Co-pilot's sidestick from an Airbus A321.

Control feedback is important to pilots. Through the yoke or stick, we can feel what’s happening with the plane; for example, are we pulling or pushing too hard on the stick? Are the controls mushy, indicating that we’re close to a stall? Are they fluttering, possibly because of misbalanced control surfaces or icing? Are they bouncing round in turbulence? This stuff is so important that sophisticated, fly-by-wire airliners, which have no direct connection from the yoke or stick to the control surfaces, actually simulate some of it.

I do most of my flying as the only pilot in my small plane, so I never considered how important control feedback is for feeling what the other pilot is doing. It turns out that lack of that kind of feedback is one of the major links in the accident chain that brought down Air France 447 in 2009, as described in detail in annotated CVR transcript in this Popular Mechanics article.

Throughout the incident, one of the pilots was panicking and pulling all the way back on his stick. It wasn’t the thunderstorms that brought the plane down, but a mush from 37,500 ft all the way down to sea level. At any point before the last few thousand feed, the jet would have recovered if the pilot had simply released the stick. The psychology of stress and panic are complicated, and I’m not writing this to condemn the poor pilot who did that; however, the point of requiring two people in the cockpit is that if one is incapacitated (whether by panic or illness), the other can take over.

In this case, however, the other pilot wasn’t aware of the problem, because a crucial piece was missing: Airbus designed the A330 with asynchronous control sticks — that means that the pilot in the left seat had no easy way of knowing that the pilot in the right seat was holding the stick all the way back, because the other stick remained in a neutral position. At one point, when he did push his stick forward, the Airbus simply averaged the two inputs — to me, that makes about as much sense to as averaging two wheels on a ship, when one wheelman turns 15 degrees to the left of an iceberg, and the other turns 15 degrees to the right.

There were many other causes in the accident chain, of course (for example, the pitot tubes initially iced over, so the flight computer didn’t have good airspeed readings, and it shut off the system meant to prevent pilots from stalling the plane), but the glaring one seems to be Airbus removing, by design, a cockpit-resource-management tool that almost every other type of aircraft has: the ability to see and feel the other pilot’s control inputs.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows Airbus’s reasoning behind designing asynchronous control sticks and (in some control regimes) averaging the inputs.

(Photo credit: Flying China Man blog)

Fixed vs incremental costs

Unusually for a public figure, however, the general in question actually stood up for himself and decided to treat us like adults and explain how things work. The situation is remarkably similar to the finances of owning a small plane (if you knock a couple of zeros off the end of the dollar values), so it’s worth summarizing here:

• The $10,000/hour quoted cost is the total cost of ownership, not the incremental cost. The bulk of that is the fixed costs (purchase, maintenance, etc.) divided by flying time. Most of those costs are incurred regardless of whether the government’s two Challenger jets take extra trips. The incremental cost of flying one of the jets (fuel, maintenance based on flight hours, etc.) is $2,360 for each extra hour it flies.

• The government doesn’t use the jets often enough for the crews to maintain legally-required recency, so they have to do a lot of empty training flights to make up enough hours. Last year, the jets flew 170 hours empty between them to help the crews meet requirements.

So when the press says the general spent $1.5M over three years flying for personal reasons (presumably ~150 hours), the first thing to realize is that that really represents $354,000 in extra incremental costs, or just over $100,000/year — still a lot, but not nearly so shocking (in the late 1990s, my customers spent over $50,000/year more than one year flying me around on the airlines for my consulting work).

Crews have to fly

The second thing to realize is that the pilots have to fly anyway. So imagine an exchange like this:

Jane Pilot: Good morning, sir. My first officer and I need another 8 hours this month to stay current. Instead of our flying in circles around Ottawa practicing approaches, would you like to tag along and go somewhere?

General: Well, captain, my friend gave me tickets for the Calgary Stampede.

Jane Pilot: Perfect — that will be just about right. See you tomorrow morning at 0800, sir.

This conversation will make perfect sense to an aircraft owner, but might be too complicated to explain in the public — we’ll see. I’ve had similar conversations with friends when I’ve needed to make up required hours (a pilot who doesn’t fly often enough isn’t safe, and sometimes isn’t legal). Of course, my incremental operating costs are a lot lower (maybe $70/hour for fuel, oil, and engine depreciation), but who’s counting?

Not the same as a corporate jet

If these were privately-owned corporate jets, of course, they could be leased out when they’re not needed, and the owner would make money and give the crew their hours. These jets, however, are full of sensitive equipment, so that the Prime Minister (for example) can monitor or order military attacks from the air. We probably don’t want a rich developer renting one to fly his gulf buddies to Florida.

It’s also worth mentioning that in at least one case, the jet was offered to the general because he missed the first part of a family on a trip to be present for the return of slain Canadians from Afghanistan. That’s a hard one to object to.

First, I’ll provide a bit of background. The autopilot has four modes as currently configured (without altitude support):

• ST: stabilization mode, which keeps the wings level (or in a bank angle selected by rotating a small knob). In this mode, I can fly a hyper-stabilized plane, much like the over-simplified flight model in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Other autopilots sometimes refer to this as WL (wing-leveler mode).

• HD: heading mode, which keeps the plane flying on a specific heading that I select using a bug on the heading indicator. The bank angle will vary as necessary to maintain the heading; for example, if I put the plane in a yaw using the rudder pedals, the autopilot will lower one wing noticeably to keep the plane flying in a straight line, and if turbulence knocks me off a heading, the AP will turn the plane to correct.

• TRK (LO): VOR-tracking mode, which keeps the VOR CDI centered using a low-pass filter (that means that it reacts slowly, so that it’s not constantly zig-zagging when the VOR scallops, as they often do.

• TRK (HI): localizer-tracking mode, which keeps the VOR CDI centred using more-aggressive corrections, as you’d want on an ILS or LOC approach, where it’s essential to stay right on the centreline.

The stabilization mode (ST) is virtually useless for me – I’ve enabled it only in my initial tests and in pre-flight checks. If I want to steer the plane using the autopilot, it makes much more sense to twirl the heading bug on heading indicator and have the AP follow it.

For enroute, I’ve tried both the heading mode (HD) and the VOR-tracking mode (TRK LO). The trouble with the VOR mode is that VOR needles scallop a lot back and forth, so even with the low-pass filter, the plane still gently weaves during flight. It’s nice because I can just set and forget until VOR passage — no heading corrections required — but especially in IMC, I found the heading mode much more effective. With gentle adjustments, I was able to keep the virtual CDI in my portable GPS perfectly centered, even in cloud and mild turbulence, sometimes going as long as 15 minutes without having to touch the heading bug.

I tried the localizer-tracking mode (TRK HI) for my localizer approach into Beverly. At 10 miles back, it didn’t seem to be doing a good job, sometimes allowing nearly a half deflection on the CDI, so I disengaged the AP before I got too low and flew the rest of the approach by hand (flying an approach in IMC isn’t a good time to troubleshoot). That might just have been an anomaly, though, and I didn’t test it inside the final-approach fix (FAF), when signal might be better — I’ll do a test flight on the ILS approaches in Ottawa in visual conditions to see how it performs there.

I’m learning to deal better with the lack of altitude hold. On my first couple of flights, I was trying not to touch the yoke when it was in HD mode, and instead to correct altitude deviations using the trim. Even though I worked hard to damp out oscillations (anticipating them by trimming before the pitch reversed direction), it was still a challenge in turbulence.

On my Boston flight in IMC, I took a different approach, and tried sharing the yoke with the AP: I pulled or pushed it to control pitch and then trimmed to relieve pressure (the way I normally would), but managed to get used to letting the AP still turn the yoke while I was holding it. I was able to trim more effectively that way, and didn’t have to correct as often, even in turbulence.

The big conclusion, though, is that the AP made a huge difference in fatigue. I can (and have) hand-flown harder and longer flights in instrument conditions, but I’m very tired after I land from the constant second-to-second attention required for the scan and other IFR tasks. The autopilot let me relax a little bit, study the approach plates more carefully, pay more attention to the engine gauges (which can slip out of an IFR scan, when keeping the plane upright is the main concern), and just generally relax, while still keeping an active (but less frenetic) scan.

Today I flew my plane home from Waterloo to Ottawa with a brand-new autopilot installed.

I’ve flown over 850 hours, about 120 of them in actual instrument conditions, and all by hand. I’m proud that I can do that, but at the same time, it’s tiring: after 8 hours bumping around in cumulus clouds and dodging storms on the Stormscope, I’m exhausted beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Even 4 hours in good VFR weather can be tiring, because of the constant attention needed to keep the plane straight, level, and on course.

Choosing an upgrade

I knew it was time to improve rather than just maintain my plane, and I also considered an IFR GPS and a new paint job (both about the same cost), but the autopilot gave me the biggest safety and operational benefits for the money. I called a few places for quotes, but the only one that answered my calls and questions consistently was Kitchener Aero, where owner Barry Aylward went out of his way to carry on a friendly e-mail and phone correspondence for half a year while I hemmed and hawed, then fit me right in as soon as I made up my mind, as if I were one of his bizjet customers rather than a tight-fisted Cherokee owner.

I decided on the S-TEC System 20, a rate-based autopilot (much smoother and more reliable than old APs) that is built into a turn coordinator, and replaces that instrument on my panel without needing any extra space. The S-TEC 20 is a single-axis autopilot — that means that it controls roll (and heading), but not pitch (and altitude) or yaw. Barry warned me that I’d wish I’d paid a few thousand extra for the S-TEC 30 with altitude hold, but I was already close to my spending limit, and knew I’d end up asking for extra maintenance work on my existing avionics (and a new 406 MHz ELT, since the plane was there anyway …).

Using the autopilot

Kitchener Aero sent me up on a test flight with one of its people, ready to adjust the autopilot, but it was absolutely perfectly tuned. While the S-TEC 20 can’t hold an altitude, here’s what it can do:

• Keep the wings level, and allow simple, stable turns using a knob (without risk of overbanking).
• Track a heading set on my heading indicator.
• Track a VOR radial inbound or outbound.
• Track a localizer on a LOC or ILS approach.

We were able to try all of these during the test flight northwest of Waterloo (except for the LOC tracking, due to a miscommunication with Waterloo tower). Unlike GPS tracks, VOR needles tend to scallop — wag back and forth — and an autopilot that overreacts to that will soon make the passengers (and pilot) seasick with all the rocking. The S-TEC 20 responded very gently, and almost unnoticeably, to the scalloping, even close to the VOR.

First cross-country with an autopilot

During my flight home, I had a chance to use both modes for a bit over two hours. I used VOR-tracking mode to track northeast outbound from Waterloo, then heading mode (with frequent adjustments) to fly a DME arc just outside Toronto terminal airspace until I could join my airways, then back to VOR-tracking mode as I followed the airways and switched from VOR to VOR. Up at 9,500 ft, above the broken layer of cumulus cloud, the air was smooth as silk, and I was able to fly hands off with only an adjustment every 5 minutes or so to the elevator trim to hold altitude. Barry was wrong — I wasn’t missing altitude hold at all.

Unfortunately, summer is summer, and eventually, the cloud layer rose up to meet me. I had to descend down below it, and my nice smooth flight became a mechanical rodeo bull. The autopilot still did a good job holding heading and tracking the VORs, though the turns in turbulence were more aggressive and noticeable, but I found myself trimming every 30 seconds or so as my pitch and altitude shot up and down in rising and falling air columns. Barry was right — in the turbulence, I wished I had altitude hold.

The good news is that the S-TEC 20 can easily be upgraded to an S-TEC 30, which does support altitude hold and electric trim. Maybe in a year or two.

Next steps

I think the autopilot is going to be a big part of my flying from now on. I’ve enjoyed the bragging rights of always hand-flying, but 9 years of bragging is enough. Besides, if flying is less tiring, maybe I’ll do more of it, and travel further: the prairies, the Arctic, the Mississippi, even the Florida Keys and the West Coast are all out there waiting for me.

You can have enough time to fly, or enough money to fly, but not both.

Changes in work

Consulting work has been wonderful crazy busy for me and pretty-much every other consultant I know, whether in IT, business, aid work, development, or what-have-you. Canada barely got brushed by the recession that devastated the US in 2008-09 (with record-high property prices in most of our big cities, it may be that our bubble just hasn’t burst yet). The problem is that my customers are mostly in Canada and the UK now — the US economy isn’t so great, remember — so I don’t have work excuses to fly down to Boston, NYC, Washington, etc. like I used to.

Recency Lost

I’ve never taken such a long break before. After six months away from flying, bad things start to happen:

• You can’t fly IFR, because you have to have done six hours real/simulated IMC and six approaches within the last six months (the infamous 6-6-6).
• You can’t carry passengers at night, because you have to have done five takeoffs and landings at night within the last six months.
• You can’t carry passengers during the day, even other pilots, because you have to have done five takeoffs and landings (any time) within the last six months.

Recency Regained (part 1)

So now it’s a matter of crawling my way out of the hole, milestone by milestone, until I can get back to my regular IFR/cross-country kind of flying. I started by calling my flying buddy Mike Hopkinson and asking for an intervention, and he complied by texting me last Saturday to remind me to get to the @#$% airport and then meeting me after his shift on dispatch. I uncovered the plane, made some stupid mistakes trying to start it (yes, it does help to check the fuel cutoff), recharged the battery that I drained, then did my normal post-maintenance checks:

• Long, thorough preflight, including control movements.
• Confirm that the engine compartment is clean (I even took a picture for before/after comparison).
• Do a 5-minute lean ground-runup, and watch for anomalies.
• Do a high-speed taxi down the runway to check what happens as the controls become effective.
• Shut down and search for stains, leaks, cracks, or anything else that shouts DON’T FLY!
• Start up again and fly circuits, always within gliding distance of the runway.
• Shut down and repeat the stain/leak/crack checks.

The plane passed with flying colours (so to speak — my paint scheme is drab), and I managed five touch-and-go landings in a crisp cross-wind, progressing from “what-the-hell-was-that?” on the first to “now I’ll gently lower the nosewheel exactly on the centreline” on the fifth. It turns out the the rules make sense — 5 really is the magic number, and now I was legal to carry passengers in day VFR.

Victory lap to Toronto and back

As soon as I was done that and mentioned it on Facebook, my older daughter asked me if I could pick her up in Toronto and bring her home for a break from her studies at U of T. It grated to be a VFR-only pilot, but the weather on Friday co-operated beautifully, so I managed to get 4 hours of proper cross-country flight time (3.6 hours air time) on a beautiful spring day. I was ridiculously nervous beforehand, but on the day of, my flying and radio work through the busy Ottawa and Toronto airspace was fine, and the flight was as boring and uneventful as I want all my flights to be (my rule is that the only excitement in flying should come from the scenery outside the window). No new milestones from that flight, but I feel confident now to start back into the night and IFR work — 2 more milestones to go.

Other ways to protest that a person can do.

Libyan people using violence to overcome violence, ONLY NEW VIOLENCE AGAINST THE VIOLENCE.

Please all the people of Vietnam Hero follow Libyan people:

Gasoline burn all government buildings, the gas plants, the tank cars carrying fuel, the homes of Communist Party members Hunting Dogs.

Each comment then goes on to provide detailed instructions with different ways of making and using Molotov cocktails. My approach to comment moderation on OurAirports is fairly permissive — I’m happy to leave in comments with strong language, political views, or even scammers trying to defend themselves (it’s fun to see other commenters take them down). I will not, however, allow comments encouraging violence, and even more importantly, I won’t allow comments that include weapon-making instructions.

In a wonderful bit of unintended irony, each comment ends like this:

The U.S. government declared, would send U.S. troops to guard the people’s protests, the people in countries with rebel demands to overthrow dictatorships.

The United States — saviour of the Vietnamese people?

Whee! I’m free!

Over the next month, I took with a few short flights in rented C-172s to celebrate my newly-won independence: to Kingston Airport to fly my parents around on 6 September, to Morrisburg Airport on 13 September, to Smiths Falls Airport on 18 September, to Peterborough Airport on 25 September, and finally, with my kids and my spouse’s cousin Andrea, over Arnprior Airport and back on 29 September.

But is it useful?

After only a month, however, the excitement of flying same-day trips within an hour of Ottawa in a rented plane was wearing very thin. I wanted flying to be useful, and to get to that point, I needed three more things:

1. A night rating, so that I wasn’t restricted to daylight flying
2. An instrument rating, so that I wouldn’t be grounded for days in bad weather
3. My own plane (or a share in one), so that I could go on real trips for business or family vacations

Student again … and owner

So barely a month after earning my PPL, I had my instructor, Alain Mussely, back in the right seat working with me on my night and IFR ratings. I went airplane shopping at the at the Buttonville Airport in November 2002 and decided to buy a 1979 Piper Warrior II (C-FBJO) — a low-maintenance, fuel-efficient plane that can cruise at 125 knots true airspeed for six hours (no reserve) with a 665 lb load. The plane arrived in Ottawa on 4 December 2002 for an extensive pre-purchase inspection, then I put it into the shop to have a four-place intercom installed over Christmas.

I earned my night rating in February 2003, and my instrument rating in July 2003, and then I had everything I needed. A couple of long trips before the instrument rating had convinced me of its value: I got stuck overnight at North Bay Airport because of bad weather on a flight back from Sault Ste. Marie in May 2003, and had to race out of Caldwell Airport near New York City in June 2003 in the wee hours of the night to escape ahead of 3-4 days of bad weather.

Finished

On 28 July 2003, I took my family and dog up for our first cross-country IFR flight. It was gloomy on the ground under a low overcast, and it was strange for my family inside the clouds when everything outside the windows went white, but then suddenly we burst into brilliant sunshine and blue skies. 11 months after earning my PPL, I finally had everything I needed to make flying useful. I have 750 hours’ more experience now, but I still have the same license, the same plane, and the same ratings.

A typical ELT.

I had an unusual experience this morning flying home from Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa with my dog, Paisley. Three separate high-altitude jets heard an ELT signal at a point along my route about 20 miles south of North Bay.

The most common types of ELTs will start sending a signal automatically when they experience high G-forces (such as when an aircraft has made a forced landing or crashed), but most often, an ELT signal just means that a boat has bumped against a floatplane, someone forgot to turn off an ELT in the back of a courier truck being shipped back for a battery changed, etc. etc. It used to be that satellites monitored the emergency frequency 121.5 MHz, but they don’t do so any more (they’ve switched to the new 406 MHz frequency), so it’s up to us pilots to listen and report.

Joining the search

There was already a plane or helicopter with the callsign “Rescue 333″ doing a lower-level visual and ELT search. It also happened, however, that Toronto Centre was already talking with two small planes at lower altitudes who would both be crossing the location where the signal was received: me from west to east, and a Cessna 172 from south to north. Centre enlisted both of us to widen the radio-search area by tuning in 121.5 MHz on our second radios and listening for any signal as we passed through. Every 3-5 minutes, I turned off the squelch on my radio: that creates horrendous static, but it also lets me hear very faint signals.

None of us, including the search aircraft and other high-altitude airliners, heard anything more. I looked as carefully as I could, but from 9,500 ft in a low-wing aircraft it’s hard to see much detail, and I didn’t want to go lower and interfere with the Rescue aircraft’s search patterns.

Ping!

About 20 minutes later, over Algonquin Park, however, I did suddenly hear one very brief ELT wave (the part that sounds like a sheet of metal pinging), as if someone had switched an ELT on to test it then turned it off a second later. It was 8 minutes after the hour. All ELT testing is supposed to take place during the first five minutes of each hour, but I suspect that some floatplane pilot somewhere in the park just had a slow watch. Still, I reported what I heard to Centre, and they passed it on to the Rescue plane.

How to help

The odds are very high that this was a false alarm — most search and rescue calls are — but it was still sobering to think of a brother or sister pilot down there somewhere under the tree canopy, in desperate need of help. If you’re a pilot with two radios, I strongly suggest that you keep the second tuned to 121.5 MHz whenever you don’t need it to get weather, etc. — some day you might actually make a difference.

CYRO-CYAM VFR, 4.4 hours flight time (4.2 air time) PIC #flightlog

CYTZ-CYRO IFR 1.8 PIC in a PA-28-161 #flightlog

No one is using this hashtag for anything else, and it would make it easy for pilots to find other pilots on Twitter who’ve flown the same routes or used the same airports. So far, of course, I’m the only pilot to find.

Where do they look?

Point A to Point B

Let’s say that you filed your flight plan from Point A to Point B and that there are no obvious barriers (mountains, large bodies of water, restricted airspace).  I’m not sure exactly how SAR works, but let’s assume that they’ll search within a 5 nm radius of each airport, and along your route of flight from those circles, allowing for a 10° drift in either direction.  The search area appears in grey below (not to scale):

Point A to Point B search area.

For a 300 nm flight, using my very rusty high school geometry skills, I calculate the search area to be nearly 9,500 nm²!  That’s a lot of forest to search for a little plane with an unconscious pilot strapped into the front seat.

Point A to Point B (via Point C)

Fortunately, we can improve our chances quite a bit, simply by providing a checkpoint halfway through the flight:

Point A to Point B via Point C search area.

Now that Search and Rescue knows that you intended to fly via Point C (represented by the yellow triangle), rather than, say, flying to the north for better scenery, or to the south to buzz your buddy’s cottage, they can anchor their drift lines at an additional point, cutting out a lot of search area (I’m still allowing a 5 nm circle of ambiguity around the checkpoint).  I calculate that the search area is now reduced from nearly 9,500 nm² to just under 5,500 nm², a reduction of over 40% simply by adding one checkpoint in the flight plan.

Point C to Point B

But wait, there’s more!  Let’s say that, when you were over Point C (your midway checkpoint), you actually made a call to flight services and gave a position report.  Now there’s no need to search anything before Point C, because they know you passed it before you made your forced landing:

Search area after making a radio call over Point C.

You’ve reduced the search area from the original 9,500 nm² down to about 2,800 nm² — still a lot, but I’d bet more on your chances now.  Simply choosing a checkpoint, and making a radio call over it, can make a huge difference.

Caveats, etc.

Flight following is an even better option, since ATC will know much more precisely where you disappeared from the radar.  Unfortunately, flight following at lower altitudes is available only in highly populated areas.  In Canada,  below 10,000 ft you’re beyond radar coverage for much of the southern area of the country, not to mention the vast north.  Even in the US, radar coverage can be spotty — I’ve fallen below radar at 7,000 ft when flying IFR in both Maine and New Hampshire, for example, reverting to non-radar reporting procedures.

A checkpoint makes sense only if you can report over it, which means that you need to be able to reach flight services, which is non-trivial at low altitudes away from populated areas.  I plan my VFR flights with checkpoints that I know will be in range of an RCO or DRCO; if that doesn’t work, you can always try relaying your position report through another aircraft (air-to-air range is much further than air-to-ground).

Another interesting option for people who fly a lot in remote areas is the Spot personal messenger (site), which updates your position continuously via GPS and satellite and displays it on a web site. I haven’t tried it yet, but the price looks reasonable. It would be critical to mention the Spot in the remarks for your VFR flight plan, so that SAR would know to go to the site and check your flight path.

Last week I wrote about the summer flying dilemma, the challenge of balancing passenger comfort, speed, and the rising summer cumulus clouds. Pilots face a whole series of dilemmas like that with every flight — in fact, it’s probably fair to say that flying is more about finding balanced solutions to different dilemmas than it is managing the yoke, rudder, and throttle.

Weight vs. time

This week, I had to deal with a different challenge, the fuel and weight dilemma. A few years ago, I never had to worry about this one: my Piper Warrior can carry 665 lb when the fuel tanks are full, and that was enough for my whole family of four, our dog, and luggage, so filling the tanks for every flight was a no-brainer. Now my girls have grown into intelligent and beautiful women, and I’ve gone the other direction by putting on a few extra pounds, so I have to start thinking about fuel and weight.

Trade-offs

Here are the kind of options I consider before every flight:

Additional considerations

You have to consider a few points when looking over these choices:

• There is some stuff I have to carry in the plane — charts, Pilot Operating Handbook, tow bar, a couple of quarts of oil, some emergency supplies, cover, etc. That stuff weighs at least 20 lb even when I strip it to its bare minimum, so out of a 40 lb baggage load, only 20 lb would be available for bags — that’s 5 lb each for four people.
• People rarely fly naked (which is a good thing, given the average pilot’s age). Even in the summer, clothes and shoes add an extra 5 lb per person, and people tend to carry purses or backpacks with food, books to read, etc., adding an extra 5 lb each.
• For safety, you need to have a fuel reserve. The minimum required is 30 minutes (45 minutes at night) VFR, and more, including fuel to get to an alternate airport, IFR. For me, 2:40 fuel means at most a 1:40 flight VFR, and maybe 1:00 IFR, which isn’t enough to be useful for cross-country flying (a fuel stop every hour makes for a long flight).

There are yet other considerations. A lighter plane will take off in a shorter distance, climb faster, and cruise faster (I see a 5-10 knot difference in cruise speed between just me on board lightly loaded, and wallowing along at maximum gross weight). It costs time and money to tanker extra fuel along, and could also be a safety issue on a short runway, if there are trees looming at the other end.

The PIC’s burden

As with the summer flying weather dilemma, there’s no automatic right answer for this: that’s why you’re pilot-in-command — you have to think hard, and trade off one kind of safety or efficiency for another, hoping you’ve found the best balance. Airline pilots worry about this even more than small-plane pilots do: someone once pointed out to me that for a 747, every takeoff is a short-field takeoff.

This week, I got my whole family to Toronto and back safely, IFR both ways, landing with about 1:30 left in the tanks. It was nerve-wracking having to do such careful fuel management, and telling Porter FBO in Toronto the exact number of litres to put in each tank (rather than “fill ‘er up”), but it worked. My fuel burn was exactly as planned, we flew a bit faster for being light, and we got four adults back and forth in a 160 hp airplane.

Next week, it’s just me and the my 12-year-old Border Collie flying to the Soo. I’ve filled the tanks right up to the brim, and will fly the whole thing non-stop for four hours, IFR or VFR, while the old girl naps in the back seat.

On a typical VFR summer day in southern Canada or the northern US — the kind that the weather(wo)men call “a mixture of sun and cloud” with a decent amount of humidity — swirling columns of heated air, called thermals, start rising in the morning, and get higher and higher into the late afternoon as the sun warms the ground.

Clouds are the dividing line

At the top of those thermal columns, like scoops of ice cream on top of invisible cones, scattered cumulus clouds form. At first, those clouds might be only 1,000 feet thick and maybe 2,000 ft above the ground, but as the columns rise, the clouds get both higher and thicker, and some of them may develop into storm clouds during the afternoon (giving your typical cottage thunderstorm or 20-minute shower).

Underneath those clouds the horizontal winds are weaker, but the vertical motion of the thermals can cause a lot of turbulence — while the air may be smooth at breakfast, by early afternoon it can be rough enough to have passengers grabbing for the vomit bags, while the pilot feels like he or she is in a wrestling match with the yoke and rudder pedals.

Above the clouds, the air is normally smooth, but the winds are much stronger.

So where do you fly?

Flying eastbound

Eastbound, the best place to be is above the clouds if you (and your plane) can manage it. Prevailing summer upper winds in this part of the world are from the west or southwest, so on a good summer’s early afternoon you can get a 25-30 knot tailwind and smooth air at 9,500 ft eastbound. What’s not to love?

The problem is that the tops of those cumulus clouds keep getting higher and higher until almost supper time. In Canada, you need oxygen to fly above 10,000 ft for more than 30 minutes, and the tops of summer cumulus clouds could hit that height anywhere between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm, even ignoring isolated storm clouds. As the day goes on, without oxygen and a powerful plane, you hit a point that you can’t outclimb the clouds any more, and you’re forced to descend either into them (IFR) or under them (VFR), giving up some of the tailwind, and throwing you and your passengers back into the turbulence.

The good news is that, with the extra speed from the tailwind, you might be able to finish your trip before that happens. It’s possible to fly a Piper Warrior from Ottawa to Charlottetown in well under four hours with a good tailwind, so you can leave early in the morning, fly non-stop, and land for lunch before the clouds (and turbulence) outclimb you. Your passengers will have to put up with a bumpy descent and landing, but the rest of the flight will be smooth.

Flying westbound

Flying westbound, into the wind, you’re faced with a lose-lose proposition:

1. Fly below the clouds to get weaker headwinds, but subject your passengers to stomach-emptying turbulence as the day goes on.
2. Fly above the clouds to get smooth air, and watch your airspeed drop to (or below) automobile speeds.

First thing in the morning, you have a good chance to find both smooth air and weak headwinds at low altitudes (e.g. 2,500 ft), but that won’t last until lunch. As the cumulus clouds start to form, you’ll have to pick sides, diving down into the turbulence or climbing up into the headwinds. And to throw extra salt into your wounds, the headwinds slow you down and make it more likely that you’ll have to make a fuel stop, slowing you down even more, and pushing your flight later and later into the afternoon and the worst of the turbulence and/or headwinds. If you do decide to go above, even that won’t last: in a low-end plane without oxygen, you’ll eventually have to go down below and start banging your passengers’ (and your) heads against the ceiling of your plane.

Flying north- or southbound

In Canada, it’s safe to say that most cross-country flying is on the east-west axis, since Canadian cities are spread out in a thin line along the US border. In the US, on the other hand, you’re just as likely to be flying on the north-south axis (or something in-between). In that case, if the upper winds are from the southwest (typical in summer, at least east of the Rockies), then flying southbound will be a lot like flying westbound, but with less severe headwinds, while flying northbound will be like flying eastbound, but with less beneficial tailwinds.

Strategies

I fly some passengers who suffer from motion sickness, so I spend a lot of time planning around this stuff. In general, flying eastbound, I’ll go up above and accept a longer flight to get smooth air, since my passengers would rather be comfortable for 5-6 hours than violently ill for 3-5. Still, I can’t protect them from the turbulence when I have to land (fuel stop or destination).

Of course, I can’t stay above all day when the sun’s out — today, coming back from Charlottetown, I started at 2,500 ft in air so smooth you could do calligraphy in the back seat, but by late morning ended up at 10,500 ft over Quebec’s Eastern Townships trying to stay above the rising cumulus layer. Once my 30 minutes above 10,000 ft were up, I had to descend and subject my passengers to 40 minutes of turbulence below the clouds at the end of the flight.

If your schedule can handle it, there are some workarounds to minimize the damage:

• Start as early in the morning as possible, if there’s no fog or low stratus. Some pilots I’ve met like to be preflighting as the sun rises. If your family is willing to wake up at 5:00 or 5:30 am, go for it, and the flight will be more fun (plus you’ll have more of the day at your destination).
• If your route follows a shoreline or a wide river, fly over water instead of land (staying within gliding distance). Water tends to be cooler in the summer, and doesn’t throw up thermals as much. Often, the best break through a line of thunderstorms will be over water, but don’t let yourself get pushed offshore.
• Fly in the evening, especially if you have a well-lit destination for landing after dark. Summer evenings are long-ish, and the air tends to start calming down again around 7:00 pm, give or take, as the ground cools, the thermals die out, and the afternoon cumulus clouds flatten out and disperse.
• Split up the trip. Instead of two three-hour legs with a fuel stop on your westbound flight, fly halfway, land before lunch, and spend the day. The next morning (or that evening), fly the second leg in smooth air again. For example, I could have flown from Charlottetown to Quebec City, spent an afternoon and evening there, and then flown on to Ottawa the next morning.
• Stay on top as long as possible, and descend quickly at your destination. For passengers who suffer from motion sickness, popping ears are far preferable to a long time down low in turbulence.
• Take up soaring. Glider pilots love afternoon thermals, because the rising air lets them stay up almost indefinitely — that’s why you’ll often see gliders happy circling under a cumulus cloud, while pilots of powered planes are impatient to be back on the ground.

In the end, though, turbulence and headwinds are facts of summer flying, and not every day is a typical day — you could drag everyone out of bed at 4:30 or 5:00 am and still be in bumps the whole flight, and you could even end up with headwinds in both directions. Don’t pressure yourself to make the flight perfect and control things outside your control: just do your best with whatever you have to work with.

So where would you fly in this? There are thunderstorms right across the country and well north of the Arctic Circle, and then snow.

(Source: Environment Canada, Canadian Weather at a Glance.)

• Charlottetown Airport in Charlottetown, PEI.
• Toronto City Centre Airport (can’t bring myself to call it “Billy Bishop” yet) in Toronto, Ontario, for the third time this year.
• Sault Ste. Marie Airport in Sault Ste. Marie, ON.
• Beverly Municipal Airport just north of Boston, MA.

All of the trips will be starting from my home airport of Ottawa/Rockcliffe. I was thinking of trying to squeeze in a flight up north to Moosonee Airport as well, but I can’t see where I could fit it in.

I just noticed this now in Transport Canada publication. I’m reproducing it here because I cannot link to it directly (links added by me):

On August 24, 2009, the pilot of a privately-owned Piper PA23-250 arriving from the United States stopped in Brantford, Ont., to clear customs before continuing to his private strip. When the pilot was preparing to depart Brantford, he was unable to start the right engine. The pilot elected to attempt a single-engine takeoff from Runway 23. During the take-off roll, the pilot was unable to maintain directional control; the aircraft departed the right side of the runway just before the intersection of Taxiway Echo and Runway 23. The aircraft struck a taxiway light and continued across the taxiway before becoming airborne. The aircraft began a slow climb but was unable to clear trees at the edge of the airport property. The aircraft’s right wing struck a tree approximately 20 ft off the ground, severing the outboard portion of the right wing. The aircraft crashed into a cornfield approximately 300 ft beyond the tree and sustained substantial damage. The pilot was the only occupant on board and received minor injuries.

TSB File A09O0179.

You can search for the source on this page.

Note that the news story linked above claims that an engine “seized” shortly after takeoff, but the later TSB summary contradicts that. The newspaper version is more believable — it’s hard to imagine any pilot knowingly doing a single-engine takeoff in a light twin!

In case the AIC link dies, or you don’t feel like searching the whole file, here’s the relevant text:

AERONAUTICAL INFORMATION CIRCULAR 4/10
OTTAWA/GATINEAU, QUÉBEC
CHANGES TO THE OTTAWA/GATINEAU CONTROL ZONE

NAV CANADA, the country’s provider of civil air navigation services, conducted an aeronautical study that evaluated the airspace and publications in Ottawa, Ontario and the surrounding airports. The study recommended changes to the airspace and publications for Ottawa International, Ottawa/Gatineau, Ottawa/Rockcliffe, and Ottawa/Carp airports. These changes will be implemented over a period of time.

The first planned change is to extend the Ottawa/Gatineau control zone south, to the south side of the Ottawa River, with an exclusion over the river at 700 feet above ground level (AGL) and below.
This change will take effect 8 April 2010 at 0901 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The appropriate
aeronautical publications will be amended.

For further information, please contact: [...]

This may sound innocent enough, extending the Gatineau Airport control zone from the north shore of the Ottawa River less than a mile to the south shore, but it effectively closes off the only eastbound class G corridor out of Ottawa, one used very heavily by pilots from Rockcliffe Airport. This will now be mandatory frequency (MF) airspace while the Gatineau FSS is open, and we’ll all have to call Gatineau as soon as we take off from Rockcliffe.

Making an extra radio call isn’t a big deal, but I wonder how many Ottawa pilots will notice this change in the new CFS, or the AIC buried deep in that PDF file? I learned about it only because a pilot from Toronto told me. As far as I know, there has been no major effort to reach out and inform local pilots — no mention in emails from local flying clubs, blogs, etc., and the chief instructor at at least one of the local flying clubs was unaware this morning of when it was coming in or exactly what the change would be. I wouldn’t be surprised to see dozens of airspace vios after April 8, as pilots follow the same route they’ve followed for years without realizing they have to make a now-mandatory call to Gatineau. Normally, I’d have expected to be hearing about something like this for months before it happened.

Afghanistan

http://www.motca.gov.af/important_information.htm

Argentina

http://www.cra.gov.ar/dta/ais/inicio.php

Australia

http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/publications/aip.asp

Brazil

http://www.aisweb.aer.mil.br/aisweb/

Canada

Not available online; partial information is available here and here, but the actual directory of Canadian airports is paper-only, in the Canada Flight Supplement

Chile

http://www.aipchile.cl/dasa/aip_chile_con_contenido/index.php (limited number of airports)

China

Not available online

Denmark

http://www.slv.dk/Dokumenter/dsweb/View/Collection-95 (major airports only)

Estonia

http://aip.eans.ee/

Finland

https://ais.fi/ais/eaip/en/

France

http://www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr/default_uk.htm

Germany

Military aerodromes: http://www.mil-aip.de/

Civilian aerodromes: not available online

Iceland

http://www.caa.is/FlugmalahandbokinAIP

Iran

http://ais.airport.ir/Homepage.aspx?site=ais.airport&lang=fa-IR&tabid=0

Netherlands

http://www.ais-netherlands.nl/

South Africa

http://www.caa.co.za/resource%20center/Charts/AERONAUTICAL%20CHARTS/charts%20index.htm