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

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

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

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

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


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




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

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


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



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




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

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

Lisbon Airport, December 23, 2009, 06:45 am. It looks like it was organized by employees of TAP, Portugal's national air carrier.

I know it's after Xmas, but I'm still full of turkey. Give the vid a minute or two to get endearing.

Merry Christmas one and all! I hope you and your loved ones have a great time celebrating Santa's birthday, and that you get lots of vitally important material possessions under the tree.

It's time to get ready for Christmas turkey, so I'll cut this short. Have a great day!

My beloved bride Lisa says I'm an attention whore. That stings, but it's not entirely inaccurate. For example, yesterday I looked around online and found some pics of myself in flight, which I'll graciously share with you, dear reader. As it turns out, our planes are pretty photogenic and I seem to have a knack for showing up in most of the shots, much like an unwanted wedding guest.



This was taken by a fellow named Steve Homewood, who found us at Oshkosh, back when we had our old paint job. I like this pic because you can see the thrust reverser has just been deployed, which means the 2 pieces of engine cowl have folded out the back of the engine, redirecting the thrust forward to help slow us down. Thrust reversers are cool.

Also note the nose wheel oleo (shock absorber) is pretty compressed - that's cause I'm pushing forward on the controls with a fair amount of force. In the Citation 550, when you deploy the thrust reversers ("pop the buckets"), it will tend to pitch the nose upward. When you are already touched down the last thing you want is to accidentally become airborne again (especially with thrust reversers deployed) so it's part of our SOP to push full forward on the controls once the buckets are out, to keep the nose on the ground where it belongs.

I attended a sim session once as part of my Approved Check Pilot training, and I watched some pilots who had never flown a Citation 550 try to land one without the benefit of the "push forward on the controls once the buckets are out or she'll take off again" training, and it was pretty hilarious. I was just glad they were learning this in the sim rather than in real life - it would have been an expensive lesson.

One last note: The graphic on the tail is a power pole, not an oil well. Our parent company is in the power business, amongst other ventures.

On to the next pic:



That's Kitsch and I in Hilton Head, South Carolina, about to blast off for home. Very popular vacation spot for those who can afford it. I remember this week - it was also the week of the Masters Golf tourney in Augusta, and we did a half-dozen runs to/from Augusta along with this Hilton Head trip.

Next pic:


This was taken by a fellow named Nino Buda, catching us landing back at Pearson, in our shiny new paint job. Shiny!



I love the angle of this one, it makes her look like an albatross or some other huge-winged bird. Good looking airplane, no? You can tell we are landing rather than taking off by the position of the wing flaps - we use 15 degrees for takeoff and 30 for landing, and those barn doors are at 30 in the pic.

On to the next glamour shot:



If you look closely you can see me in the right seat in this pic. Shiny forehead!

This is one of the Bravo's that Kitsch and I fly on occasion. Nino Buda, the same photog as the last pic, clearly has a good camping spot on approach into Pearson.

This is my shiny forehead again, this time as we are coming back from a few days in Greensboro South Carolina.





Last but not least, this was one of my first flights in a Citation 550, flying a Bravo for a friendly competitor a few years ago. This was on takeoff at Pearson - you can see the flaps at 15 degrees, and you can see the nose gear has already retracted while the main gear is still coming up.



I like that people take pics of the jets - they are beautiful machines and it does look pretty cool when we are down low, either arriving or departing. The thing I'm mostly thinking about now is the next time I pooch a landing I'm gonna be worried that some photog out there has captured it and is immediately uploading it to the web for posterity. No pressure, right?

Give it 60 seconds to get great. Note to Santa: I would very much like one of these, please.

On November 1st, Toronto Pearson abolished late-night or early morning arrivals and departure for general aviation (meaning non-airline) aircraft. That means we can no longer operate between the hours of 12:30am and 6:30am, under penalty of a fine equivalent to 16x the max landing fee (which is already exorbitant).

We do about 50 company flights a year, and about a third of those are scheduled for departure before 6am - the object of a business trip is usually to fly somewhere far away but arrive in time for a morning meeting. Anyway, Pearson has totally screwed us and I'm sure I will rant more about this at a future date, but for now I will just include this so you are aware it's an additional consideration in my flight planning.

For example, we flew to Quebec City last week to take some people to an evening function there. On the return trip home, we were scheduled to drop off a few of the passengers at a smaller airport before heading back to Pearson for the night.

We figured that in still-air conditions, we would have to be airborne at 10:30pm at the latest in order to land at the smaller airport and drop off some pax and then fly to Pearson and land before the 12:30am cutoff. We told the passengers this, and explained that if we weren't airborne by 10:30 no matter what, we wouldn't be ending up in Pearson that night.

I mentioned still-air conditions. Turns out, the air wasn't still at all. The jetstream was in town, and at 33,000' we had 100 knots on the tail on the way to Quebec City. That meant we got there in just over an hour, but it also meant that it would take us just over 90 minutes to fly the same thing in reverse, which would put us pretty tight on time for getting back into Pearson.

Our passengers showed up at 10:15, and we were airborne at 10:29. At our flight-planned altitude we were estimating an 89-minute flight to the small airport before a roughly 20-minute flight home, giving us 10 minutes to land, taxi in, drop off our passengers then fire up and take off. My previous world-record quick-turn time is 12 minutes, so this was going to be a real challenge, if not impossible.

Have no fear, this is when I get a chance to shine and to show I earn my few bucks an hour salary. I took a page from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan and decided to think in 3 dimensions, which took a lot of brain power so I made sure I was sitting down first.

A couple of relevant performance figures:

At 33,000', we burn ~1,100 lbs/hour of fuel and cruise at 355 knots true.
At 18,000', we burn ~1,700 lbs/hour of fuel and cruise at 340 knots true.

I decided to eat the additional fuel burn and fly to the small airport at 18,000', where the winds were only 10 knots. We avoided the wicked headwinds upstairs and got there in 70 minutes, saving us 20 minutes of flight time and giving us a decent buffer for landing in Toronto. And on top of that, we even saved money.

We burned more gas per hour, but for less hours. The end result was we burned maybe 200 lbs more fuel than if we had climbed to a higher altitude and flown home at 33,000', but we saved 0.3 flight hours.

For the blog, we'll estimate it costs us roughly twenty-two dollars per minute to operate our jet. A pound of gas costs us about 50 cents. So, I burned about a hundred bucks more worth of fuel by flying low, but as a result I was able to save about four hundred bucks in operating costs. As a flight department manager that's a relevant consideration, so it was nice to be able to save a few bucks in addition to making it home before the curfew.

We arrived to clear skies and calm winds, and touched down 15 minutes before cutoff.

Sliding along the ILS on approach to Teterboro on a recent wet day. My camera's batteries die about 30 seconds from touchdown but I still like the video for showing all the rain across the windshield and for giving you an idea as to the noise level of light rain. When the rain is heavy it can be deafening.

Sometimes the mountains wave.

My Mickey Mouse impression. Please don't sue, Disney.

Don't worry, nothing bad happened - I flew a demo flight for a prospective buyer on someone else's Citation 550. They ended up buying it right after the flight, so I can only assume it was my awesome landing that sealed the deal. Actually, my landing was more like dropping a shopping cart off a sidewalk curb, but maybe the prospective buyer was so impressed that the aircraft held together despite my spine-crunching arrival that he decided to purchase her for her demonstrated resilience in the face of hardship. All airplanes are female, btw.

I have been flying a whole lot lately, and have taken a bunch of video and pics. I'll spend the rest of the day uploading some so I can finally post them.

Noone gets hurt, amazingly. This is why it's important to actually obey IFR rules, like sector altitudes. These people were unprepared to encounter cloud, yet they continued to valley-crawl while in IMC. I'm amazed this footage wasn't recovered at a crash scene.

Ahh, the southern US.

We have been on tour for a few days now, but the internet at our hotels has been slow and sketchy, so I haven't been able to upload any vids. In theory we return to Toronto tonight, so I'm hopeful I'll have some fresh stuff for tomorrow.

In the interim, feast on some pics of our treasures and travels.



I got some awesome KISS M&Ms at a Wal-mart in Charleston SC. Each M&M has a little portrait of one of the band members. Kiss army ftw!




We crossed beneath a busy airplane highway on our way south. I count 7 contrails, but I might be missing one or two. This was along the Baltimore - Washington corridor, which is stupidly busy all the time.




As we arrived in Philly, I saw a rampie giving haircuts to other rampies. They'd stuff newspaper into their collars and the barber would give'er with the shaver. He did 2 guys in 5 minutes. Now that I think about it, free haircuts at the FBO might be something to advertise.



It's hard to read in the pic, but the ident of this Gulfstream is IDEAS. I assume they are very creative pilots.

Hmm, the pax just showed up so I'll cut this short.

That's Lisa, myself and a coworker driving back to our main office after lunch. On Google Streetview! We saw the streetview car - just a regular car with some portable antennas and a camera in a bubble on the roof - and were laughing about how cool it would be if it was actually recording. Turns out, it was. Now that we've been assimilated by the Borg I'm not sure if it's a good thing. On the plus side we are immortal and that's cool, but even though we were in a public place I still feel a little freaked out. Clearly I'm over it as I'm publishing the pic on the blog and I know I should just shut the hell up about privacy, but still. I'm also quite relieved I wasn't committing some road-rage offence when our snap was snapped.

Last but not least, this is us riding the localizer backcourse into Ottawa a few days ago. Basically we line ourselves up with the runway about 10 miles back, then descend when the charts tell us there are no mountains / buildings / cel towers in the way.

I have flown maybe a thousand IFR approaches but I still get a thrill when we bust through the cloud base and the runway is in front of us like it should be.

I would write more but I'm tired after a long flying day (I'm in Providence at the moment) and a week of packing and unpacking. I'll youtube some vids of our new house soon; in an effort to make sure we unpack in a timely fashion, Lisa invited 25 relatives over for Thanksgiving this coming Sunday. No pressure ;)

Watching ice form on the wings and dealing with it. Also on our Ottawa trip last week. Icing isn't really an issue for most jets - we can either climb or descend through it a lot more quickly than most piston-powered aircraft, so we generally don't spend much time at altitudes conductive to icing.

The cool part is about 3 minutes in.

Hit the HQ button for hi-def goodness.

Surprisingly, the whine during engine start isn't a pilot, it's an inverter we use to power laptops etc while in flight. It yelps during engine start, but a reset makes it all better.