was smooth, the skies were clear, and the iphone was actually able to capture a nice night ILS down runway 05 at Pearson on the return leg. Pepper was flying, I was recording. I'm quite pleased with how the video turned out - you'll want to set the resolution to 480p for a little more detail. You'll hear a horn near the beginning, it's the "remember to put the landing gear down" horn. We remembered, so I guess it did a good job :)

Things look quite pretty at night, if you can keep your eyes open :) Thank jebus for Red Bull, it really comes in handy on flights like these - I find it's like 2 cups of coffee without the gut-rot. Near the end of the video one of the pax says "Hey, let's go to Mexico now", and I reply "We need to get a bit of gas first", just to put it in the proper context in case you heard me saying that and were like "wtf!"

2010-05-03T06:30:00.008-04:00

*NOTE* in one of the vids I posted yesterday, I show some nasty weather moving through Nashville. I checked the news last night and saw that more than 10 people died as a result of that storm system. That's awful, and it further underscores the power that some of these storm systems have, especially ones in the midwest.

Now lets document the trip back home. This one went faster - we did about 4.5 hours in the air as opposed to 7 hours getting to Scottsdale, which is directly a result of the 180 mph winds blowing from west to east during these past few days. The trip was pretty straightforward with the exception of hitting one hell of a bump on departure from Scottsdale - we were climbing through 16,000' when some mechanical turbulence off the mountains caused a single jolt during which everyone on board hit our heads on the ceiling (yes, we all had our seatbelts on, and no it didn't matter) and stuff to go flying all around the cabin - not fun at all for our pax, especially the one person who was a nervous flyer to begin with. Kitsch went back and talked to them for a while, calming the pax down and explaining that the plane was fine and the turbulence was unlikely to occur again during our trip home. Still, I haven't felt a bump like that in quite some time. Oh, and on arrival into Toronto the ATIS (automated weather information system) was calling for winds down the runway at 7 knots, but tower was more accurately calling them as mostly down the runway at 35 knots, so it was a wee bit bumpy coming in - again, that was a fun conversation with the nervous pax who had to be assured that light turbulence is a relatively routine, if irritating part of flying.

And now for some pics 'n vids!

I played with a tilt-shift app on the iphone in lots of these pics - when done well, it's supposed to make everything look like a model railway set. Clearly the software isn't perfect, but it still makes some stuff look pretty cool.

The last vid is of Kitsch's masterful landing in Toronto during our windy arrival.

A rather peaceful video - watching the clouds go by as we pass over Kansas.

Random babbling, again over Kansas. Apologies to Captain Dave for stealing his great tagline "Life on the line continues". You HAVE read Captain Dave's blog, right? It's in my top 3 all-time favorites.

Departing Wichita, pondering the thunderstorms off in the distance.

Closer to the T-storms, coming up on Kansas City MO, futher ponderousness.

Finally, Kitsch's masterful ILS into Toronto. Again, the actual winds were nearly 30 knots stronger than the ATIS was indicating, which added a bit of a thrill to an otherwise routine approach.

2010-05-02T08:53:00.005-04:00

Epic trip to Scottsdale recently. I did a few vids to pass the time - nothing too exciting in them, but I was kinda pleased with some of the photos I snagged on approach into KSDL.

Vids first, then pics.

Playing with tilt-shift on the iphone

Now the cool stuff. I really like the landscape of Arizona, I think everyone should see it at least once.

2010-05-02T07:41:00.004-04:00

We did CPR / AED training last week, here are a few highlights.

AED = Automated External Defibrillator - we carry one on board in case any of our passengers have 'the big jammer' while flying with us. Now we know how to use it!

I'll sum up what we learned in CPR - If it's an adult, call 911 first, then give 2 breaths via mouth-to-mouth, followed by 30 fast and hard chest thrusts (you are aiming for 100 thrusts per minute, timing-wise). Repeat until help arrives. If it's a kid, do 5 sets of 2-breaths and 30 chest thrusts, then call 911, then get back to CPR until help arrives. If it's a baby, only use 2 fingers for the chest thrusts instead of both hands.

Oh, and prepare for lots of barf.

To use the AED, follow the verbal instructions that the unit gives you, zap 'em if the unit says to zap 'em, but you'd better make sure nobody is touching the person when they get zapped.

Again, prepare for lots of barf.

The training went pretty well, as you can see from the pics and video.

2010-04-20T14:35:00.003-04:00

This is what all the fuss is about - you know, that volcano that I can't pronounce the name of. Footage was taken yesterday. There's a cool shockwave about 45 seconds into the vid.

2010-04-16T20:24:00.002-04:00

A quick tour of our back yard and the occupants of said yard. Charlie lives indoors, Barfington is an outdoor kitty. Barfy is half-wild but will let me pet him from time to time, and certainly let me feed him. He gets most of his nutrition from field mice, but I figure the occasional (ie daily) bowl of Meow Mix helps round out his diet.

2010-04-16T06:45:00.003-04:00

Pepper's Nassau approach in my previous post is nice, smooth, and low-risk. That's absolutely fine - our passengers expect that, and that's what we deliver. Some other folks like to amp up the difficulty level a little bit when they are airborne, and that can be fun to watch too...

This is the Red Bull air team pulling off a truly spectacular / insane stunt in Styria, Austria. I only drink regular Red Bull, I'm guessing these folks must drink the bootleg, distilled, overproof version :)

You don't need to be bilingual to appreciate this, trust me - you'll get the idea about what they are attempting pretty quickly through the video.

More info here, as well as some amazing pics.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1265891/Hold-think-youre-going-Skydiver-grabs-gliders-tail-fin-fly-2-100-metres-100mph.html#ixzz0l88NYbp7

2010-04-15T15:08:00.002-04:00

Pepper is a pilot on the Citation 550 for another company, but we have good relations with them and we tend to fly the same aircraft from time to time. He saved me considerable inconvenience a while back by landing the airplane when I couldn't see out my side of the window.

He took a cool video with his new videocam, it's a visual approach into Nassau. I haven't been to Nassau in a couple of months, but it appears it's just as I left it :)

Here's his video, I find it really relaxing:

You can play it in 1080p HD if your computer has the horsepower, just click on the 360p tab and change it upwards.

He did another video of a jetliner (an American Airlines 737-800 to be precise) passing below them on the way to Nassau, which I'll share because the zoom on his camera is better than mine:

Corporate jets tend to cruise at a higher altitude than most commercial jets, with a few exceptions.

2010-04-14T08:59:00.003-04:00

Aight, let's go through our checklist in painful and boring detail :)
Scroll down one post for an example of the checklist we use.

Ima skip some of the ones that are obvious to me, but if you have any questions I'll be happy to blather on about any missed items.

1. customs/canpass - did we do the paperwork before attempting a crossborder flight? This is all done electronically now when we go to the US, via the Eapis system. On the way back to Canada, we just make a phone call to CANPASS.

2. oxygen system - we check our masks to make sure they are plugged in and there is pressure in the lines - there is a little indicator in each mask that shows a green stripe if there is pressure in the line, and a red stripe if there is no pressure. Oxygen control valves are switches that dump the emergency oxygen masks in the passenger cabin if we want to completely freak them out, or if the cabin altitude exceeds 13,000'.

3. circuit breakers all in, switches switched appropriately - we double-check these because our maintenance guys could have done routine maintenance on the airplane and left c/b's pulled or switches in unusual positions as part of their maintenance checks. They are, ahem, strongly encouraged to leave the cockpit as they found it, but as we all know, sometimes stuff happens.

4. we fire up our standby attitude indicator (we actually have 2 standby AI's) to make sure it has spun up before flight. It has its own little battery pack and doesn't need main bus power or main battery power to spool up.

5. If we are doing a ground-power-unit (GPU / battery cart) start, then we leave our generators off, but if we are doing an engine start from our own battery we leave our gens on - that way once we start one engine, the generator on it will help provide electrical power to start the second engine - so much so, that a GPU or cross-generator start only counts as 1/3 of a battery start for logging purposes.

6. Battery emer check - we check that our vital systems will still be powered by the emergency battery bus in the event of a complete electrical failure. If we somehow were to lose our main electrical system, the emergency battery bus will power our #1 communications radio, our #2 navigation radio, and the copilot's HSI (navigation thingy), along with a few cockpit lights. That means that if we lose electrics, the copilot will have control of the plane as the Captain's HSI will be toast.

7. We check our various warning systems - that's an easy one - there's a circular switch with about a dozen positions we rotate to in order to check all our various warning systems, like thrust reversers, landing gear lights, windshield bleed air heat, engine fire indicators, TCAS etc. That means the cockpit gets lit up with bells and lights and buzzers for a few minutes, but again it's important to make sure the bells and lights and buzzers will operate correctly if they need to.

8. We check our fuel crossfeed valves and indicators to make sure we can use fuel from either tank to feed either engine. Our fuel burns are pretty amazingly even on both engines, and we generally don't have to crossfeed from one tank to another, but if we were to lose an engine and have to fly around for a while before landing, it's nice to know we can burn fuel out of either tank to feed the remaining fan.

9. Inverters - we have dual inverters (they change the electricity provided by our generators from DC to AC for those systems that run on AC power), and we make sure they are both working - one inverter can easily provide enough power for the entire airplane, but we have two of them as a backup and we make sure both are happy and purring before we blast off.

10. Pressurization and environmental - basically we dial in our expected cruise altitude into the pressurization system, and we turn the air conditioning on if it's hot outside.

11. Trim / Flaps - we normally take off with 15 degrees of flap unless we are operating out of an airport that has a high altitude about sea level. We set the trim depending on the aircraft load - if we have some hefty passengers sitting up front, we'll trim the aircraft to be nose-up a little bit, so we don't have to reef on the controls as hard to pitch upward to take off.

12. CVR - we press a little green button on the cockpit voice recorder and if a little green light goes on in 5 seconds, it passes the test. If it doesn't go on, we get it fixed before flying. That's about all I know on that one.

13. Autopilot - we run it through a bunch of tests for the first flight of the day, but for all other flights that day we can do a quick-test by pressing a little red button and listening for the "you passed the test" buzzer.

14. Atis / GPS / Data / Takeoff Briefing / clocks and bugs - We find out the weather, write it down, find out our clearance, write it down, then enter our flight plan into our GPS. We then calculate our various speeds and thrust settings using a book I made up a few years ago - those are based on our weight, the airport altitude about sea level, and the temperature on the ground. Modern jets will automatically calculate all that stuff, but we do it manually. In the checklist under "Before Takeoff" you'll see a little section called 'simplified takeoff data' - we can use those numbers if the aircraft falls under the conditions set out in the table, which is handy on quick turnarounds - the thrust settings and speeds in the quicknumbers are conservative, so if we wanted to be extra-anal, umm, I mean precise, we could still look up the exact numbers for our temp/weight/altitude etc in the big book.

15. Pax advisory / coffee - we flip on the "fasten seat belts and stop smoking" lights, and we hit the switch that heats the onboard coffee pot. This is very important for pilot and passenger caffeination.

You'll notice there's a little black line on the checklist after these checks. We can do all the previous items hours before the flight, but we don't go below the line until everyone is on board and the main cabin door is closed.

Once everyone is on board, we make sure the doors are all closed and locked (the "door unlocked" light will go out). We turn our avionics off in case we get a power spike from a bad GPU or generator during start, we turn off our air conditioning because it's a total power hog and we want to use all available power to spool up the engines quickly, we do a quick check of the engine instruments to make sure they look normal, then we pick an engine and hit the start button on it. We will then monitor the engine instruments to make sure we get oil pressure / fan rotation / fuel flow / engine temperature indications at the right times, and once the engine is idling nicely, we flip the switch that extends the speed brakes. Each engine has a hydraulic pump that can power all our hydraulic systems, and our speedbrakes are one of those systems. If the speedbrakes operate normally, we know that the hydraulic pump on the spinning engine is working. We alternate which engine we start in order to test each hydraulic pump every other leg. Once we ascertain everything is tick-boo with the spinning engine, we fire up the other fan.

Phew, I have writers cramp now so Ima take a break - I'll talk about the rest of the checklist in painful detail shortly. The funny thing is, it takes about 5 minutes to do all these checks once you are familiar with the plane, far less time than it took me to write about them, or for you to read about them. Good thing too, otherwise we'd never get off the ground :)

2010-04-13T12:42:00.001-04:00

This is the checklist we use for normal operations.

Thanks to the commenter on this post who showed me how to upload it without using screen-print! :)

I'm going flying shortly, but I'll do up another post soon that explains some of the items on the checklist.

2010-04-12T16:03:00.005-04:00

Fun with the macro focus on the camera! Our plane might be old-skool but she has character. I think some of these are really pretty.

2010-04-12T12:31:00.006-04:00

Yow, it's been 20 years since I got my last tattoo done. They have faded somewhat in the past 2 decades, but they are still clear enough that I get enjoyment from them - a date with the laser is still some time off in the future. Lately I have been thinking a lot about getting a necklace, one that could be hidden by a pilot shirt of course. I don't know many other pilots with tattoos - I wonder why that is? Tattoos are pretty personal - I don't expect anyone else to 'get' why I got mine done, and that's fine - honestly I didn't have any particularly traumatic life-even that prompted them, I just thought they looked pretty. The black ones are in homage to my favorite band of all time, Skinny Puppy. I guess I'm a goth at heart, I just don't look good in black lipstick so I forgo the fashion part. Lucky for my passengers! :)

2010-04-10T18:53:00.002-04:00

2 posts in one day! I'm nothing if not erratic, a quality that is surely highly valued in a corporate pilot :) The previous post is funnier, but these look cool so there you go. It's important to watch them in order, otherwise chaos will ensue.

then

2010-04-10T17:49:00.006-04:00

On the positive side, my underwear is fresh, and so are my socks and t-shirt. The rest of my stuff, not so much. I blame myself entirely - after flying for 22 years, I know better than to depart on a quick daytrip without my overnight bag. Oh well, I'm sure the Walmart in Miami Lakes was happy for the extra business as Kitsch and I bought our overnight sundries, so I guess we are doing our part to help out the economy in these harsh economic times.

A sample of our schedule this recent past:

Day 1: Toronto - Raleigh NC - Augusta GA - Toronto
Day 2: Toronto - Miami - Augusta - Toronto
Day 3: Toronto - Raleigh - Augusta - Miami
Day 4: Miami - Nassau - Miami
Day 5: Miami - Toronto - Raleigh - Augusta - Toronto
Days 6 and 7: Toronto - New York - Montreal - Toronto

Lots of Augusta stuff, apparently there's some sports event going on there - I dunno, I don't follow soccer or football or whatever :p

Anyway, on Days 1 and 2, you'll note that we end up back at Toronto. I packed my bag for Day 1, but on Day 2 I left it in our front porch, too lazy to clean it out and repack fresh socks and underwear and company golf shirts. You can facepalm now, but let's build it up a little:

The weather was mostly uneventful, but as we flew south toward Miami we could see a nasty system heading east from the south-central US. No big deal - if we didn't dillydally in Miami we could beat the storms into Augusta, wait them out and then head back home in time for a late supper before starting our next day's flights. We landed in Miami, dropped our pax off, got fuelled up, and Kitsch went out to the plane to get our clearance. He came back a few minutes later, with 4 words. "Ground stop in Augusta". Curses! Expletives! Obscene gerund! It wasn't even the weather that was causing it, it was all the traffic inbound to drop off rich folk for the Masters Golf tourney, which was causing gridlock at the airport. Even though we have to get arrival slots for Augusta during the Masters, apparently the system still has a few kinks in it.

The ground stop lasted a few hours, just enough to let the storm system really build up in intensity. Once the ground stop was cancelled (would that be called a ground go?) we looked at the radar, and it was then that I really, really wished I had brought my overnight bag.

All that red stuff on radar is the juicy center in lines of thunderstorms up to 55,000' with hail and lightning and all sorts of things that will twist your airplane's tail. Oh yeah, by this time, we were also 10 hours into our duty day. If you look at the picture, you'll see there was no real practical way to get into Augusta from southern Florida - the storm system may appear to end in the Gulf of Mexico, but it didn't - there are just no radar stations out there so it gets cut off - the satellite images showed it extended all the way to the southern tip of Florida, a few hundred miles west of the state. Oh, and as an added bonus, the storm systems were moving slowly, and it would be hours before they passed east of Augusta.

So Kitsch and I made a call we haven't had to do in a few years - we called up our Augusta pax and told them we wouldn't be making it in that night, we'd have to wait out the storms and pick them up early the next morning. I felt bad for our pax - hotel prices are insane in Augusta during Masters week (if you can even find them), like $500 for a single room at a one-star Super 8. I'm not even making that up, that's what we were quoted.

Anyway, that set off a whole cascade of scheduling events, which isn't a whole lot of fun for us, especially as our flight department is small and Kitsch and I don't have a person in the office to help out with stuff like this.

We rearranged our schedule, booked rooms at the local Marriott and went in search of fresh underthings, razors, contact lens solution and everything else that we had in our overnight bags. Yup, Kitsch normally carries a bag on every trip too, but inexplicably he chose not to on this one - at least I didn't have to endure his laughter at my wrinkled shirt and pants because he was in the same boat.

Once we got stocked, we rushed back to the hotel to start our duty rest because we had to be up extra-early to get from Miami to Augusta to pick up our pax, drop them off in Toronto, then take another group of pax to Augusta (via Raleigh for US Customs), then back to Miami for another group of pax. Yup, we did nearly 9 hours in the air and I don't mind telling you I was absolutely wiped at the end of it.

Fortunately for me, Lisa was able to drop my bag off at our FBO in Toronto the night we were stuck in Miami. I picked it up on the backhaul and I am now stocked for the rest of the schedule. Like most lessons learned, I'm now more bitter and more wiserer. I have decided to be proactive to make sure I never make this mistake again, no matter my level of laziness: In addition to strengthening my resolve to never hit the engine start buttons unless I have my regular overnight bag, I'm making a small bag up with overnight gear that will never leave the airplane. My laziness might be a powerful force, but my self-disgust at falling for the ol' "It's just a quick trip, you'll be back home before you know it" is even more powerful.

ps: the stuff I blacked out on my Firefox screen cap isn't very interesting - it's related to a hobby of mine I like to call 'sharing' but others like to call 'downloading pirated video games'. I figure no need to self-incriminate any further...

2010-03-16T18:08:00.002-04:00

Meet Charlie, our baby girl puppy!

A couple of corrections that Lisa asked me to make: She's 1/2 Boston Terrier, not 1/2 British Terrier, and that's our kitchen featured, not our living room. Puppy ate my brain!

If you have any dog-raising tips, lemme know. I have owned twenty-seven bazillion cats, but this is my first dog. Good thing she's so freakin' cute! ;)

2010-03-15T14:06:00.002-04:00

We did this on Friday. Kitsch was flying this ILS, I was in the right seat. Only the last couple of minutes is interesting, but I'm too lazy to edit my videos for length. Oh, I got a shout-out from a controller on this trip. Glad you like the blog :) After that I flew back to Toronto where the weather was actually identical at 400' and 2 miles, but I didn't get it on video - too bad now that I think of it, it would have made an interesting comparison. This is my final try at using the iphone video - it's okay but my $150 Kodak ZX1 would give a lot more detail so Ima switch back.

2010-03-08T19:07:00.002-05:00

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

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

2010-03-08T18:38:00.005-05:00

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

Absolutely beautiful country here...

Guess the iconic Canadian landmark!

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

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

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

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

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

2010-02-14T22:56:00.004-05:00

Happy Valentines Day! I hope someone makes you feel loved today, tomorrow, and every day after that. This is a squishy post, you are forewarned...

I have loved airplanes all my life. When I was a young boy in Tanzania, I'd sit on my parent's shoulders, point at the skies and identify the big planes as they were coming in to land at the airport. DC-9! Lockheed Tristar! DC-3! I fingerpainted pictures of airplanes long before I could read and write. My mom has saved some, presumably in case I ever become famous and they become valuable :)

I love lots of little things about flying, like the smell of hot jet fuel, or watching a meteor burn across the sky at night from 37,000'. I love the sound of a pop can opening because it reminds me of being a kid on a Wardair 747 , flying across the Atlantic to visit my grandparents in Ireland, and absolutely intoxicated with the sense of power that "Can I get you another Coke?" from a flight attendant conveys to a small boy, especially one who wasn't allowed to drink pop unless while on vacation. I love easing the power levers forward and being pushed into my seat while the plane accelerates down the runway. I love thrust reversers and beta range. I love rotating belly beacons and overhead cockpit switches. I love bleed air heat. I love landing at around 9pm on a summer night, during that short window when it's getting dark but you can still see everything. I love crisp sheets in a nice hotel at a warm destination in January. I love strobe lights on the wings and tail, lots and lots of strobe lights. I love coming home to Lisa and smooching her cheeks while she giggles and squirms. I kind of hate getting dressed up in my pilot outfit, but I love that I look like a professional when I do. I love getting together with a group of pilots and telling stories, enjoying the camaraderie that can only come with sharing intense experiences. I love hearing "The passenger has changed the departure time from midnight tonight to 9am tomorrow" (I heard that last Wednesday). I love arriving after a storm has passed through the airport and the skies are clear, with scary thunderheads beating each other to death off in the distance as they move further away. I love flying over big highways at night and watching the rivers of light move across the ground. I love that my job occasionally takes me to Vancouver for a few days, so I can go to Nanaimo and hang with my mom. I love when passengers, Customs agents and bosses are all in good moods at the same time.

And I love certain specific airplanes...

At my first job, I fell madly in love with the first airplane I was ever Captain on, a Beech Baron (C-GICM), also known as India Charlie Harley due to the sound the engines made at idle. She was a short Baron with upgraded engines that added 50 hp and increased the rate of climb to 3,000 feet per minute on a cold day. When I pushed the throttles forward it felt like pulling the trigger on a railgun, and for the first 50 hours or so, I was all "Whoah Nelly!", unsure if I was up to the challenge of handling a beast like the 55 Baron. Hardly anything worked on her - the panel was VFR only (if even that), and she was held together with speedtape and frayed lockwire, but she had the heart of a lion, and she sounded like the end of the world when I ran the engines up to full power. I also flew the Piper Navajo and Navajo Chieftain, and they were pretty cool - I really liked the overhead switches in the cockpit - but it wasn't love like it was with India Charlie Harley.

At my second job, I met C-GPAA, a Beech 58 Baron. I bonded with her at a fundamental level, flew her for 4 years and cried when the company went under and she got sold to an Israeli arms dealer (for real) living in Long Island. Yeah, I'm emo.

At my third job, I met the Mitsubishi MU-2. People who have flown the MU-2 tend to be a sharply divided group - I'm in the group of people who think it's an absolutely amazing machine that's built like a tank, and can do 300 knots while flying into 3,000' ice-covered gravel strips. This love affair was a bit one-sided - though I loved the airplane (and respect it like no other), she wasn't that into me and she made it clear that she'd happily end my life if I neglected her or pissed her off, much like that Wiccan girl I dated about 15 years ago. That's okay, not all love stories involve reciprocation and I don't mind being unrequited once in a while, as long as I don't get totally shot down. Bah, that last line sounded a lot more clever in my mind that on the screen, but I'm working on a deadline (Valentine's Day pilot blogging post is traditionally done on Valentine's Day, at least that's what Aviatrix tells me) so it stays.

At my current job, I met the Cessna Citation 550 light jet. She's happy to be airborne, which I'll admit was a refreshing change from the occasionally bitchy MU-2. I love the fact that she takes me above the weather, and she keeps me warm, and she takes me to lots of cool destinations where I can pretend to live like a rich person for a few days at a time. I'm not gonna lie - I love the fact that I'm a qualified Captain on her, but that's more a reflection of my own crippling vanity than anything to do with her. I think she loves me back a little bit - she's never left me stranded anywhere, and she's never chucked a fit while flying. Like a magical flying pony almost, she does her job without complaint, and is generally patient and understanding when I make a mistake.

But of course all of this pales in comparison to the biggest gift that aviation has given me, one that I can never repay. I met the my beautiful bride Lisa at the airport and I'll always be profoundly grateful for that gift. I love flying, but Lisa is my life.

What do you love?

2010-02-03T17:26:00.002-05:00

..Confirm holding short of the runway...

2010-01-25T19:24:00.004-05:00

I'm very grateful that I'm in a job where I don't have to put a price on safety, because sometimes safety is incredibly expensive. Allow me to elaborate...

We flew west today for a whole long while, and on the way west we stopped in Omaha Nebraska to clear US Customs. The Customs people were friendly and quick and that part was great, but the part that wasn't too hot was the weather.

It was overcast and snowing today in Omaha, and we ended up picking up some ice. Not quite the "Can't see out the windshield" kind we had a couple of weeks ago (scroll down a couple of posts for that story), but any ice is too much ice on a plane, so we had to remove it before continuing our journey westbound.

When deicing in North America, there are generally 4 different types of fluid used, conveniently named Type I, II, III and IV.

Type I is a de-ice fluid, meaning it's used to remove ice that has already accumulated on the plane. It's a mixture of 90% glycol (alcohol) and 10% water which is heated to about 90 degrees Celsius before being sprayed on the plane. It's usually colored bright orange, like in the video I attached to this post. Type I is great for removing ice, but it doesn't provide a very long period of protection from re-icing after it's applied.

Type IV is the most commonly used anti-ice fluid and is normally colored green. It's a mixture of glycol and a thickener, usually vegetable oil. The thickener prevents the glycol from dripping off the wings after the fluid is sprayed on, which provides decent protection for a while if it's snowing outside etc. The stuff is supposed to stick like glue to the wings until you are doing about a hundred miles an hour down the runway, when it's supposed to drip off and leave no trace. Oh, and as a random observation, it tastes terrible.

Anyway, you are less likely to come across the other two types of fluid, but I'll include them here for the sake of completeness:

Type II is an anti-ice fluid, meaning it's put on to prevent ice from forming on the wings it's snowing outside, etc. It's being phased out in favor of Type IV, which is more effective.

Type III is an anti-ice fluid but it's hardly used any more, if at all - it was designed for smaller commuter aircraft but it turns out that Type IV is equally effective, so type III became irrelevant.

So how do we know what fluids to apply in what situations?

In Canada, Transport Canada publishes an updated manual called the HOT guidelines (not nearly as fun as it sounds), which lists the length of time you can expect your de-icing or anti-icing fluid to provide protection.

Anyway, if the airplane is just covered in ice but the skies are clear then we generally would only use Type I, but if it was snowing or freezingly raining then we'd add a coat of Type IV for added protection.

For example, if it was -5c with freezing fog at the airport we wanted to depart from, Type I fluid might give us up to 13 minutes of protection against refreezing, but if we added a coat of Type IV, it would provide us up to 80 minutes of protection against refreezing.

At large airports during bad-weather days there can be long lines of aircraft waiting to depart, so the longer you have protection, the greater your chances of being cleared for takeoff while your de-ice and anti-ice fluids are still working. If the lineup is too long and/or the precipitation is too bad (freezing rain, etc) then it's entirely possible the aircraft will have to pull out of the departure lineup and go back to get de-iced again.

And now, here's some of this stuff being put to use in real life:

We only took Type I de-ice fluid because it wasn't actually snowing in Omaha, so we didn't need to worry about any additional ice while we were taxiing for departure. In the video it looks snowy, but that's just snow blowing around the ramp.

In the 5 minutes it took to de-ice us this morning, they used 42 gallons (158L) of heated Type I Oh, did I mention it's $16.95/gallon ($4.49/L)? That adds up when they fire the stuff out of a cannon, in this case to the tune of $712. That's about $20 for every second they sprayed us.

I know that sounds outrageous, but it was actually a lot cheaper to deice in Omaha than in our home base of Toronto Pearson, where the airport association has a monopoly on de-icing facilities and they jack the price outrageously because they can. Last time we got de-iced in Toronto, the bill was $2,500.00. Still, it's better than trying to fly an iced-up plane and littering the countryside with aircraft parts, so that's what we'll continue to do.

2010-01-15T18:51:00.003-05:00

Please donate what you can to relief efforts in Haiti. I can't get over the images I'm seeing on TV and the web.

This link will take you to the Canadian Red Cross where you can donate online.

2010-01-05T07:55:00.007-05:00

I respect icing, but it usually doesn't make me sweat in the jet.

This turned out to be a long story, so you are forewarned...

We flew up north to Timmins last night for a passenger pickup and return to Toronto. Kitsch was in New York with the Bravo so I was accompanied on this flight by Pepper, a fellow Captain I borrowed from a friendly competitor, and who has allowed me to call him Pepper for this story, so here we go...

Pepper and I had met years before while flying medevacs and had kept in touch, only to wind up years later flying the same type of aircraft out of the same airport. In fact, the last time I flew with him was a few months ago, in 'his' Citation and I was his f/o. Last night it was 'my' Citation and I was Mr 4-bars, not that it really matters for the purpose of this story.

Checking the weather before the flight, we knew a warm front was over our destination. It's all relative, and a warm front in this case means air that's maybe 5 or 6 Celsius overrunning air that's closer to -15c. Precipitation is usually the result, sometimes making beautiful snowflakes. Unfortunately it's not always a joyous occasion, as unfrozen precipitation from the overrunning warm air mass can fall through the cold air layer and (through *magic*) become supercooled without actually freezing until it hits a solid object. You know what's a solid object? An airplane!

If heavy freezing precipitation hits an aircraft, it can easily overpower the most robust anti-ice and de-ice systems ever built, very rapidly destroying the wings ability to produce lift and clogging all sorts of important air intakes, coating radio antennas and frosting over the windshield. For starters.

As a jet we generally don't spend much time in icing conditions - when we take off we can quickly climb up high enough that it's too cold for ice to form, but upon arrival we generally spend about 10 minutes at a low altitude when approaching and landing at an airport. This is all relevant because Timmins was reporting light freezing drizzle throughout the day. I called ahead and made sure the airport operator would have ground personnel available to de-ice us once we landed, and we got that all coordinated. The runway was constantly being sanded and plowed, and the runway friction index was decent, so that part looked fine too.

Anyway, I guess my point is we were primed to expect messy weather and icing, but it was still predicted to be within the capabilities of the aircraft. The conditions didn't look too bad on paper, and the weather was decent at various alternate airports along the route, so we lit up and headed to Timmins.

The departure was uneventful, and we cruised well above any clouds for an hour while talking about airplanes and playing with the on-board satellite weather. We noted the weather in Timmins had improved from absolute minimums to 3 miles visibility in freezing drizzle, with a ceiling of a thousand feet.

ATC told us the tops of the clouds were around 13,000' and we could expect possible ice in the clouds during the descent. I turned on our anti-ice system to let the various parts warm up before we descended through the clouds. Our hot bits got hot and we punched through the tops of the clouds a few minutes later.

It really didn't take long after that.

Me: "Hmm, we sure are picking up a lot of ice"
Pepper: "Yep. Maybe an inch. I can see it on the wingtip light gates. You wanna blow those boots again?"
Me: "Yep"

We were then descending through about 9000' on the approach to Timmins and the icing started to increase in intensity. All our anti-ice equipment was on, and I was regularly cycling the rubber boots on the wings to knock off ice that was just as rapidly accumulating. No huge deal, and not unsafe - everything is functioning as it should. I told myself this as I watched huge plates of ice fall off the wings every time the boots inflated.

A couple of minutes later, ATC lined us up for the runway and we started our final descent along the ILS glideslope into Timmins. We broke through the bottoms of the clouds about 10 miles from the runway.

Normally that's a good thing, but Pepper and I greeted it with consternation. We could see out the side windows just fine, but the ground visibility revealed that our front windshield was completely covered in ice, as in armour-plated. It was dark and we simply hadn't noticed because we wouldn't have seen anything anyway until the last few minutes of the flight. Our windshield is heated by taking hot air from an engine and blowing it over the outside of the windshield, and it's normally a pretty effective system, but the freezing precipitation we were flying through was really sticky, and it simply overpowered our bleed air heat.

I flipped another switch which started to drench the windshield with isopropyl alcohol, much like windshield washer antifreeze. We have about 20 minutes of fluid, which should be more than enough to eventually get the ice off the windshield, but it's not an instant process. In the past 5 years of flying the jet in Canadian winters, I have never gotten to flip this switch before, so I guess that was cool.

Me: "Okay, let's do a missed approach and maybe hold for a few minutes to see if the alcohol does the trick and we can see."
Pepper: "Okay, I'll let ATC know that we want to go around and hold in the icing while waiting for the icing to disappear"
Me: "If worst comes to worst we can always climb up to altitude and let the ice sublimate."
Pepper: "How much does your plane cost to operate per hour?"
Me: "You were adopted and your cat hates you"

Now before you get all freaked out, I want to make the clear point that we are in *NO* danger at any time during this event - if worst came to worst we'd just fly back to Toronto, where the skies were clear, and during the flight the windshield ice would likely sublimate entirely, but the whole point of this trip was to go to pick someone up and bring them to Toronto, so we didn't want to give up just yet.

We turned off all the airvents in the cockpit, further strengthening airflow to the windshield. I slowed the plane down by 80 knots in the hopes that decreased airflow over the windshield will slow ice accumulation and heat dissipation, and maybe let the windshield alcohol soak in a little better.

We executed a missed approach and told ATC why, and they immediately got very curious and wanted all sorts of details which Pepper happily provided. We didn't climb up very high and were able to stay below the cloud layer, which helped slow the accumulation of ice, but the ice never stopped building. Of course all this time I was cycling the de-ice boots constantly, and the wings were doing okay.

We started to orbit the general area of the airport and waited to see what happened next. What happened next was that I started to be able to make out a faint strip near the bottom of the windshield where the alcohol was soaking in and melting some of the ice. Pepper said the visibility out his side was improving also, so that was cool. We decided to shoot another approach and see if we could see the runway by the time we needed to land, so we flew around and got all lined up with the runway again, about 10 miles back from the threshold.

Pepper: "Runway in sight"
Me: "You lie"
Pepper: "No, really. I can see it out my side"
Me: "I got nuthin'. Could you see enough to land if you had to?"
Pepper: "Cool! Yeah I could!"
Me: "Okay, you have control"

Pepper flew the ILS all the way down to a remarkably smooth landing, especially since we land the airplane from the right seat about once a year, usually during sim training. I was only able to see indistinct blobs out the front of my windshield the entire time, but once we got on the ground I was able to taxi by looking out the side windows.

After we landed, 4 ramp guys came out and started to look at the airplane and point. On the unprotected areas of the airplane there was enough ice to supply the cocktail needs of Keith Richards himself.

Our passengers were already there, so we loaded them up and waited while the de-ice truck blasted hundreds of litres and thousands of dollars worth of pink heated de-ice fluid on our airplane, scrubbing her clean and helping protect her while we taxied to the runway for departure.

We departed less than three minutes after getting hosed down, climbing through the icing layers and into clear air less than four minutes after that. The same warm front that was affecting Timmins was also starting to wreak havoc in the Toronto area, and we could see approaching precipitation. We managed to beat the precipitation in and I was able to actually land the airplane on this leg, so that was fun.

I wasn't even going to write about this, but two things made me:

1. An hour after we landed in Toronto, a departing Boeing 777 reported severe icing on the climbout. The Boeing 777 is a totally badass, huge jetliner and for them to report severe icing gives you some indication of the potency of the weather system.

2. This CADORS report, on an aircraft that arrived in Timmins 1 hour after we did:

Date: 2010-01-04

The Beech A-100 aircraft was on a flight from [origin not reported] to Timmins Airport (CYTS). The flight crew reported difficulty seeing out of the cockpit windshield due it being frozen. The flight crew declared an emergency and ARFF services were called out from the city. The aircraft landed at 0313Z without incident and the ARFF service equipment was released.

That gave me the chills when I read it today - I was browsing the CADORS to see if our airplane was mentioned - if an airplane in Canada overshoots for any reason a CADORs report is normally generated, but it appears we might have gotten lucky, both in the CADORS and in real life.

2010-01-04T13:57:00.005-05:00

We did a trip to Quebec a few weeks ago, and I found the instrument approach here interesting from a pilot-geek perspective. Instrument approaches are what we use to line up with the runway even if we can't see outside due to clouds etc.

When I fly the jet, I mostly go to large airports that use ILS navigation technology which lets us get right down to the runway before having to look outside. However, not all airports have the capability to install ILS's, and a good rule of thumb is the more remote the airport, the more primitive the instrument approach.

The NDB approach certainly wins the 'most primitive' prize - it's old, not very accurate and has been almost completely replaced by more accurate forms of navigation. Basically you are following an arrow on an instrument which points to various radio stations on the ground, but the arrow tends to waver and wander and lag and point at thunderstorms instead of navigation aids etc, so it's not the most desirable way to find the airport, but it's legal (and presumably safe).

For those of you who don't do this sort of thing, this particular instrument approach goes roughly like this:

1. Dial the Thetford Mines beacon frequency (275) in on your navigation receiver.
2. Fly to the Thetford Mines beacon If you are coming from the west, you can descent to 3,500 feet once you are within 25 miles of the airport. If you are coming from the east, you can only descend to 6,000 feet - this tells us there is high terrain or maybe a radio tower in that area.
3. Once you cross the beacon, turn to a track of 235, which is heading southwest, and descend to 2,900'
4. Fly outbound on the 235 track for a while, maybe a minute. You have 10 miles of protected airspace, so make sure your timing leaves you within your 10 protected miles.
4. After your minute is up, turn left to a track of 190, fly for 30 seconds, then make a 180-degree turn to the right to a track of 010.
5. Hold the track of 010 to intercept the desired inbound track of 055.
6. Once you are established on your inbound track of 055, you can descend to your minimums of 2500'. The chart lists 3 miles as a visibility you'll likely need in order to see the runway, but in Canada visibility is an advisory value only.
7. Look outside for the airport. If you see it before you cross the Thetford Mines beacon then circle to the south, not descending below 2,500' until you are in a position to land. If you cross the beacon and don't see the airport, climb to 3,500' and make a left turn back to the beacon and hold.

First, let's follow along with me as I take a boo at the approach:

The minimums on this approach still keep us over 1,000' in the air, so I start to dimly realize there are other factors in play, like maybe the airport being in between a bunch of hills. Oh, also:

1. It's an NDB approach, which is a fairly old and inaccurate way of finding the runway.
2. It's to a relatively small 4,500' strip. The shortest field we will operate out of is 4,000', and that's only if the runway is clean and the airplane is light.
3. The NDB navigation aid is right at the airport, which can make the approach a little tight.
4. There is no circling north of the field, except;
5. If you miss the approach, you are expected to turn to the north.
6. The procedure turn is to the south, and if you see the field, you are expected to circle south, where a hilltop 89' below the airplane lurks.
7. There is no local altimeter setting, you are supposed to use a remote one.
8. There is a restricted area (open-pit blasting for an asbestos mine) just to the east, so straight-out departures are out of the question.

This is a clip of us circling to the south of the field. You can see the 2,411' tall hill looming in the fog at around 0:15 into the video. The rest of the video is kinda boring and my battery cut out just before we touched down, so skip it if you'd like.

Once we landed, we shut down and chased our passengers away for a few hours. The airport was closed the day we arrived, and we picked up a pile of ice on the way in. We tried using the credit-card scraper method, but the ice was really sticky and I broke my library card, so we went with plan B:

The middle part where we start the engine is a lot more boring than I had hoped, but check out near the end of the clip where the Captain deploys the thrust reverser. Thrust reversers are cool :)

The howling sound at the end is me singing along with the engine.