Our iPad2 is very useful on board the airplane - we have Jeppesen charts installed as well as lots of other useful apps. The iPad2 replaces the original iPad, which I left in a hotel room in Phoenix, AZ. What I'm waiting for is an XM weather receiver that will talk to the iPad via bluetooth so that we can get airborne weather on the iPad. We already have airborne XM weather via a tablet PC on board, but the tablet is cranky and clunky.

Ideally Jeppesen puts weather on their charts as well so we can switch from the weather app to the approach app and still maintain that situational awareness. Their current app is decent, but lots of other iPad apps give you US charts with the airplane superimposed on the charts so you can watch as you fly the approach, and Jepp doesn't offer that yet.

But I digress...yup the iPad2 sure is a neat piece of hardware. Wait, what's that on the top right corner?



Seagull poop maybe?

Nope.



That's not good. That's what happens when I leave the iPad between the seats, then unlatch my seatbelt and let the buckle fall to the floor, through the iPad screen. I got a cover for it, which was inconveniently underneath the iPad when I dropped the seatbelt buckle on it.

I did that on Wednesday, and yesterday I made an online appointment at the Apple store to see what could be done. When I got there I showed the iPad to the guy and explained that I broke it because I was stoopid, the guy said "Tell you what - I'm going to give you a one-time replacement for it. This time it's free, but if you do this again it'll be $325 to fix the screen." Hell yeah I can agree to those terms! 5 minutes later I walked out of the store with a brand-new replacement iPad for the one I carelessly broke, and new-found respect and admiration for the customer service at Apple.

Red Bull at night, pilot's delight. I have flown 10 of the past 12 days, which is pretty unusual, and the occasional pick-me-up comes in pretty handy - I think this particular Red Bull met its demise on the way back from Boston. I love Red Bull so hard, I seriously do.

Kitch's last day is tomorrow, so we are spending today and tomorrow paperworking and tidying up. The replacement hiring process continues, with many interviews and a couple more to come. Turns out it's pretty hard to blog about the process, at least for the moment, so I think I might wait until we pick someone before I go any further on that front.

Oh, I have used lots of the suggested interview questions / techniques that you all posted in response to my last blog entry, so thanks for those :)

Okay, let's talk more about the hiring process.

For some background, scroll down a couple of posts to the 'everything changes, everything ends' one, then come on back because I need some advice.

The stakes are pretty high for me - whomever gets hired will be working closely with me, and I want to make sure we mesh well. They will also be flying with my boss, who is a great pilot, a smart guy and pretty reasonable to work for, but who also assumes that people will operate at 110% efficiency, so there isn't any room for stupidity or laziness. I like that, because I like the challenge and frankly because I'm up to the challenge - yeah, I certainly have the Captain's ego to go along with my Captain's qualifications and experience, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in this situation.

Anyway, if I end up hiring someone who turns out to be a dud, it's gonna be an expensive mistake, and my job security is pretty much directly proportional to the number of expensive mistakes I don't make, if you catch my drift.

I don't care nearly as much about flying experience as I do about personality. "Hire for attitude, train for experience" is my mantra in corporate aviation-land, and it has served me well thus far. That being said, if we hire a 200-hour wonder then they will be sitting right-seat for ages and ages until they qualify for their Airline Transport Pilot's License (which they need to fly as Captain), so there are some experience considerations involved.

My plan is to hold the interviews at a nearby restaurant or pub - I think you can learn a lot more about a person during lunch / over beers than you can sitting across from them in a boardroom. Am I wrong?

I looked online and found a valuable post at a blog called 'Pilot Notes', and I think I'll shamelessly steal some of the questions listed, but I think there are some other areas that could be covered - after all, the actual flying part of this job is a relatively small portion of the job itself - we do lots of paperwork, and we will be spending days on the road together, so want to be able to assess that stuff as well.

Now here's the whole point of this post: If you were in my position, what other questions might you be asking the candidates during interviews? Let's assume that the candidates demonstrate good technical knowledge about aviation / airplanes, so that stuff is not in question.

I'm gonna go back in time for a second.

Kitsch and I were at our Toronto Pearson office a few months ago, hanging out and paperworking, when we got a phone call. It went something like this:

"Hey, do you have your plane available?"
"Sure. When? Where?"
"St. Catharines. As soon as you can get here"
"But St. Catharines is only 12 minutes away. Wouldn't it be faster for your clients to drive? Also, we are gonna burn a lot of fuel for a short flight, so it's gonna cost extra."
"We'll pay the extra cost, just get here now. You aren't taking anyone anywhere, we just need the plane. It's for a tv show."
"I love television shows! We'll be right over."

We hauled airplane butt across the lake, and landed. We sat in the airplane for a few hours as they filmed some actors getting in and out of the airplane over and over again. We watched an actor dressed up as a pilot. We ate delicious catering while the pilot-actor got shot, over and over again. They gave us back our airplane, and we flew home. The actual filming process was pretty boring, but the food was delicious and our airplane is immortalized!

Here's a sample of the result :)

For the full experience, watch Covert Affairs Season 2 Episode 4, which came out last night. I imagine the episode is likely available online or on bittorrent, but I wouldn't know for sure :p

That being said, the plane is only in the first few minutes of the show - once the pilot gets shot, it's pretty much over for us.

Everything changes, everything ends.

Kitsch got "The Call" from Air Canada last week, and will be starting with them at the end of July. He is a great pilot and a good person to be in the road with, and I'm really sorry to see him go, but I understand why - he's 30 and will have a 35-year career with them if he starts now. Unfortunately it does involve some sacrifice - the shameful truth about Air Canada is that the initial pay is just a hair over 35k/year and a new hire's schedule is best described as "often, and chaotic". However, after a few years the pay and schedule start getting decent, and after a few years more it gets downright lavish ;) That, along with free travel passes and the opportunity to fly heavy equipment across the planet really makes it a no-brainer for someone interested in those things. More power to him!

Anyway, that means I need to hire a new pilot to replace Kitsch, and I need to do that pretty quickly. The most-trafficked aviation website in Canada is AvCanada, so I put a job ad there. I took it down after a few days and am now starting to go through the 342 resumes I have in my inbox as a result of the ad, electronically sorting a small pile from the large pile. I tried to make the ad realistic and descriptive so that people would have an idea of what is required, and what is offered.

Here's what I wrote - I have edited out the identifying stuff because the application time has elapsed and I have enough resumes already ;)

---------------------------------

Position: Citation 550 First Officer
Company Name:
Contact Person: Ops Manager
Street Address:
City: Oakville
Province/Territory or State: Ontario
Country:Canada
Web address:
Email address:
Phone number: NO phone calls or drop-ins please.
Apply via: Email or snailmail only.
Aircraft Types: C550 Citation II

Hmm, the airlines are hiring again. That means it looks like we may need to refresh our resume pile for a Citation 550 pilot, specifically an F/o position.

Are you smart? Are you polite when appropriate? Are you willing to live within an hour of CYYZ Toronto Pearson Airport? Are you okay with an F/o position on a light corporate jet? Do you use soap? Do you promise to read the parts below about the extra office duties and especially the part about not offering to pay for your training? Could you stand to work a bunch of long days in a row with a sarcastic bald guy? If your answers are 'Yeah', 'Sure' and 'Yup' so far, then please read on!

Absolute Minimum requirement: Functioning cerebral cortex (preferably with 'sense of humor' addon), current CPL / Multi-IFR with the right to live and work in Canada. Also, a working knowledge of MS Office. As the plane is a 2-crew turbojet, you'll need an ATPL if you ever want to log PIC (we'll discuss that after a year or two). Current C550 PPC/Type Rating an asset, but we will train the right candidate.

About us:

We are a corporate flight department for a publicly-traded renewable energy corporation, based at Pearson Airport in Toronto. We fly 90% corporate, 10% charter. The successful applicant can expect to fly 200-250 hours per year, plus or minus. Please do NOT offer to pay for your training. We will pay all your training costs at Flightsafety and you, being an honorable person, will agree to stay for 2 years. We don't pay per diems, we pay all your meals and hotel bills when on the road, and we stay at decent hotels and have the option to eat at restaurants with actual utensils. We will provide you with a nice laptop, a generous mobile phone allowance and a full benefit plan, 'cause that's how we roll. Heck, we'll even pay for your pilot medicals.

Normal work-week schedule is Monday to Friday, with the occasional weekend trip. Realistically we fly once or twice a week. Most flights are booked well in advance - in the past 6 years we have had a total of 2 same-day trip requests. We mostly fly throughout Eastern Canada and the US, and sometimes down to the Caribbean - 90% of our trips are within a thousand miles of YYZ, with the other 10% of trips being company runs to Arizona.

There's more, and this is important - we are a small flight department (2 Citation 550's) and everyone here pulls their weight on the operational side as well as the flight line.

This means flight planning trips, organizing customs / airport slots, arranging hotels / ground transportation, helping with audit preparation, billing, picking up commissary and the thousand other tiny jobs that make up a corporate flight department. For example: I'm not gonna ask you to wash the boss's car, but I may ask you to help with an Ops Manual update, or to assume some Quality Assurance roles within the flight department. This means less spare time when we're not flying, but on the upside it will certainly keep you mentally active.

Pop quiz: Did you really read the part about not offering to pay for your training and about the extra flight-department-related duties involved in this position? How about the part where you need to have a current CPL / Multi-IFR? And especially the part about no phone calls or unscheduled visits to my office or home? Cool, then let's continue...

We have high standards, and that's a good thing. Our planes are maintained by an Air Canada connector, we don't cut corners, and we expect you to bring your 'A' game. In return, you'll get a good F/o job working with good people on a good-natured corporate jet. For real: You will get treated like a capable human being, with all the respect and expectation that brings. You in?

If so, please send your resume in .pdf or MS Word format to Ops Manager, or mail it to me.

Again, NO phone calls please, and no drop-ins (this is to see if you can follow instructions).

In return, I will do my absolute damnedest to reply to all applicants within a month.

Salary:$ 50k/year + expenses + full benefits
Closing Date: June 20th 2011. Possibly hiring for early July.

----------------------------------------------------

Some of the resumes I have gotten are truly spectacular - some in a good way, and some not so much. Can you believe that one guy actually sent me a resume offering to pay for his training and to work for free? I'm not even kidding, but that's for a future post.

What I think I'll blog about next is walking through the hiring process, from resumes to interviews and beyond. Hopefully we will end up with a candidate who can handle the requirements, and who doesn't hate being featured in the occasional blog post :) Wish me luck!

All Hail Baby Balthor*!! This is his portrait, taken as of yesterday when we found out he is going to be a he. He's still baking, but we have high hopes for midnight on Halloween, when he is scheduled to make his first appearance out in the world.

*Name subject to likely change/veto by Lisa

Let's talk about CRM for a second. What's CRM? Cockpit Resource Management, which is basically a fancy way of saying "getting the crew members to work together toward a common goal". Good CRM is a beautiful thing - you know what the other crew member is thinking and everyone performs their duties in a synchronized and orderly fashion.

These guys take CRM to a whole new level. They are flying a C-130 Hercules aircraft at an airshow, and it's pretty amazing to watch how the 3 crew members synch up. It's the aviation equivalent of ballet.

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

I decided to slack off and sleep in until 3:45am today. After I woke up, we did this. The eastern seaboard was all fogged up this morning, and one of the few exceptions was our destination, which was 300' overcast and 6 miles visibility. Kitsch hand-flew this one just for fun, while I jealously pouted and watched from the F/o's side.

A few things of note - for the first couple of minutes we are cruising above the final cloud layer, which was at 3,000'.

Then not much interesting happens until around 6:15, when you can hear the Ground Proximity Warning System call out "500", which tells us we are 500' above the ground. We see the runway around 30 seconds later.

At around 6:50 you can hear the GPWS freak out a little bit, yelling "Glide Slope" a couple of times. On short final we were stable and in visual conditions, and Kitsch decided to duck under the glideslope a little bit in order to make a nearby runway turnoff. It's not a big deal in a case like this where the runway threshold is displaced - you'll note that the actual runway began well before the paint markings did.

After we land you can hear the pax clapping - at our parent company it's customary for the passengers to applaud such a smooth and skilled arrival. Funny thing is, I'm not even kidding - gotta love a job where you get clapped at just for doing it correctly :)

I was lazy with this vid and didn't edit it, so the rest of it is pretty boring - we taxi into the US Customs apron and await the tender mercies of the customs officers. As I'm writing this from my hotel room, clearly things went okay :)

A trio of landing videos for your enjoyment / criticism :) As per usual, 720p and full-screen makes it cooler ;)



This one was at KRDU, Raleigh-Durham. They switched runways on us twice while we were on final, and we ended up aiming at runway 05, 5 miles back at 5,000'. A normal glideslope height at 5 miles would be about 1,500' above ground, so we were about 3x that, yee-haw! We were empty, so Kitsch pulled the power to idle, dropped the speed brakes and the plane took the express elevator down. The Citation 550 can descend pretty much vertically if we need to, and you might note (through the wind noise) that we actually had to add power on short final to make the approach. That's also good airmanship in our jet - the engines take a little while to spool up, so if they were at idle power and we had to go around suddenly for some reason, we might be at a bit of a disadvantage. I like to keep the power at around 55 - 60% until we are at 50' and crossing the runway threshold, just in case.



This was coming back home on a cloudy day. I forgot to turn on the camera until we had already mostly broken out, but there's about 2 minutes of ok footage, and I didn't completely pooch the landing so there's that too ;) Not too challenging overall as the winds were light, and theceiling was 1,000' (we can get down to 200' without having to look outside) but it was still kinda fun. About 2:10 into the video you'll see a big cloud-generating building in the distance. You might wonder why they have a cloud-generating building so close to the runways - I did, and then found out that it's the power plant for the airport. I guess they need it nearby, but on foggy days it can really add to the overall overcast.




This last one is landing on runway 23 at Pearson, also known as the opposite end of runway 05. We did this one a few days ago, on a smoggy, hot, thunderstormy day. The ceiling was 9,000' but as you can see, the smog made for some pretty poor visibility. The approach was fairly routine, but they kept us in pretty close so we got to turn and drop like a stone during the last couple of minutes. Always fun for the flight crew, sometimes less fun for the passengers. The thing that concerns me the most is thinking about the fact that I breathe that same polluted air.

Things you don't expect to see at the airport in Quincy, Illinois, part 1.

In this pic (taken from Aviation Explorer), an unfortunate pilot is encountering three different types of turbulence, and presumably encountering turbulent conditions in his underwear as well. I'm not actually sure if that last part makes sense, but I'm gonna go with it.
What the hell is turbulence anyway? Here's the short answer: it's when the air around your airplane changes direction and/or speed quickly. It's a fact of life for a pilot, so I'm gonna yammer on about it for a little bit more.

Turbulence is caused by 4 basic building blocks, which can act separately or join forces in an orchestra of suck (as per the picture above). The components are Mechanical, Thermal, Wake and Wind Shear.

With mechanical turbulence, the wind travels along the surface of the earth and hits various objects, like trees, buildings, mountains and whatnot. The air moves around the objects and becomes turbulent. As you fly over (or behind, relative to the wind) these objects, you get bumped about.

A description of thermal now: On a warm day, the ground gets hot. The hot ground causes the air above it to heat up, and that air rises. The rising air screws up the smooth ride for airplanes flying through it. One rule of thumb that works is if there is a layer of puffy clouds on a hot day, the thermal turbulence will only rise as high as the cloud layer and the ride above the clouds will be thermal-free.

Wake turbulence is caused by other aircraft. While an aircraft flies to and fro burning fuel and money, the lifting surfaces displace a whole lot of air and the engines blow air out the back end at high speed. All this air takes a little while to settle down, and if you fly close behind another aircraft you could be exposed to its wake. Depending on the size and configuration of the offending aircraft, it can be nearly imperceptible or it can be the aviation equivalent of being in a canoe out on the water as a supertanker goes by at high speed. Generally an aircraft that has flaps lowered and is at a low airspeed generates the most wake turbulence. Boeing 757's and 767's are nice planes, but are notorious for their unpleasant wake characteristics.

Wind Shear is caused by an angry god who wants to smite you with thunder and lightning, and by other stuff too. When the direction or speed of wind changes significantly within a short horizontal or vertical distance, the boundary areas will be bumpy. A rough ride caused by flying through a thunderstorm or crossing through a jet-stream boundary area would both qualify as wind shear turbulence.

Back to that pic at the top for a second, hopefully now it makes a little more sense - first the pilot encounters turbulence in the forms of thermal, then mechanical, then wind shear. Good thing no other planes were in the area or he coulda had 4/4, a perfect score (if you hate your airplane's wings).


In Canada, we report turbulence based on 3 levels of intensity. The following is shamelessly stolen from the Canadian AIM:

Occasional: Less than 1/3 of the time. Intermittent: 1/3 to 2/3. Continuous: More than 2/3.

--------------------------------
Light - Turbulence that momentarily causes slight, erratic changes in altitude and/or attitude (pitch, roll, yaw). Report as “Light Turbulence”.
*OR*
Turbulence that causes slight, rapid and somewhat rhythmic bumpiness without appreciable changes in altitude or attitude. Report as “Light Chop”.

Occupants may feel a slight strain against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects may be displaced slightly. Food service may be conducted and little or no difficulty is encountered in walking.

Not a big deal for most people, but it gets bumpier ;)
---------------------------------
Moderate - Turbulence that is similar to Light Turbulence but of greater intensity. Changes in altitude and/or attitude occur but the aircraft remains in positive control at all times. It usually causes variations in indicated airspeed. Report as “Moderate Turbulence”.
*OR*
Turbulence that is similar to Light Chop but of greater intensity. It causes rapid bumps or jolts without appreciable changes in aircraft altitude or attitude. Report as “Moderate Chop”.

Occupants feel definite strains against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are dislodged. Food service and walking are difficult.

When it's moderate, you know you are flying through the air in a small metal tube. White-knucklers will be having a bad day, and the occasional beverage might end up on the floor or walls.

Here's a video of moderate chop that I took a little while ago - you can really only tell it's a rough ride 'cause the camera is shaking.




---------------------------------
Severe - Turbulence that causes large, abrupt changes in altitude and/or attitude. It usually causes large variations in indicated airspeed. Aircraft may be momentarily out of control. Report as “Severe Turbulence”.

Occupants are forced violently against seat belts or shoulder straps. Unsecured objects are tossed about. Food service and walking impossible.

You'll notice there is no "Severe Chop" - at this level it's all just lousy.
---------------------------------

We do our best to avoid turbulence - at cruising altitude sometimes all it takes is a climb or a descent of a couple of thousand feet to change a rough ride into a smooth one, or we might alter our route laterally to avoid an area of widespread unrest. If we have no choice but to fly through a zone of turbulence, we can also slow down. As our airspeed increases, our lifting surfaces are capable of generating more lift. This is good, but only to a point. Airplanes have an airspeed called 'maneuvering speed' (Va), below which a sudden intense gust of wind will cause the lifting surface to stall (and unload) rather than producing so much lift as to cause structural deformation. Depending on the situation, you might prefer to have a stalled wing or tail instead of having them depart the aircraft, but then you are dealing with a stalled airplane and that can have its own set of complications. Anyway, maneuvering speed decreases with weight and if you wanna totally nerd out, as a general rule the reduction in Va will be half the percentage reduction in aircraft weight. Another important note is that Va is also only predicated on full deflection of the controls on a single axis, and some forms of turbulence (ie thunderstorms) can cause intense stresses in multiple directions, which can easily result in catastrophic structural damage at speeds below Va.

What prompted this post?



This is a Citation that I was flying for another company a while back when we got a taste of severe turbulence. The skies were clear, but a strong frontal passage had caused lots of wind shear and mechanical turbulence, and it had been reported as severe by other pilots just ahead of us. I slowed down to our maneuvering speed, cinched up my seat-belt and shoulder harness, told the pax to hang on, and waited for it. Going through about 8,000 feet on the descent, we hit the wall. I was hand-flying (I prefer to hand-fly if it's gonna be really bumpy, so I can tune into what the plane is doing a little better) and the plane started to act like she'd been tasered. The severe bumps were only for a few seconds, but during that time, the oxygen masks in the back deployed uncommanded. The above pic is of a nice mechanic packing them back into the ceiling. The plane was fine - we were nice and slow when we hit the bumps and there wasn't any structural damage or anything, but it kinda got my mind on the subject.

I hope all your airflow is smooth, and your oxygen masks only deploy when you ask them to :)

I think pregnancy agrees with her. I mean, except for the barfing and sleep disruption, which are symptoms she apparently has also. Yes, I'm terrified, thank you for asking ;)

A quick update to the A380 video I posted recently. A guy on AvCanada posted a pic that shows the wingspan of the A380 superimposed over a Google Earth view of the accident scene.

The wingspan is the yellow line with the red dots at each end, near the bottom left corner of the picture. It looks like there should be enough clearance if the 380 is on the center line of the taxiway and the RJ is north of the the road. Hmm.

This happened last night, when an Air France A380 was trying to depart JFK for Paris and its left wingtip caught the tail of a Comair RJ. No injuries reported, so that's good, though if I was in the RJ cockpit I'm thinking the seat upholstery would likely need to be replaced. It does makes me take the "please keep your seatbelts on until the plane has arrived at the gate" warnings a little more seriously too.

How did this happen? I'm sure there will be a report, but right away I see there are a few things of interest:

- The A380 seemed to be going faster than a normal taxi speed, but it also seems like the video might be sped up a bit.
- It was at night, so visibility wasn't the greatest.
- The widest runways at JFK are 200 feet across.
- The wingspan of the A380 is just over 261 feet.

Looks like they might want to revise the procedures for handling the A380 when other aircraft are in the neighborhood. From the way it completely manhandled the RJ, I'm not sure the A380 would even notice if they ran over our Citation 550. I bet I would though, so I'm making a mental note to give it at least 131 feet of lateral separation on the ramp if I ever come across one.


Update: Here's the ATC audio, and a couple of pics