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.

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...

*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 :)

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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 :)