UNSAR

Posted on October 23, 2006 by David Megginson

Update: The ELT is back and recertified with a new battery, but the forecast tomorrow calls for cloud and ice from about hilltop level to 9,000 ft, so the Hope Air flight is canceled.

UNSAR is the Transport Canada acronym for an UnNecessary Search And Rescue alert. In addition to publicising the problem in a newsletter article, they have produced a poster that’s shown in most FBOs and flying clubs with rescue aircraft circling a delivery van, a (perfectly OK) float plane, etc., while in the bottom right panel a real crash goes unattended.

I was on my way home from a family breakfast Sunday morning when I noticed a message on my cell phone. The SAR centre picked up an ELT signal from the vicinity of Rockcliffe Airport, and after a line check, they determined that it was coming from my plane. I was out there within 45 minutes, and determined that

  1. The signal was coming from my plane (strong enough that it spilled over onto other frequencies).
  2. The cockpit ELT switch was set to “arm”, not “on”.
  3. Turning the switch to “off” stopped the ELT for a minute or so, then it started again.

It would have been better, of course, if I’d been in the habit of turning the cockpit switch to “off” whenever I parked the plane, but in this case, it wouldn’t have helped — after a couple of weeks of constant rain, my guess is that some moisture got into the side panels and shorted the switch, since the ELT was intermittently activating with the switch in any position. With freezing, fumbling fingers, I grabbed a Phillips screwdriver (always keep a multi-head screwdriver in your plane), opened the access panel in the tailcone, shoved my hands through the tiny, sharp-edged access hole (we don’t pay mechanics enough), turned the main switch on the ELT unit from “arm” to “off”, disconnected the antenna and wires, and figured out how to remove the unit.

Just as I was finishing, a SAR person walked up to the airplane to talk to me. He was very friendly and reassuring about the whole thing as he copied down the details from my ELT box (recertified May 2006) and confirmed the time that I shut down the unit, so that the SAR centre could close the file on the activation. I also learned a couple of interesting tidbits:

  • In the case of an UNSAR, standard procedure (if the owner or pilot couldn’t be located fast) used to be to get access to the plane as fast as possible causing as little damage as possible, but after complaints, SOP is now simply to wait for the battery to die.
  • Further to the first point, the equipment used by the SAR satellite monitoring centre is now good enough to distinguish the idiosyncracies of the crystal used in each specific radio, so that one ELT signal won’t prevent them from distinguishing another one (though it must make it no fun for airliners, and FSS and ATC units that have to monitor 121.5 continuously).

It also turns out that this weekend there was a survival training camp at Rockcliffe hosted by the SAR people, so my UNSAR gave them a chance to practice homing in on a real ELT signal on 121.5 (usually they have to use separate training frequencies). While I’m very sorry for all the hassle caused to so many people, I’m glad that some tiny good came out of it.

Today I’m taking my ELT unit into the avionics shop to have it reinspected (I expect that it’s fine) and to have the battery tested, since I don’t know how much it drained during the activation. After that, I’ll reinstall it in the plane, but won’t reconnect the cockpit switch until I can have it inspected as well (I’ll placard that the script is U/S and will write a snag in my Journey Log to cover the legal bases). I’m also going to remove the pilot-side panels to see if there is water getting in there somehow.

I could legally fly the plane for 30 days without an ELT as long as I put a placard in the panel, but I have a Hope Air flight coming up across hundreds of miles of nothing (the kind of area where every building is shown on the map, and there’s enough room for a small U.S. state in-between them). The ELT activation was an accident, but flying across wilderness in winter weather with no ELT would be just stupid.

So, for those of you considering becoming aircraft owners, are you still interested? Even with a simple plane like a Cherokee or 172, you can expect 2-to-5 unexpected minor crises like this every year, though most don’t involve anyone but you.

Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Thank you for smoking

Posted on October 18, 2006 by David Megginson

If you wish to smoke, please step outside.

When I bought my Warrior, there was a small plastic sign in the middle of the panel reading “If you wish to smoke, please step outside.” My daughters were angry with me for removing the placard, but I’ve never been one to wear a stale joke on a tee-shirt or a car bumper, so keeping one on the panel just didn’t work for me.

In a recent blog entry, Sulako, a bizjet pilot, found a much funnier way to express the same opinion about smoking. He dug up some old notes from when he was flying an MU-2 medevac back in 2004, and quoted these lines:

On that note, thank Jebus for the smokers, they are our bread and butter. If you smoke and aren’t smoking at this exact second, I urge you to pull one out and light it up. Things have been a bit slow so far today and I wouldn’t mind flying.

Even though Sulako has moved on, he’d probably appreciate it if you could start smoking so that his colleagues flying medevac can keep putting food on their tables. Do you really want to put hard-working pilots out of jobs?

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Night and day: two perspectives on a small airport

Posted on October 17, 2006 by David Megginson

Since I moved from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier International to Ottawa/Rockcliffe at the beginning of this month, I’ve had a chance to take only two flights, but with two drastically-different results.

Night …

One fine evening I decided to drive to the airport and fly some night circuits to stay night-current. I usually love night circuits: the air is still, the visibility is excellent, the frequencies are quiet, and it’s very easy to spot traffic. This time, though, nothing went right. The area where my plane is parked is extremely dark, and the path through the parked planes is entirely unlit. To make things worse, the dome and map lights in my plane weren’t working. I ran through my checklist using a flashlight, started the plane, taxied gingerly to the runway in the dark (trying not to knock off anyone’s spinner with my wing tips), took off, and then realized that I hadn’t set my altimeter.

At my previous home airport, I always set the altimeter when I listed to the ATIS, but of course, there was no ATIS at Rockcliffe. I’ve flown from many other untowered airports without forgetting to set my altimeter to field elevation, but because I thought of Rockcliffe as my home airport now, I was following my old home procedures. I had last flown in fairly low pressure, so the altimeter was so far off that it was effectively useless, and without the overhead map light I was forced to use a flashlight to see the tachometer. I could have radioed Gatineau for their altimeter setting, but that would have meant digging out the CFS to get the frequency and then reading with the flashlight, when I already had enough on my hands. I just flew my best estimate of circuit altitude, glanced at the altimeter to see how many hundred feet it was off when the wheels touched on my first circuit, then adjusted it when I was safely back in the downwind. After a couple of circuits, my setting was fairly accurate.

The second challenge is the runway lighting. Rockcliffe has no VASIS or PAPI approach-slope lighting, so you’re entirely on your own, and to make matters worse, only 1.700 ft of the 3,300 ft runway is lighted for night operations. Normally, landing and taking off on a 1,700 ft runway in a Cherokee or Skyhawk is no big deal, but at night, with no approach-slope lighting and trees hiding somewhere under me in the dark, it required some fine-tuned flying — more importantly, I tried to imagine coming home at night after a family trip in MVFR and landing, and it didn’t seem like a fun prospect.

By the end of the evening, I’d decided that I’d move the plane back to Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier as soon as my three-month committment was over, extra cost be damned.

… and Day

Before my next flight, I drove to the airport, opened the lighting dome, reattached a loose ground wire, and restored cockpit lighting (I also put on my canopy cover, to help keep the plane dry in all this rain. Then, in nice VFR weather, I went to the airport last Sunday morning and just flew: no flight plan, no talking to ATC (but a lot of attention to airspace), but just a little tour over the Gatineaus and around within the 25 nm no-flight-plan circle.

I actually like talking to ATC — I learned to fly at a busy airport, and feel no stress around it — but it was a surprisingly relaxing experience flying around entirely on my own, without a fixed plan. After an hour of slow, low-altitude (I do most of my flying cross-country at 5,000-10,000 ft) flying around hills, lakes, and rivers, circling small towns and a covered bridge, and admiring the fall leaves, I came back in along the Cumberland-Rockcliffe VFR corridor, crossed for the midfield downwind, and landed.

My only complaint is that the people at Rockcliffe don’t seem particularly friendly compared to people at other small airports I’ve visited: almost without exception, people on the porch or in the parking lot glance away awkwardly if I smile, nod, or wave, instead of waving back. The people in the clubhouse are mostly tired and/or tense flight instructors, though the dispatch and line staff were friendly enough. I guess you can’t have everything.

I’m still deciding what to do in January, but I might give Rockcliffe a full year so that I can see all its different faces.

Tagged , | 6 Comments

A distinctive plane

Posted on September 30, 2006 by David Megginson

Yesterday, under a low ceiling and poor visibility in showers, I made my shortest-ever point-to-point trip in an airplane, flying the 7 nm from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier to my plane’s new home at Ottawa/Rockcliffe.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of light aircraft based at Rockcliffe, of all descriptions: the largest is a shorter-bodied version of the Piper Navajo, and the smallest are Cub-sized two-seaters and similar. There are many vintage and unusual aircraft tied down along the long rows of the flightline.

While one of the Rockcliffe instructors and I were standing in the rain kicking, raking, and digging through the mud trying to find the long-disused tie-down chains in my new spot, he mentioned that he thought my plane was the only Warrior on the field (though there are many other Cherokees). Who’d have figured that a Warrior, of all planes, would stand out on a flightline? I’m glad I don’t fly anything more mundane, like, say, an Ercoupe — I’d hate to blend into the crowd.

Note to American readers: while the Warrior is a very common training plane in the U.S., it’s not very popular in Canada — until the mid 1990s, spin training was required for a Canadian PPL, and unlike the Cessna 172/150/152, Warriors are not certified for intentional spins.

Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Cell phones, planes, and the Canada-U.S. border

Posted on September 28, 2006 by David Megginson

I just finished a three-day business trip to Boston, once again using the very friendly Norwood Memorial Airport (the Wikipedia article needs some TLC) to the south of the city. Boston has a nasty airport security zone with high security fees, required prop locks, etc. Norwood is far enough to be outside the zone, but is near stations on two MBTA commuter lines, making it easy to get in and out of downtown.

When I’m flying, I usually leave my cell phone turned on (a grey area, I know) so that I can get access quickly in case of emergencies. During this trip, however, I noticed something strange: once I was in the U.S., I had either no signal or an extremely weak one with no bars. This continued all the way into Boston, even over cities and Boston suburbs. Coverage was great as soon as I was on the ground, so it wasn’t a problem with roaming.

I think that the cell phone company who partners with Bell Mobility (Sprint?) must be refitting their towers to block out signals coming from above. I’d guess that this is the first step to allowing cell phone calls from airliners, before setting up satlink cells inside the planes themselves. This change is significant for pilots like me, who hope to be able to use the cell phone for last-ditch emergency communication if all else fails. As an historical footnote, this change would also would have prevented the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 from finding out about the WTC and Pentagon attacks and deciding to fight back against the highjackers. That said, the change is probably inevitable for simple business reasons.

Almost the second I flew across the St. Lawrence River from New York State into the province of Ontario, all of the bars on my cell phone lit up again.

Tagged | 4 Comments

Soo trip notes

Posted on September 18, 2006 by David Megginson

fold-up plane from in front

I flew from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie yesterday, then flew a Hope Air patient from the Soo to Kingston this morning, before making the short hop back to Ottawa in the afternoon.

Westbound

Flying westbound to the Soo is a slow prospect in the Warrior. The trip is a bit under 400 nm, but due to the headwinds, it generally takes around four hours. This time, it was all IFR, but at least it was smooth, the icing levels were well above me, and all the thunderstorm activity was about 50 miles to the north of my route. Everytime Toronto Centre gave me a new altimeter setting, it was significantly lower, sometimes requiring an altitude change of a couple of hundred feet, as I flew towards the big low parked over Lake Superior and the nasty weather around it. The IMC on my route from Ottawa, however, had a different cause: the tropical storms and hurricanes had pushed a huge amount of hot, humid air north above them, leaving a stationary front a bit south of James Bay (north of my route). Because the front was there for so long, what had been supposed to be nice and clear became cloudy and hazy, plunging us into unseasonable IMC of the summer variety.

Cold front

A cold front was be blowing through overnight, and I know that I’d have to fly through that cold front from the back side in the morning. For those who don’t fly, you need to understand that cold fonts suck — they mean lots of rain, thunderstorms, turbulence, fog, cloud, and just about anything else you don’t like (in the summer, they even bring tornados). Lying awake in my hotel room at 5:00 am I heard the rain pounding outside, and knew that the front was on its way through.

When I walked out of my hotel in the morning, I found an airplane sitting in the parking lot right outside the door. I wasn’t sure whether to take this as an omen of good luck (the flight will go fine) or a warning (it’s a good day to tow your plane on a trailer) — I guess superstition is too complicated. Here’s a second cellphone photo of the plane, this time from behind, the way I saw it when I walked outside.

fold-up plane from behind

Eastbound

IMC and thunderstorms are a bad combination, because when you’re in cloud, there’s no way to see a storm coming. Before I left, weather radar showed that all the activity was well north of my route, though the GFA called for isolated thunderstorms all over ahead of the cold front. I evaluated the situation, and decided to list every way I had to avoid storms:

  1. try to stay out of cloud so I can see buildups coming
  2. use my Stormscope to watch for lightning strikes
  3. ask Flight Services for regular updates from ground-based radar

None of these is 100% reliable: between cloud layers (and the layers go very high ahead of a cold front), it’s often hard to make out buildups ahead, since everything fades to white; the Stormscope is a very blunt instrument and misses intense weather that doesn’t happen to produce lightning; and Flight Services is looking at outdated and and low-res lightning and radar pictures, when I can reach them by radio at all. As a result, I made a couple of rules for my flight:

  • At least two of these three methods had to be available to me at every point during the flight, or else I’d abort and land at the nearest airport.
  • All available methods had to show a wide, clear path with no storms moving towards it.

It turned out a bit bumpy, with a lot of rain, but nothing more disturbing. Three hours of hand-flown IMC has left me a bit tired now, though. As usual, the weather cleared up just before my destination, so I didn’t get to log an approach.

Northbound

With the tailwind from the southwest, I flew into Ottawa like a rocket: the whole flight from Kingston took about a half hour, and I made it home before the front hit Eastern Ontario. Unfortunately, I then had to wait 35 minutes for a cab to take me the last 10 km home. The wind’s starting to shake the leaves outside my window now, so I guess the weather’s on it’s way in our game of leapfrog.

Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Great flying weather, and a bit of boneheaded flying

Posted on September 13, 2006 by David Megginson

Warm front pushing in, ceilings at 800 ft AGL with occasional 400 ft, light rain, freezing levels above 10,000: it looked like great flying weather to get in some IFR approaches in actual IMC.

Recency

Pilots have to do a certain amount of flying in real or similated instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) to keep their instrument ratings current (otherwise, they’re allowed to fly only in visual conditions). In Canada, the recency requirements include six hours and six approaches to minima.

Air mattresses and sailors

Note the phrase real or simulated IMC. Simulated IMC — flying wearing foggles or a hood to block the view out the window — is one of the sad jokes of aviation, since it simulates flying in real instrument conditions about as well as floating on an air mattress in a hotel pool simulates sailing in a storm on the high seas. While flying six approaches wearing foggles (with a safety pilot) meets the legal requirements for IFR recency, I don’t think it does much for actual flight safety, so I use it only as a last resort, mainly in the winter when IMC near the ground almost always comes with icing. As a result, on the rare days when I have no meetings booked with customers, no family committments, and beautiful low rain arrives without any thunderstorms or icing, I rush to the airport, get soaked preflighting the plane, ignore the people standing inside shaking their heads with pity and disbelief, and take off into the clouds.

Getting started

There hasn’t been a lot of rain this summer, but I did manage approaches in IMC in July on actual trips — one into Boston/Norwood, and one into Toronto/City Centre — so if I could manage a quick four approaches today, I’d be current until mid-January (when I’ll probably have to use the hated foggles). I called flight services, and they confirmed with ATC that a mid-day training flight would be OK. At the airport, I fueled the plane (full tanks are always a good idea in low IMC, since diversions can come unexpectedly), holding one hand over the tank opening to keep the rain out, then took off, and within a couple of minutes, there was nothing but white outside my window.

Smith’s Falls NDB 06 full procedure

I’ve developed a nice circuit of approaches around Ottawa. I started by flying to Smith’s Falls/Montague for the full procedure NDB 06 — that has me flying directly to an NDB (an AM radio navigation aid), flying away from the runway for two minutes, doing a funny kind of loop, coming back into to the navaid, then continuing at a pre-determined altitude until I either see the runway or run out of time. I was in and out of cloud bases at the minimum descent altitude of 980 ft MSL (564 ft AGL), but I did see the runway in time that I probably could have landed with a fast dive and some borderline aerobatics. Fortunately, that wasn’t my plan today, so I started climbing again for the missed approach and called back in to Ottawa Terminal.

Ottawa/Carp VOR/DME B with 21 DME arc transition

The second approach was the VOR/DME B (B is pronounced “bravo”) approach into Ottawa/Carp. For this one, instead of a full procedure (flying away from the airport, then reversing and coming in), I flew something called a DME arc, which is my very favourite IFR procedure. DME is an old-fashioned (pre-GPS) instrument that tells how far my plane is away from a UHF transmitter: in this case, from the Ottawa VOR (an FM radio navaid) on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. To fly a DME arc, you simply turn 90 degrees from the DME at a pre-determined distance, and adjust your course so that the distance on the DME stays the same. If you flew long enough, you’d do a complete circle around the DME transmitter. There are all kinds of convoluted procedures for flying a DME arc, including messing with VOR radials, etc., but mine is easy: just turn the plane a few degrees away from the DME if the distance is getting too low, or a few degrees towards the DME if the distance is getting too high. It works a charm, and requires almost no work. I flew the 21 nm DME arc until I intersected a VOR radial that would take me over the Carp airport from the south, then followed the radial, lowering my altitude in steps: down to 1,400 ft once I was on the inbound radial, 900 ft (518 ft AGL) at 11 DME from the VOR (1.8 DME from the airport), and then climbing back up to 2,900 ft at 9.2 DME when I was over the airport. I saw the Carp airport at the last second, and again, could have made it in with some aerobatics, but this was a circling approach (I wasn’t lined up with a runway), and it might have been a bit too exciting. More on circling approaches later. Note also that at both airports, I was barely able to see the runway at around 500 ft AGL.

Ottawa/Gatineau VOR/DME 09

The third approach in my circuit is a straight-in VOR/DME 09 approach for Ottawa/Gatineau, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. The transition from the Carp approach is trivial: the Carp missed approach heads for the Ottawa VOR, and the Gatineau approach starts at the VOR, so just … fly to the VOR. For the Gatineau approach, I fly away from VOR on a predetermined radial, again, with a series of step-downs at various DME distances: 2,900 ft to the VOR, 2,400 ft until 5 DME, 1,300 ft until 11 DME, then 760 ft (551 ft AGL) until 14.3 DME, when I’m right over the airport and begin the missed approach. The weather was a little better here, and I broke out of the cloud bases around 1,200 ft MSL (1,000 ft AGL) and was able to see the runway clearly. That led me to think that I could expect about the same ceiling across the river at Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier.

Ottawa ILS 07 circling 04 … no, straight-in 07 … no, circling to a taxiway … I mean 04

My last approach was back into Ottawa. All of the previous approaches were non-precision: the navigation aids guided me to the airport horizontally, but did not guide my altitude (except through step-down fixes). Ottawa has two more advanced navaids called ILS, that can provide a precision approach: not only does it help me stear left or right, but it tells me precisely what altitude I should be at during each stage of my descent. I have to fly around to the west side of the airport to get in line for the ILS 07, which I’ll be sharing with big transport jets. ATC tells me that there are three big jets on the way in, so I have a couple of choices: fly out 15 miles and have a nice, easy approach behind them, or turn in tight almost right over the final approach fix and rush down ahead of the jets. When I was an IFR student, I would always have taken the easy one because approaches seemed so hard to set up, but the tight one sounded like better practice (and is more realistic for a small plane at a busy airport), so I took that.

Terminal gave me an immediate turn and descent. I turned sharp (30 deg bank) and dropped the plane at 1,000 fpm to show them that I was capable of taking this approach without messing up their traffic flow. That was good enough, and they kept turning me in and dropping me until I joined the ILS right outside the final fix. I knew enough not to fly an approach at 90 knots in these circumstances, so I pushed the throttle forward and whizzed down the ILS at 120 kt. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to be in the way of the jets, Terminal turned me over to tower.

An ILS approach straight-in to a runway has very low minima: normally, you can fly right to 200 ft above the ground before you have to see the runway. However, I was planning on doing a circling approach to the runway near my parking spot (remember circling approaches from Carp?), so I needed legally to see my runway at 506 feet above the ground (880 ft MSL) and be able to stay at that altitude until I was lined up for my final approach. No dice. While the airport was reporting better conditions over the control tower, there was low cloud over the approach to 07, and I was coming down through 1,200, 1,100, 1,000 ft with no sign of either runway 07 or 04, though I could see a bit of ground straight down. At 950 ft I began a rapid call to the tower asking to cancel the circling and land on 07, but right at that moment — as I passed through 900 ft, 20 ft above circling minima — I broke out and saw the whole airport. In the middle of a sentence, I switched back with “correction: 04 in sight, continuing with circling approach”. Unfortunately, in those 2-3 seconds, I forgot that airports always look different in IMC, and I actually lined up with a taxiway instead of 04 and descended below the 880 ft circling minima. Fortunately, I caught the mistake before tower did, and — with some of the stupid borderline aerobatics I had been smug about avoiding at Smith’s Falls and Carp — sidestepped a half mile to the actual runway 04 and did a smooth landing on the wet pavement.

Lesson learned: circling approaches near minima really are a dumb idea, and it’s hard to make good decisions in a fraction of a second at the end of an approach. When the ceiling was close to circling minima, I should just have planned on the straight-in landing and an extra 10 minutes taxiing.

Tagged , , | Comments Off on Great flying weather, and a bit of boneheaded flying

Nice landing in downtown Montreal

Posted on September 11, 2006 by David Megginson

Cessna 172M after forced landing in Montreal.

I have no idea how the flight got to this point, but according to this CBC article, once the pilot found himself low over downtown Montreal in a Cessna 172M without a working engine, he seems to have done a good job landing on Avenue du Parc in Montreal, with no harm to people or property.

The incident happened yesterday on September 10, the day before the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, so it’s easy to imagine how people might react when they saw a plane swooping down and landing in the middle of a major city, right? Wrong: Montreal continues to deserve its reputation as Canada’s (and North America’s?) most laid-back city. Here’s how people actually reacted:

No one was hurt during the emergency landing, which unfolded in front of a crowd of amused onlookers lounging on Mount Royal Park’s green hillside.

They hovered around the plane and snapped photos.

What about the police? Surely they activated some kind of emergency anti-terrorism plan? Well, actually …

Montreal police were the first emergency workers called to the scene.

Police spokesman Robert Mansueto said he’d never seen anything like this in the city.

“I think this surprised a lot of police officers,” Mansueto said.

“Everybody did a double take, you know, saying is this a joke or is this for real.”

Terrorists win whenever they make people afraid, so it’s nice to be able to celebrate a victory of common sense over fear on this otherwise-grim anniversary. Kudos to the good people of Montreal.

(Photo: Tanya Birkbeck, CBC)

Tagged | 3 Comments

Moving to a new airport

Posted on September 8, 2006 by David Megginson

After a lot of agonizing, I’ve decided to move my Warrior from Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier (CYOW) eight nautical miles northeast to Ottawa/Rockcliffe (CYRO) effective 1 October. The short flight means a huge number of changes for me: I’ll be leaving Canada’s 6th busiest airport, where you have to tune in three different frequencies (ATIS, Clearance delivery, and ground) before you even start taxiing, and moving to an uncontrolled airport in the middle of parkland by the Ottawa River. Here’s a shot of part of the flight line, taken from the clubhouse porch:

Flight line at CYRO

I’ve flown into, maybe, 30 or 40 different airports, from tiny grass strips to huge international airports much busier than CYOW, but coming home from a long trip I’ve always know that there was a lot of support waiting for me, including two ILS approaches, several FBOs, heated hangars for deicing, emergency equipment, all types of servicing, washrooms available 24/7 for desperate passengers, etc. Now, I’m going to be arriving at an airport with no instrument approach, one tiny maintenance shop on the field, and a barbeque that never seems to stop churning out hamburgers (little use to a vegetarian like me, sadly). It’s going to be a big adjustment. One nice feature is the Canada Aviation Museum on the south side of the field, across the runway from the tie-downs:

Canada Aviation Museum

I’ve never kept my plane anywhere but the big airport. I did my primary flight training, night rating, and instrument rating there, and when I bought my Warrior, the broker flew it in from Toronto and we did the preflight there. I have no regrets about training at a busy airport — I know too many pilots who are terrified of ATC and busy airspace, but I’ve flown around Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia (as well as many smaller airports) with no problem at all, because I was used to the radio work right from the start. When I was first asking about flying lessons, flight schools at small airports gave me a lot of BS about higher training costs or long delays at towered airports, but they didn’t turn out to be a problem, and I feel like I would have had only a partial education learning to fly somewhere like Rockcliffe.

Now, though, the expense is catching up with me. I have a very good deal on a tie-down spot with plug-in at the big airport, but when I add up landing fees and other costs, I calculated that it’s costing me about $1,000/year more to park at Macdonald-Cartier than it will at Rockcliffe (they’re the same distance from my house), even when I factor in two diversions/year for weather and the resulting cab fares and parking expenses. Next year, when Nav Canada brings in their new user fees for large airports, I calculate that the price difference will jump to $1,500/year. I won’t speculate about how hard a commercial pilot like Aviatrix or Sulako has to work to make that much, but it’s a lot for me, too, especially with two daughters hitting university in the next decade.

Here’s my new tie-down spot. It doesn’t look like much, but presumably, there are tie-downs and some paving stones under all that grass and weed:

New tie-down spot.

It’s not just a matter of money — I’m hoping that a new airport will give me a new start with flying, maybe bringing me closer to other pilots and to my plane itself. Rockcliffe seems like a much more pleasant place to spend a sunny afternoon waxing the plane or BSing with other pilots in the clubhouse (or mowing my parking spot), even if I can’t eat the burgers.

Tagged , | 8 Comments

Wake turbulence as art

Posted on September 1, 2006 by David Megginson

Wingtip vortices made visible with smoke from flares

A reader (who wishes to remain anonymous) sent me the link to this picture. Here’s a high resolution version. The photo was taken over the Atlantic Ocean near Charleston, SC on 16 May 2006 — a C-17 released flares, and the smoke from the flares makes the turbulent air in the big plane’s wake visible, including the wingtip vortices.

Posted in General | 5 Comments