Someone asked me yesterday what the worst part of my job is. Honestly I'd have to go with "wearing a tie". Maybe it was my free-spirit upbringing, but when I wear a tie it feels like I'm being insincere or perhaps even fraudulent. It's not a huge deal in that we mostly don't dress up - for company flights we wear golf shirts and dress pants, but for charters we do the full meal deal with the pilot shirt and epaulets and Captain's bars and whatnot. I guess the theory is that our passengers will assume we are competent and professional if we wear a fabric stripe down the front of our shirts and have a few stripes on our shoulders. Funny how appearances mean so much.

Click the red "HD" button for large-screen video goodness.



It got me thinking though. I'm gonna ask Lisa what the best and worst part of my job is from her perspective and I'll post a little interview with her shortly; I'm interested to hear her take on what it's like to be married to a pilot-type-guy.

For those of you who are dealing with the heartbreak, stigma and shame of having a pilot in your family, what differences do you notice in your family life compared to your non-aviating friends?

To the jackass(es) who were shining laser pointers into the cockpit of arriving traffic into Pearson one night last week, you should probably see a doctor to confirm whether or not you are mentally retarded. My money is on "yup".

It should be obvious that it's illegal in Canada to shine lights at aircraft in an attempt to make them crash and everybody on board die, but the max penalty is a surprisingly lenient 5 years in prison and/or $100,000 in fines.

That hasn't prevented morons from doing it though, and unfortunately the incidents are on the rise: In 2006 there were 3 reported incidents, in 2007 there were 25 and in 2008 there were nearly 60 incidents reported.

Sadly only one person so far has been convicted of this offence - some doorknob in Calgary in 2008, who sat on his apartment balcony and lased a Westjet 737 cockpit on takeoff and then lased the police helicopter sent to investigate. He later said he was sorry, was fined a thousand bucks and had his pointer confiscated.

Seriously, that scares the hell out of me - not only the worst-case scenario of losing control of the aircraft during landing and crashing, but also the thought of more extended suffering - having permanent retinal damage and losing my pilot medical and going blind and being helpless.

I see precious little difference between pointing a laser at an aircraft cockpit and pointing a stinger missile at an aircraft cockpit, and I hope that the seriousness of the situation is fully impressed upon whomever gets caught for this pointless and dangerous 'hobby'.

Multimedia Frenzy time! Here's a bunch of random pics and videos from a trip we did to Texas and Arizona recently. I'm still getting the hang of my new camera, but the initial results are a lot better than my old one. I'm mostly happy that the speaker on the new camera doesn't freak out every time there's ambient noise.




My baby in Fort Huachuca (Waa-chew-ka) AZ. Half the airport is a military base and the other half is civilian. They launch unmanned predator drones here to patrol the border, and the base is primarily military intelligence. We saw some pretty crazy aircraft coming and going - King Airs with tip-tanks and bristling with literally dozens of antennas. I didn't take pics because I don't wanna wind up in Gitmo.






Watching an airliner pass a thousand feet above us while in cruise. We approached each other at about a thousand miles an hour, so it's a fast clip :)



The flight school in Nogales AZ offers maps, headsets and energy drinks. That's actually pretty smart marketing, I wonder why more pilot stores don't have cases of Red Bull in stock.



Departing Goodyear, AZ. Without irrigation this place would look like the surface of the moon. It was +43c when we took off - normally our plane takes about 2000-3000 feet of runway to take off, but hot temperatures really suck the performance out of the plane, and it took us 5,110 feet before we got airborne.




Gratuitous cloud shot! Note the thunderstorms in the distance. They will become more relevant shortly.



Our onboard XM weather system is the cat's ass. In the pic, the pink triangle is us, heading east. You can see Albuquerque and Las Vegas NM to our south. See all those pink/purple dots by KTAD? (Trinidad, Colorado) The dots are lightning strikes emanating from a storm cell. This one was impressive, but we saw some truly amazing storms a little further down the line.



This is what the storm cell looks like out our window. The top rises at least twenty thousand feet above us. Not many aircraft can climb that high, so we plan to avoid it laterally by a fair distance. Thunderstorms like this have more than enough energy to remove the wings from our aircraft, which I respect on a fundamental level. On the left hand side of the storm cell, see the cloud shelf coming from the main mass and extending to the left? The overhang might look clear but that's where storm cells spit hail out, so we never fly under the overhangs. An acquaintance of mine got suckered into flying under a similar overhang a few weeks ago and the resulting hail damage to the wing skins of his aircraft cost just under 250k to fix. He didn't tell me how much it cost to clean the pilot seats after that flight.



Eventually the lunar landscape gave way to the prairies of Kansas.





We made our way past that storm and then found ourselves paralleling a truly spectacular one. This was in Kansas, just between Oklahoma City and Wichita. This one was still building while we flew past it - you'll see the video I took shortly that shows it was up to 65,000 feet, but it eventually built to 70,000 feet up. Storms like this can have more energy than a small nuke.



Here's a video showing the uber-badass thunderstorm.



Another video showing some clouds, some traffic above us, and an added bonus at the end!



After a while we passed the evil thunderstorms and were left to happily cruise between some cloud layers.



After a while it got dark and the sky turned silver and blue.



Passing by Chicago on our way home. It is duly noted that my new camera sucks at night shots :)



We made it back to Toronto after 5 hours of flying, tired but happy to be home.

This is an angst post, so feel free to skip it if you aren't into that - I'll have fresh aviation stuff up soon.

Lisa and I have stopped trying not to have kids. That's exciting, and terrifying at the same time. Normally it's a good thing when her friend comes to visit and I suspect it will take a little while to make the mindset adjustment. I have been thinking about kids lately for a variety of reasons (incidentally what do you guys think about the name "Balthor" for a boy? He could carry a sword!) and it has made me reflect more about the nature of consciousness and the inevitable loneliness we all feel as we occupy ourselves during our brief time on the planet.

I read once that there are 5 unavoidable truths in life, 5 things that we will experience again and again during our tenure on planet earth.

1. Everything changes and ends
2. Things do not always go according to plan
3. Life is not always fair
4. Pain is a part of life
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time

I hope I can show my kids how to deal with the challenges they will inevitably face, and I hope I can show them that the single most important thing is life is love - who you love and who loves you.

The thing that I have to figure out is how to do that when I think that we are essentially alone in our minds - our consciousness is a solitary one.

I can share a fairly limited version of my thoughts and feelings with you, gentle reader, and I can share a much fuller version with close friends and family, but I'll never be able to show someone what I'm actually thinking, nor really know what they are.

It's like there's darkness and we are groping around, looking at shadows and hoping they are friendly. Sometimes we find people in the darkness and sometimes we huddle together to share a spark, but the darkness is always there and it inevitably overwhelms. Someone said that every relationship that doesn't end in divorce ends in death, which is depressing as hell, but also true. I can be close to people, I can even be inside someone, but I'm still essentially alone in my head. Will having kids change that? I don't think so, but maybe I'm hoping I can be in their minds for a little bit, before they strike out on their own and move into their own lives.

I know that's likely a good thing that we can't read each others thoughts - I'd hate for people to know what goes through my mind when I'm driving on highway 401 and some doorknob cuts me off, but it's can also be a lonely thing when you are trying to communicate and the darkness interferes.

Pets are generally honest as are small kids - you can usually tell what's on a dog's mind and if you ask a three-year-old what they are thinking you'll likely get a pretty direct reply, but beyond those, everything we hear from anyone is filtered though countless layers and sometimes it can be hard to tell what's real, what's valuable and what is just static. What if my kids don't believe me when I tell them I love them? What if they tell me they don't love me?

I'm looking forward to having kids, but sweet Jebus it's a hell of a responsibility. I want them to be healthy, happy and fulfilled, and I want them to know they can talk to me about anything, even if it makes them (or me) look bad. My parents did an absolutely fantastic job in this regard and I hope to continue that legacy.

I want to share a campfire with my kids, and I can only hope they trust me enough to sit with me for a while and share the warmth. I'm not sure why I'm saying this, but my gut tells me that it's important that I do.

I got a new video camera and this is my first official video on it. The compression youtube uses makes it look less nice than I'd prefer, but it's still okay. It records in hi-def so you can click on the red HQ button on the youtube video to see it in 720p glory. As an added bonus the microphone works great!

I took some flying videos this morning but the sun flare overwhelmed the camera (we were headed east) so I toasted them.

This is a video of the hotel we are in today 'cause I like taking videos of my hotel rooms.



The camera is a Kodak ZI-6 which I got from Newegg.ca for $170. Pretty nifty!

I was on vacation for most of July so that's why I didn't post for a month. Lisa and I did a tour of the interior of British Columbia in a camper van. We took about a thousand pics so I'll be sorting through those and posting the pretty ones shortly.

We have been flying a lot lately - I have flown 5 of the past 7 days. We have signed an agreement with another operator that uses the Citation 550, guaranteeing them an available pilot in exchange for a few thousand bucks a month. It saves them from having to replace the Captain they lost (he retired) and it helps us lower our overhead so it's win-win.

Oh, and our plane is painted and beautiful. I'll take some pics this afternoon and post them later.

As far as our house goes, we take possession on Sept 30th and it can't come fast enough - it's like we bought the coolest toy in the world (the house) but can't play with it for 6 more weeks.

I gotta check the weather now - there's a 40% probability that Toronto will be wiped off the face of the earth by thunderstorms this afternoon and that may affect our plans to return there this afternoon :)

My job is pretty cool sometimes. This is Snoop Dogg, one of Lisa's favorite performers of all time. We flew him to/from a concert. He was really laid back and polite, much more so than some of the businessmen and politicians I have flown. He called me Captain and we did the fist-bump thing where you make a fist and bump it against the other guy's fist. I think I'm in his posse now.

I lol'd.

Our first home! 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, infinite cool.

It's an older house, redone. We paid just under 350k CDN for it, or at least the bank did on our behalf. I'm referencing the money because a) we are relatively poor and that's really cheap for the Toronto area and b) the place is so cool you might think we paid several billion dollars for it. We would have, but fortunately we got a deal :)


It's about 6 miles west of our current place, in the city of Burlington Ontario. We take possession Sept 30th. A really nice couple sold it to us after completely updating and renovating the place and putting countless hours of work and love into it. After their daughter heads to school this fall they are going to buy a place out in the country, so their loss is our considerable gain. You see, she's an artist and he's carpenter who fixes botched home renovations. Seriously, is there any better person to buy a home from? We did the home inspection last week and the inspector was nearly in tears "This is why I got into home inspection." and "If you don't buy this place, I will. There's nothing else like it. At all." and my favorite "Holy shi - sorry, I'll edit that out of the DVD I give you. I'm trying to be professional here, but there's just so much to look at".


We saw at least a couple of dozen homes before we found this one, and it's the only one that made me wanna barf with house-lust. Lisa was skeptical (the pics really don't do it justice) but once she saw the place in real life she fell in love with it as much as I did.

We immediately offered to pay their asking price, on the condition that they leave a whole bunch of cool stuff behind, like the stained glass, the dining room table (the husband made it himself and it's gorgeous), all the appliances and a bunch of the art and furniture. Basically we said "you may take the clothes in your closets but leave everything else". They are into the idea of de-cluttering their existence, so it worked out great!

I could hardly sleep this past week while waiting for our mortgage arrangements to solidify and for the home inspector to do his job, and being just generally buzzed on adrenaline at the idea of being in debt until 2 years after I retire :)

Oh, would you like some pics? Home, meet blog. Blog, meet home.

View of the front room. Note the textured walls. The front windows all open out completely - you could drive a car through if you wanted to.




Dining Room leading to front room. We have a 2-room kitchen, you can see one room on the left with a built-in stove. We have 2 ovens, good for entertaining :) Dining room table was handmade from old barn-board by the owner. All the woodwork in the entire place is shiny and flawless.



Different angle on the dining room. Note the stained glass - the house is full of it.



Some kitchen action. Note the gas fireplace in the kitchen, good for cold mornings :)



Off to the right you can see the main floor bathroom. We have one in the basement, one on the main floor and three more upstairs. The kitchen sink isn't stainless steel, it's this crazy brown smooth ceramic stuff.





Lets head upstairs for a few minutes and check out the master bedroom. Note the fireplace and the computer nook.



Note the awesome curved wall with major closet space behind. Off-camera to the right is the entrance to the ensuite bathroom, which is itself pretty insane.



More computer nookage and fireplaceage.




One of the basement rooms, which they use for tv. There's a bar on the right. The antlers kind of creeped me out but further inspection reveals they are paper mache and wire.



Off-camera to the right is the laundry room, art room and games room. They currently have the games room set up with fooseball, air hockey, a big vinyl collection and a regular table-top hockey game. Oh, and a whole pile of storage, along with a bathroom and some other stuff I forget now.




Let's head outside for a second to witness some real insanity. Our back yard is like a park, with 4 heated and insulated buildings with water and electrical service. All the smooth rocks in the pictures have faces carved into them.



This looks promising... the white framed-thing is more stained glass. It's seriously everywhere we look.



The inside of the gazebo, with water, electricity, bbq, tunes and a bar fridge.



From halfway down the back yard, facing toward the house. More buildings off-camera to the right.



My fingers are cramping from typing, so I'm off for a bit. More pics of the bedrooms, bathrooms and whatnot to come. They are all pretty wild - stuff like glass bricks in the shower and a complete bathroom in one of the bedrooms.

And don't even get me started about the staircase... :)

We can watch her online. I think the pics are quite beautiful.

Fresh paint for our beloved Citation!

Our paint is nearly a decade old. It's peeling and fading a bit and we are starting to see some minor corrosion on some of the metal rivets and screws under the peeling spots, so it's time to take action. Expensive, time-consuming action!

We are getting our jet painted next week - in theory she'll be done just in time for Oshkosh. This is the final design - the colors might be tweaked a little but not much. We have green because our parent company has a whole lot of green in their logo, and we have blue because it sets off my eyes nicely.

We are using Skyharbour Aircraft Refinishing in Goderich - not only am I fond of them because I used to live there, but they are about 10% cheaper than the nearest competitor. That adds up when a typical paint job costs about 40k.

Cosmetics aside, the paint has a practical benefit also - I'm certain the swooshes on the engine cowl and tail will add at least 20 knots to her cruising speed.

Anarchy plane!

I saw it sitting on the ramp this morning and was quite taken by the logo - you don't normally see the symbol for anarchy on a corporate jet.

It's here because a punk / pop band called The Offspring is in town for a concert. The lead singer / guitarist flies it, kinda like Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden flying their tour Boeing 757, only on a somewhat smaller scale. The Offspring must have small, lean roadies and small, lean amplifiers :)

Still working lots (latest thing is a maintenance audit) and looking for a house - Lisa has told me it's time we bought one so I guess we'll do that soon too. I should get off my butt and post the "hitching a ride" thing I wanted to, but I still have to clean it up a little. Hopefully tomorrow.

Life isn't all about aviation. I have other interests that are far more dangerous...




Those are my special homemade hot apple bacon turnovers. It's just basically hot fresh apple pie filling with a strip of bacon stretched over turnover pastry with hot icing drizzled on. Add a large double-double coffee and some fruit salad and you're good to go.



Now these are the full-meat version: Pastry-wrapped bbq-bacon-wrapped bbq'd ribs.



I boil pork back ribs for just over an hour in some nice broth, then bbq at 550c for 15 minutes, turning once. After they are done, I use big scissors to chop the ribs into single-rib sections, discarding the occasional middle rib to make sure the meat portions are generous. I add a slice of smoked gouda cheese along the rib, (that idea was courtesy of Andy, who I link to on the left side of the page) then wrap it in a strip of bacon that I have also bbq'd. Sidenote: I put the bacon on the bbq top rack so the bacon fat falls onto the ribs while they are cooking. I then slather it with this President's Choice brand habanero bbq sauce that comes in a big brown glass bottle. That stuff is sex. Anyway, time to throw some croissant dough around it, then bake about 8 minutes or until the croissant is brown.

Another shot of my pretties:





Aight, on to the poutine lasagna.

Taken during the assembly:






I did 2 different versions of this, with the following layers, from top to bottom.

#1. Thrice Blessed Poutine Lasagna of St. Germain De La Heartattack

Spicy Fries
Cheddar Cheese curd, Parmesan Cheese
Ground beef cooked in beef gravy
Lasagna Noodles (deep fried in bacon fat)
beef gravy (yes, an entire layer)
Spicy French Fries
Maple Back Bacon
Cheddar Cheese curd
Lasagna Noodles (deep fried in sausage fat)
Barbequed Chicken Breasts, sliced
Spicy French Fries
Sausage and Cheddar cheese, chopped into smallish cubes
Spicy Farmer Sausage, diced
Lasagna Noodles (deep fried in chicken fat)

Arrange it in layers, bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then broil until cheese on top is golden brown. It weighed about 9 lbs.


Watching it cook. It took forever, what with me opening the oven door all the time :)




The finished product. Lisa and I put our initials on it in french fries, but they seemed to have fused into the general cheesy-gravy-meaty-fryey goodness.



What a delightful choice of wine!



I don't have pics of the other one but it was a variation on the original with the addition of prosciutto ham layers along with hungarian sausage meat. Lisa and I had a dinner party a few weeks ago and invited about 20 folks over for a feast - I made 4 lbs of meat per person, so it was pretty great. I made burgers that were half ground beef, half ground bacon and half cheese along with some pretty insane 'normal' bbq'd ribs. And don't even get me started about the desserts Lisa made, sweet Jebus.

We don't do this often, in case you were worried my heart was going to explode. Now you know my guilty secret!

Been flying lots, but will have time to post tomorrow. I just got back from flying and saw that Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson have both passed. I will always have fond memories of Farrah's swimsuit poster, and of learning how to moonwalk like Michael and of staying up to watch the world premiere of the Thriller video on Friday Night Videos when I was a kid. The world is a little less interesting today :(

I'm gonna pour a half beer on the curb for the two of them, then drink the rest of it and go to bed.

My original post today asked about the possibility of hitching a ride to pick up our plane, and offering to pay for some of the gas of whatever airplane took us there. I quickly got a really informative email from a nice fellow who politely explained that what I was asking for was illegal in the USA. I consulted the FAA regs and it turns out that I can't offer to pay gas for a ride - in Canada the rules are different, and I'll do up a blog post tomorrow detailing the differences.

I have deleted the original post as it no longer applies (I think we'll just snag a rental car and drive the 7 hours), but I'll revisit this tomorrow as it's an issue that I find interesting.

In Canada as of July 1st, if we want to do charter flights we need TCAS 1 at a minimum. If we want to fly above 29,000' (and jets generally do, for fuel efficiency) then we need to get TCAS 2. Private flights are unaffected.

Those of you in the USA are probably going "What? Is the FAA really going to make all charter aircraft install incredibly expensive equipment?" Nope. This rule is Canadian-only, which I find really surprising - usually Transport Canada follows the FAA's, but apparently in this case they wanted to lead the charge toward mandatory expensive equipment additions during the recession.

Oh, you are also probably saying "Sully, I'm not currently wearing Raybans and epaulets while fondling my 4-lb pilot watch, so perhaps I'm not familiar with the term TCAS".

Basically, it displays other aircraft and tells us if we are going to occupy the same space at the same time as them. Pilot-geek-wise, TCAS = Traffic Collision Avoidance System. There's another acronym called ACAS in which 'Traffic' becomes 'Airborne', but they mean the same thing.

The difference between TCAS 1 and TCAS 2 is fairly important. TCAS 1 will tell you if it predicts a collision with another airplane, but it's up to you to take a course of action to avoid it. TCAS 2 will tell you about a predicted conflict, AND tell you what it wants you to do to avoid it. You see when a plane with TCAS 2 talks to another plane with TCAS 2 and they determine that a conflict exists, the units in each airplane will actually talk to each other to coordinate an escape plan, so that both planes don't climb or descend at the same time and still hit each other. One unit will tell their plane to climb and the other unit will tell the other plane to descend, which is pretty sensible. With TCAS 1, the units don't talk to each other, but they will show the relative bearing and altitude of the offending airplane so the pilot can decide whether a climb or descent is most appropriate.

In the simulator, when we train with TCAS 2 they tell us to trust the equipment over anything else - if you are flying along and you get a TCAS warning to descend but the Air Traffic Controller is telling you to climb, then descend. A nasty accident in Russia a few years back resulted from a TCAS alert that the crew disregarded in deference to Air Traffic Control orders - the TCAS told them to climb but ATC told them to descend, so they descended, right into another aircraft, killing all 69 people on both aircraft.

Now when I bring that up, I don't want to give you the impression that mid-air collisions are common in aviation because they really aren't. The sky is a big place and usually the "see-and-avoid" system works great for VFR flight and the "Air Traffic Controller probably doesn't want to see me die today" system works acceptably for IFR flight. But someone in Transport Canada decided that it was an issue anyway, so here we are.

Long story made longer - we do enough charters in Canada (being based at Toronto Pearson and all) that we will bite the bullet and install TCAS in our plane. In fact, my beloved baby jet is getting some expensive electronic boxes added as I type these words, and we are hopeful she'll be done by Friday. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Let's go back a few months, when I started looking around at different systems and costs. I went over our charter records for the past few years and saw that we have done precisely 1 long charter within Canada and the other hundred were either to the USA or to locations in Canada that are close enough (Ottawa, Montreal) that flying above 29,000' isn't really an issue. Also, we are really close to the US border and once we cross into US airspace we can climb as high as we want, so it has zero effect on US charters, which again make up 99% of our charter revenue stream.

I noted with horror that TCAS 2 costs about $110,000 MORE than TCAS 1, and saw that it would take us many years of Canadian charters to recoup the extra 110k in costs that TCAS 2 would come with. As a point of reference, 110k is about 10% of the cost of the plane (in today's market), and the resale value added is minimal because the equipment isn't mandatory in the US. It's just not worth it for our operation and this airplane - if we get a chance to do a charter to Vancouver or something then we'll just have to fly at 29,000' and grit our teeth through the increased fuel burn, but we'll still make a few bucks on the trip, so it'd still be worth it.

I also researched different systems in the hopes that someone makes a TCAS 1 system that's upgradeable to TCAS 2 down the road. One company does, the Honeywell CAS 66/67 system, but you end up paying about 45k more if you get the CAS 66 and eventually upgrade it to the 67 than if you just buy the complete 67 package - I guess it isn't THAT upgradeable after all.

Anyway, now comes the interesting part (about time! you say). I sent out lots of requests for install quotes for both a TCAS 1 and TCAS 2 system. I sent requests all through Canada as well as the US, and of course hit up all the local avionics installation places around Toronto.

All the quotes I got could fill a book, but I'll just share a few.

Here are some TCAS 2 quotes for the Honeywell CAS 67 system, installed:

From a local Toronto business - 183k
When Kitsch called the same business they gave him a quote for 178k, so I guess his phone voice is a lot sexier than mine.
From another local Toronto business - 138k
From a third Toronto supplier - 312k
From a place in Illinois - 154k (144k if we bring them 3 or more airplanes)
From a place in Florida - 144k

Yes, the 'third toronto supplier' actually wanted 140k more to install the exact same system as their competitors. If you don't believe me, PM me and I'll happily email you pdfs of the quotes so you can disbelieve your own eyes. I don't know how one can offer any service in the sky with prices like that, but maybe that's just me.

Now for TCAS 1, the Skywatch HP System in TCAS 1 mode:

Local Toronto business - 65k
Another Toronto Business - 88k
Third Toronto Supplier - wouldn't quote it as it wasn't enough profit for them
From a place in Florida - 43k
From a place in Pennsylvania - 28k

So we went with the place in Pennsylvania - we flew the plane down last week and she's already mostly finished the installation. If the installation goes well (and as an atheist I'm still praying it does) , I'll make sure to publish the name of the place in case you feel like dropping some serious coin on some magic boxes. Anyway, once we get the plane back I'll take a little video so you can see the system in action - coming into Toronto Pearson should give it a good workout as there are about a dozen planes in the neighborhood at all times. Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe ignorance was bliss when we couldn't see all the shiny metal tubes hurtling toward us at hundreds of miles an hour...