Click on the court summons to make it larger.




So Lisa and her friends were driving to Ottawa to see her brother. They got as far as Kingston before getting lost and turning onto a sideroad, where they soon met an undercover police car. The officer claims that he clocked them going 138km/h in an 80km/h zone.

It gets better...in Ontario, being charged with speeding more than 50km/h over the limit means the following:

1. Immediate 7-day driver's license suspension - you have to give it to the officer on the spot.
2. Immediate 7-day seizure and impoundment of the vehicle (we pay the towing and impound fees - in Lisa's case around $325)
3. If convicted, minimum $2,000 fine (max is $10,000) and 6 demerit points (which could triple her insurance from $130 to $400/month)
4. If convicted, probable suspension of her driver's license for 30 days, and possible suspension for up to 2 years.
5. Lisa had to take the train back to Oakville ($45) once her car got impounded, then she has to take it to Kingston in a week ($93) to get the car back. (My mom is coming to visit this weekend, and I'm not going to take a whole day out of that visit to drive Lisa to Kingston)
6. Sully gets to give Lisa a ride to/from work every day, which means Sully has to wake up a half-hour early every morning. Not a real big deal, but still...
7. Lisa immediately gets a letter from the DOT saying she gets her license taken away for 10 years if she gets another big speeding ticket in the next 10 years.

In short, you do NOT want to get convicted of speeding more than 50km/h over the limit in Ontario.

As an aside, another consequence of having your driver's license taken away is that you no longer have ID to get into the bar; that night, Lisa tried to go to the pub with her friends and was denied entry because she didn't have a driver's license to show the bouncer. I'm sure there's something in there about karma or something, but I'm not sure what conclusion to draw.

And how was your weekend?

I'm in New York right now, on a company trip. The flight was routine, so I'll quickly segue to something more interesting.

This is a video clip my friend Jennifer made of a trip she did to Toronto Buttonville, flying a medevac in the MU-2. She's been a Captain on the MU-2 for some years now, and has it mastered. This is no small feat, considering the level of difficulty of the MU-2. For example, I can take my hands off my C-550 during flight and the plane will be rock-solid in its flight path. Hell, I could probably land my Citation II with my eyes closed and my hand only on the trim wheel, paying attention only to the rad-alt callouts. On the MU-2, my record for flying it with no hands before having to take control again was 6 seconds. When I did my first flight in the MU-2, my eyes were the size of dinner plates. 18 months later, when I did my final flight in the MU-2, my eyes were the size of dinner plates. Anyway, my point is that the MU-2 is a hella challenging airplane to fly, and she makes it look easy.

You may notice that this plane really hauls ass, even on approach.

I love the part around 1:20 when the plane touches down and she puts the props in Beta / Reverse, causing the "whoompf" noise. And then you get a small taste of the amazing wall of noise that the MU-2 puts out while taxiing.

If you wind up needing medical attention in northern Ontario somewhere, you might end up hitching a ride down south in one of these magnificent machines. If you see a friendly captain with blonde hair sitting up front, be sure to tell her you've seen her on youtube ;)

I got an interesting letter in the mail today from Transport Canada. In it was an advisory circular, entitled "Protecting the health & safety of employees on board aircraft in epidemic situations involving airborne communicable diseases".

Basically, it's what to do when the bird flu mutates and becomes communicable from human to human, which is probably going to happen sooner rather than later. When it does, millions of people will become infected and a pretty good chunk of those will die. Anyway, Transport Canada has decided that it's a likely enough scenario that they need to come up with a plan to fight it. After all, airplanes carrying sick pasengers will make any epidemic a pandemic within a few hours.

It says lots of basic stuff like the flight crew should use respiratory protection devices, which I'm assuming might be some variant on a surgical mask or an oxygen mask. It reminds us to use basic hygiene, which is certainly appreciated in a multi-crew cockpit whether or not an epidemic exists.

But here's the funny part:

"Air operators should also prevent obviously ill passengers from boarding their aircraft when they show signs such as persistent coughing, impaired breathing, persistent diarrhea, persistent vomiting, skin rash, abnormal bleeding and reduced mental clarity."

Just imagine.

Some of the stuff would be pretty obvious, like persistent vomiting or hideous disfiguring skin rash. I have flown lots of passengers with reduced mental clarity, but that has mostly been due to the bar stock we carry, and they got better after drinking lots of water and having a nap. Abnormal bleeding? I can't think of more than one scenario in which bleeding is normal, and I'm sure as hell not going to investigate that one either - it's not polite to do that to any of our paying passengers, let alone half of them. How on earth are we to know if a passenger about to board our aircraft has persistent diarrhea? I'm really not looking forward to that particular encounter...

You know what? It's just not worth it - in fact, remind me to call in sick that day :)

Crossing 600 miles of water to get to Bahamas.

I like that pic. I don't know how it's going to look on the blog, but at home it looks like I can actually look up and see into space.

These shots were taken a short while ago in a Citation Bravo, which is the newfangled version of the Citation II I fly - the airframe is the same, but the engines have 10% more thrust, the landing gear is trailing link (makes for softer landings) and the cockpit instruments are a lot more modern.

We took this plane to Bahamas. To be honest, I am less excited about that area than I used to be - there are only so many days I can walk along the beach with a pina colada before I start to pine for my couch at home. It's weird, but true.

Anyway, where were we?

Right, Bahamas.



I'm posting these pics as I'm looking outside my window at a massive snowstorm which is hammering the Toronto area. You know, the part where I previously said I was sick of Bahamas? I take it back. I'm ready for another trip, Mr. Charter client sir.

Okay, I'm getting off track. I actually had something interesting to post today, so now that I have alienated 90% of you, it's time to talk about pilot-geek stuff and chase away the remaining 10% :D

On the way back, the headwinds were such that in order to have enough fuel for the return leg, we had to climb to 43,000' above sea level, where the fuel burns are lowest. I'm not generally a huge fan of high-altitude flight (my personal feel-good altitude is 33,000'), mostly because we get exposed to a lot of solar radiation, which isn't particularly good for us. But there's another reason too, one which I will attempt to explain.

The higher we go, the more we tuck ourselves into 'coffin corner'

Here's a picture illustration of what I mean, taken at 38,000', climbing to 39,000'.



The part we care about at the moment is the airspeed indicator, which is at the top left of the pic. We are indicating 184 knots, and climbing at 500 feet per minute. Now see the little red bar at the top of the airspeed indicator, starting somewhere at around 218 or 219 knots? That's our never-exceed-speed indicator, showing the fastest we are allowed to go before we start to lose some structural strength in the airframe. To oversimplify - if we go too far over our redline, the wings come off.

Now there is another bar on the airspeed indicator that we can't see yet - it's a white one which appears at the low end of the indicator. It shows us the stall speed of the aircraft at that particular altitude. At 38,000', it's not yet an issue.

Now let's climb up a little higher.




See what happened to that little red bar on the airspeed indicator? We only climbed 3,000', but now the red bar is showing that our never-exceed speed is only about 202 knots. You still can't see it, but the white bar showing our stall speed has climbed also.

Let's push our luck and climb to 42,000' now. The altitude that we are currently flying at is indicated on the right side of the display, in green. The altitude at the top of the right side in red is what we have told the plane to climb to.




Now the red never-exceed-speed bar is showing somewhere around 198 knots, and we see the first appearance of the white dont-go-below-this-or-you-will-stall bar, which is showing around 137 knots or so.

I found it interesting that in these pics, we have only climbed 3,000'

We still have 60 knots to play with in between these two ranges, so it's not a huge issue for us, but consider this: At sea level, our never-exceed speed would be around 275 knots, and our stall speed would be around 85 knots, which gives us a 190 knot speed range that we can safely operate the airplane in.

This same effect applies to all aircraft - it was said that the US military spy planes such as the U2 or the SR71, who climb to altitudes above 60,000', would only have a 5 - 15 knot window in between the never-exceed speed and the stall speed, so it was vital to handle the aircraft extremely gently to avoid an upset.

Why does this happen? Well, I'm not going to go into it in much depth - Aviatrix at Cockpit Conversation can explain it a lot better than I can, but the short version is that the air is less dense at altitude, which causes all sorts of funky things to happen to airplanes.

That's it for my pilot-geek stuff today, I just thought it was interesting to see the effect of lower air density in real life.

I think this clip has been around for a while. Or maybe I just saw it in a nightmare I had once. A 747 gets hit by lightning while taking off in a thunderstorm.

To me the solution might be to not take off in a thunderstorm, but then again I'm not a 747 Captain.

Heading straight west for 2 tanks of gas gets us here...










Departing one airport for another one nearby, we pass over a normal, boring area of houses.
Click on any/all pics to make em bigger.





Wait a minute...let's zoom in a little. Those aren't all just houses....



Miles and miles of the awesomeness that is a US military airplane graveyard. How many billions of dollars went into these planes? I wonder what stories they could tell?




On approach, we watched the sun play with the fog in the hills.



Yeah, my job is pretty cool.



The next pic down is what we saw when this convo took place:
"Sully-1, call the airport in sight. It's 12 o'clock and 10 miles."
"Umm, if you say so. I'm thinking we'd like vectors for the ILS"
"The airport is reporting 15 miles visibility"; the controller spoke slowly and carefully, as clearly he was dealing with a moron who couldn't find a simple airport in the middle of the desert.




After landing, we saw a gorgeous turbine Beaver arrive. The logo on the tail is 2 otters, so I'm thinking this plane must have a big brother around somewhere.



After finishing flying for the day, I went back to the hotel where I discovered an amazing thing. Did you know you can get grapefruits from trees now instead of just in stores? What will they think of next!



I continue my obsession with recording little videos of my hotel rooms...

We are looking to hire a charter coordinator for our operation. I suck at drumming up business, so it's time to hire someone who doesn't suck, and who can get us 150 - 200 hours worth of client charter per year.

Do you live somewhere near the Greater Toronto Area?
Are you good with people?
Are you smart?
Can you legally work in Canada?

This is a NON-FLYING position, and it won't lead to flying down the road. We want someone who will make this into a long-term position, and who will invest time and energy into this job, so I'm not really interested in someone who will just do this until they can get a flight crew position.

Here's the offical job description; please email me a resume if you are interested.

Position: Charter Coordinator
Contact Person: Sulako (I'm gonna be reading the resumes, and I'll be happy to give you my real name and our company's name in the fullness of time)
Street Address: 2450 Derry Road East, Hangar 9 (North End of Pearson)
City: Mississauga
State/Province: Ontario
Country:Canada
Fax number: 905 405 8608
Apply via: Email, Fax
Aircraft Types: C550

Job Description:

NON-FLYING POSITION

We are a small corporate flight department that also does the occasional charter. We would like to focus a little more on the charter side, and are interested in hiring someone who can help develop that for us. The successful candidate would have a background in aviation and be a motivated self-starter, good with customers, and have a decent knowledge of marketing. You would be responsible for contacting new and previous clients, generating and implementing a marketing plan, organizing charters and flight following, and overseeing the day-to-day activities of our flight department.

We own and operate a Citation 550 (Citation II) light jet, which is based at Toronto Pearson airport. We have office space at the north end of Toronto Pearson airport as well as our parent company's main office in Oakville.



Email me your resume at sulako@gmail.com or fax it to 905 405 8608 and let's talk!

Wages: Our owner believes "What gets rewarded gets done" and we want this done. Above Industry Standard wages + full benefits (dental, prescriptions, RRSP match, etc.)

Closing Date: Feb 1st 2008

This is how I want to end my flying career, rather than, say, blunt trauma followed by a fire.

In this video, a United 747-400 is performing a low approach at Frankfurt International airport on Rwy 25L. This was a retirement flight of the captain and the tower in Frankfurt asked him if he would do a low approach.

It was filmed from the tower.

Happy New Year! I hope 2008 is spectacular for all the right reasons.

Well my ear has healed to the point that I can fly so that's cool. One note I wanted to bring you up to speed on. Got some others too;

Aviatrix over at Cockpit Conversation blog has gone from a public blog to an authors-only blog for the time being. This may change again in a short while, but for now, from now on Cockpit Conversation won't be public. It's nothing personal, she has to do it for professional reasons and that makes total sense to me. You aren't missing any posts, so don't worry that you are falling behind; She hopes to be blogging again soon and I'll certainly update with details as they become available to me.

I wonder what joys and tribulations the next year will bring us? I'm guessing more trouble in the middle east, skyrocketing fuel prices, more ominous weather patterns, more abuses of authority, more cat-hoardings, more carjackings live on tv and more gross obesity.

I just read that we can expect to pay $1.50/l for gasoline this summer (around here, gas has been about a buck a litre ($3.75/gallon); man am I glad I drive a Civic hybrid - even at those prices $75 will get me 900km easily and 1,000 if I drive obnoxiously fuel-efficiently.

Not so much can be done about the jet though.

We burn 160 gallons of gas per hour on average. When I started in mid 2005, our direct fuel burn cost would be around $390/hour. Reading our last weeks fuel provider invoice, our fuel burn cost was closer to $730/hour. So for each hour of operation, we paid $340/hour more just in gas, and nearly twice as much on fuel as we did only 2 1/2 years ago. Our new fuel provider currently offers a fuel burn cost of roughly $510/hour, still $120 more than 2 1/2 years ago, but a little easier to absorb. For now.

I don't know at what point it won't be economically viable to operate a small business jet. At $10/gallon, a figure that is entirely possible to see in places like New York or Boston in the event of a fuel shortage, we would pay $1,600/hour in fuel cost alone. Set aside engines, parts and maintenance and you are looking at $2,600/hour in operating costs. Oh, if you happen to be running it as a charter you might want to make a profit in the order of $1,000/hour. Even if you whittle away at that, there isn't much leeway before the owner decides that chartering the plane at near-cost isn't worth it and pulls the plug on charters. Anyway, you can see that fuel prices have a direct impact on our charter rates, and I worry about how many customers are willing to pay the increasingly insane amounts of money for fuel that it takes to get from point A to B in style and convenience.

Now my real point; I'm 36. I still have 29 years to go before retirement. Is my job going to last that long? Is the corporate pilot job model obsolete? If it is, what should I be doing? Buying a plot of land somewhere and taking survival courses in the event of global armageddon? Do I need to learn how to shoot my own burgers? Mmm, burgers. Any thoughts?

Click on the pic to make it bigger, then be jealous of my narcotic pain meds :)


I woke up at 3am with pus coming out of my ear and in considerable pain. I have had a sore throat for the past couple of days, but it got better yesterday and I thought I had dodged whatever it was. In fact I had dodged nothing, it had simply moved elsewhere in my body to regroup and fester.

So I woke up the lovely Lisa and got her to drive me to emerg (my sense of balance was also wobbly, and I didn't want to drive), where the doctor diagnosed me with a 'wicked' ear infection.

//Sidenote: my wait in emerg was about 5 minutes before I saw the doc. I paid $0. Even the parking was free. Don't believe everything you hear about the Canadian medical system. The prescriptions were free also, due to my company's medical plan. That being said, if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket, they would have come to $27 in total - not bad, considering I'd pay 100x that amount to get rid of the pain.

At least the doc was kind enough to give me Tylenol with codeine - I had no idea that ears could hurt this bad - between the pressure and the shooting pains, I'd give it a 7-8/10 on the pain scale.

Anyway, all this sucks on a regular day, but today I also had a charter flight at 7am. We are a small flight department and there are only 2 of us available for this flight. I called another operator with whom we have a friendly relationship and begged for one of their pilots, but unfortunately all their guys and gals are out flying today. So I was screwed.

Now this particular charter was a sub-charter for another air carrier, so then I got to call their dispatch and tell them that we would be unable to do the flight.

I felt really bad for the dispatcher I called; it's 4:30am by this time and I wake him up to drop a big ball of stress on his lap - the clients are good clients of theirs, and my inability to do the flight will undoubtedly piss the clients off at the other operator.

So that's how my day started. I have nothing to sum up this story; the codeine is kicking in and my brain is choosing more and more random words to type instead of the ones I want to, so I'm going to go stare at a wall for a while - the pain meds are loaded with caffeine as well, so sleep is out of the question for a while. But at least the pain is dull, like my senses.

So a few weeks ago a guy from the Wall Street Journal drops me an email and asks a few questions, which I answer. Today, I show up in the freakin' WSJ, section R, page 6. That is kinda cool. Unfortunately there is no link to the article as the WSJ is subscription-only. If I find one online, you know I'll be posting that one :) Anyway, I guess I should make a post.

Today was an interesting day, pilot-geek wise. Kitsch and I took a group of bankers to the east coast for a few hours, then back home. It was kind of funny though; there was another jet on this same run, but the other jet was a large corporate jet and it was taking not just a regular banker, but the president of the bank. Yup, we took a half-dozen bankers in our small jet, and their bank president flew alone in a large jet. I guess that's what I'd shoot for if I was inclined to be a corporate type - being the guy who gets the big plane alone to himself. I'd wear tiger pajamas; you are welcome for the visual :)

Another interesting part was that the weather sucked absolutely everywhere - there wasn't an alternate airport in Ontario that worked for our return flight so we had to hold an airport in the US. This bad weather took the form of a lot of cloud, and a lot of low ceilings. It wasn't thunderstorms or anything, just a lot of flying in grey nothingness and rough air. That being said, I had a really fun time on my flying leg this morning, heading to the east coast. The weather was poor except for right along our destination, so I got to have some fun on a visual approach, which is when I fly the airplane down to the runway by actually looking outside the airplane. Our destination was a coastal city and I got to land at the airport by flying along the coast, between a few islands, then down the harbor, avoiding the floating cranes then hanging a last-minute right and landing. The harbor visual in this airport is most fun evar. On our return to Toronto, Kitsch flew the instrument landing system right down to 400 feet before we saw the runway; not the technical absolute hardest IFR but not the easiest either. Normally our approach briefing is 'visual backed up by the ILS' on whatever runway we are landing at, but today we did full approach briefings, detailing exactly what we would do if we failed to find the runway in the bad weather. That was kind of cool, looking outside on approach to Toronto while Kitsch flew the airplane by using the cockpit instruments, seeing only cloud and fog but knowing that the city was just a few hundred feet below us, then seeing the runway at the last minute and making a safe arrival. I have flown hundreds if not thousand of ILS's and it still amazes me when the runway shows up, right ahead of us, glowing and blinking through the clouds and fog. The system works, which is a good thing as I bet my life on it a few days a week.

We also got to deal with icing in climb-out and arrival in both our cities today. Icing is not a good thing, and living on the shoreline of one of the great lakes, we tend to see a lot of days and nights where icing is a big deal.

Every time we fly in cloud and the temperature is below freezing, the plane will tend to accumulate icing. When ice forms on the smooth surfaces of our wings and tail, the rough ice disrupts the smooth airflow, which wrecks the ability of the wing to produce lift in a real hurry. So we have 'boots' on the outer parts of the wings, and we have electrical heat for the inboard parts of the wings and also the engine fan inlets. The 'boots' are rubber strips on the front of the wing that inflate, which causes the accumulated ice to crack and fall off. We don't want our engines to ingest large chunks of ice, so our engine intakes are heated, along with the front few feet of the wing that sits ahead of the engines. By heating those surfaces, it prevents ice from forming at all. It also uses a lot of power; our normal electrical load is around 75 amps, but with the heats on, it's closer to 350 amps. Larger jets have all their wing surfaces heated, but I guess in our jet it would take too much power away from the engines, so the boots do the job for most of the wing surface.

Anyway, in our particular jet, the anti-ice protection systems use up a lot of our available engine power, and that affects our ability to climb while our anti-icing systems are turned on. The good news is that icing usually only lasts through maybe 25,000 feet up, and we can climb higher than that. The bad news is that it takes a while to get up that high, longer when our icing systems are on. I guess it's not really a safety issue or anything - we always have more than enough available thrust to climb through the icing, but it just sets off a primitive thing in the back of my brain, a little cold tickle down my spine. I watch the ice accumulate and know that if the icing system fails, I am in real trouble. But then the system works and we keep on keepin' on, safe but wary.

The last thing that was interesting from a technical perspective today were the winds; Theoretically in a no-wind situation, it makes sense for us to climb as high as we possibly can for each flight as our fuel efficiency generally increases with altitude - we might burn 1,400 lbs per hour at 26,000 feet, 1,000 lbs per hour at 36,000 feet and 700 lbs per hour at 41,000 feet etc.

Today was a bit different. We had a low-level wind going east at a hundred miles per hour, increasing with altitude. So it was in our best interest to fly as high as we could on the way there, then relatively low on the way back. We have access to some pretty good computer software that takes the predicted upper winds and applies them to our flight paths and tells us what routes are most efficient. And in today's case, it told us that we should fly lower than normal on the way back, like at 26,000 feet instead of 36,000 feet. We would burn 400 pounds more fuel but the headwinds were considerably lighter and we would arrive around 20 minutes earlier than by climbing to a higher altitude and saving fuel but staying in the air longer. Now in the business of aviation, flight time counts for a lot; let me randomly pick a figure of $150 every 6 minutes of flight time as a reasonably close guide to our operating costs for the plane. Fuel costs roughly 50 cents per pound, so the extra 400 pounds of fuel we burned added around $200 to our cost of operating the flight. But the 18 minutes we saved took $450 off our costs of operating the flight, so we came out ahead bottom-line wise. It's just one of the things that I get to consider as Ops Manager, but I don't mind, I like the challenge.

Anyway, a few random thoughts all spun out of this one little run we did today.

More later, the lovely Lisa tells me it's bed time, and I don't want to keep her waiting. Santa's list and all that.

Freezin' :)

I'm back from vacation. It was awesome. You know what else is awesome? This safety briefing from a flight attendant. Listen and laugh.

I'm on vacation until Sunday, October 28th. I'm visiting my mom in Nanaimo BC, then visiting my dad and his family in Saskatoon. I fly next Monday, and I'll have a good story for you then - it's about how Lisa and I met, and it's actually aviation-related.

Lisa, out on the town. I'm flying, which is presumably why she is looking up. This is kind of a theme.