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!

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'...

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?

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.

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.

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... :)

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)