On Top

Posted on March 17, 2005 by David Megginson

Stuck on top VFR.

When weather permits, VFR is often a good choice: it gives you more control over your route and altitude than you would have IFR, generally speeds up the trip (since you don’t have to be spaced and sequenced as much during departure and arrival, especially at busy airports), makes it easier to avoid icing in winter time, and just all-round feels nice. When there are clouds somewhere along the route, however, you have to make an important decision: VFR underneath, or VFR over the top?

The decision is hardest when the clouds are right around the best cruise altitudes for your plane, say, 3,000 to 8,000 feet for a normally-aspirated piston aircraft like my Warrior. If you fly underneath, you could end up dealing with precipitation, marginal visibility, hills and towers, and (of course) lots of turbulence; if you fly over the top, you could end up dealing with strong headwinds, and, most importantly, you could get stuck up above an overcast. For my return to Ottawa from Teterboro, mindful of the Catskill and Adirondack mountains along my route, I chose to go on top at 9,500 feet for the smooth air and lack of mountains to fly into; and yes, I got stuck.

I knew that things weren’t going my way when the broken cloud layer closed up to an overcast near Saranac Lake, NY instead of breaking up to scattered. I checked the Massena, NY ASOS (I had planned to descend there, over the flat land) and it was also calling overcast; the Ottawa ATIS, which was coming in from 100 miles away at that altitude, was calling broken clouds. Halfway between Saranac Lake and Massena, I was handed off to Montreal Centre for flight following, and I talked to them about the situation, warning that I might need an IFR clearance to get down. The controller insisted that the latest weather for Massena was showing scattered (as I’m sure it was, as far as the data available to the controller went), so I said that I could wait until closer to Ottawa.

In the end, I got my clearance for an IFR descent inside Ottawa Terminal airspace. I knew that the cloud layer was too thin to hold any large, supercooled water droplets, so icing wouldn’t be a major issue; still, I activated all of the meagre ice-prevention gear at the Warrior’s disposal before starting down: pitot-static heat on, carb heat full, heat on defrost. The clouds were less than 1,000 feet of stratocumulus, and I was through them and back VFR in a couple of minutes, as expected.

Now, let’s try some what ifs. What if I hadn’t been flying an IFR-capable aircraft, or weren’t IFR current? There was no hole that a VFR pilot could have used — the biggest one I saw near Ottawa was about 50 meters long, and mostly there were no holes at all. Canadian VFR pilots require a special rating and 15 hours instrument time to fly VFR over the top, but US pilots have no such requirement. If I had been a new American PPL, with (say) 70 hours experience, arriving at Ottawa stuck on top of the overcast with only my required 30 minutes VFR fuel reserve, how would ATC have dealt with me? Obviously, Montreal didn’t have up-to-date information about Massena — might they have sent me somewhere similar, where I might have found nothing but more overcast? The centre controller could tell that I wasn’t in trouble by my calm tone of voice and the specificity of my request (“I might need an IFR clearance to get down” rather than “I need to find some way to get down” or even “oh my god! oh my god!”), so I was handled much more casually than my hypothetical VFR-only pilot. I’d like to know how they would have handled that pilot, who might have been getting more and more panicky as the fuel got lower and the cloud layer stayed solid underneath.

My flight met all the requirements for VFR over top — the sky was clear at my point of departure, Massena was forecast scattered, giving me a way down, etc. — but I still got stuck. Does VFR over the top make sense for non-instrument rated pilots? Certainly, it’s safer than scud running around mountains, but I would not have wanted to be up there without the IFR option. At least a much bigger required fuel reserve would be a good idea.

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New York and Teterboro

Posted on March 17, 2005 by David Megginson

Waiting for takeoff at Teterboro.

I just got back from a short trip to New York with my family and my first visit to Teterboro airport. A big advantage of Teterboro is that it has customs at the airport, so I was able to fly non-stop from Ottawa rather than landing just over the border to clear US customs.

Once again, I was surprised at how (relatively) quiet New York Approach was. I always hear pilots either complaining or boasting about the rapid-fire radio traffic, etc., but the radio was much noisier (and faster) departing Ottawa than arriving in New York — on arrival, my sector wasn’t any busier than, say, Albany Approach, much less Ottawa or Toronto Terminal. Maybe it’s just that we Canadians talk even faster than NY air traffic controllers pumped up on caffeine and adrenaline …

I was VFR arriving at noon on Monday and was able to fly straight to the airport and directly into a tight right downwind for runway 01. Leaving VFR around 3:00pm EST Wednesday afternoon was a bit busier, but my delay was still only about 10 minutes waiting behind a line of bizjets (tower let me cut into the middle of the line and take off from an intersection). This was my third time flying into New York airspace — I previously landed at Caldwell, NJ (Essex County Airport) VFR and Farmingdale, NY (Republic Airport) IFR in low IMC. Some pilots, and even flight instructors, are too nervous to fly into NY — I think the reputation for scary airspace and ATC is completely undeserved. If you can handle flying in Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal, you can handle New York, at least arriving from the north. Get out there and try something new.

The down side is getting into the city from any of the airports I mentioned. A limo from Teterboro to SoHo cost USD 90, including tip; a taxi from SoHo back to Teterboro cost USD 80, including tip. By comparison, parking the plane for two nights at Teterboro cost (I think) USD 25, since the first night was free with a fill up. My total bill at Teterboro, including fuel from Ottawa (23 US gallons, at high Teterboro prices), parking from Monday to Wednesday, and tax was only USD 139, which is a lot less than the ground transportation. Next time, we might try the cheap municipal express bus to the Port Authority if we don’t have too much luggage. As an alternative, it might be worth paying the USD 100 fee at La Guardia in exchange for an easy USD 18 cab ride into midtown — if anyone’s tried that, please leave a comment or pingback/traceback from your own weblog to let me know how it went.

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Local U.S. FSS Numbers

Posted on March 13, 2005 by David Megginson

The U.S. Airport/Facility Directory consistently lists 1-800-WX-BRIEF as the phone number for any Flight Service Station (FSS). Unfortunately, the toll-free numbers don’t work for a Canadian cell phone, even when you’re in the U.S. — that makes life hard when you want to close a flight plan after landing at a non-towered airport (for example), or get a weather briefing while you’re in the taxi on the way to the airport.

Fortunately, I’ve just found this PDF list of local numbers for all U.S. FSS. Once I actually had to call Nav Canada’s toll-free FIC number just to have them look up a U.S. FSS number for me — I’m printing this out and putting it in my flight bag so that that doesn’t happen again. They’re also useful for getting a U.S. briefing from a Canadian landline.

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Web site: push your own tin

Posted on March 10, 2005 by David Megginson

Live traffic around KTEB.

The US has some sites for tracking flights on the web (IFR or VFR with flight following), but as far as I know, they all require accounts, membership in an organization, or something like that. While collecting information for our family trip to New York City on Monday, I was visiting the Teterboro Airport web site and discovered a link to a real time feed of flights into, out of, and around Teterboro. You can watch the planes take off, land, and transit the airspace, and you can click on any plane to find out its type and altitude. Similar feeds are available for Newark, La Guardia, and JFK. You can zoom out to get the big picture, or zoom in to get a detailed view of what’s going on close to the airport.

So now you have to decide who you want to pretend to be — John Cusack or Billy Bob Thornton — and then you can scream into your imaginary headset lining up planes tight on the approach to keep the tin moving and prove that you’re the alpha-controller. Of course, the planes won’t listen to you, but that’s life. More seriously, it’s a great way to get a feel for traffic patterns before flying into New York airspace, supposedly the world’s busiest (though I’ve flown my Warrior in and out twice so far and found it quieter than Toronto or Ottawa on a busy day — that might just have been my timing).

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Mnemonics

Posted on March 4, 2005 by David Megginson

Aviatrix has a great posting on the pointless mnemonics we learn during flight training, such as GUMPS (Gas, Undercarriage, Mixture, Props, Switches) for last-second pre-landing checks and CCCC (Cram levers forward, Carb Heat [or Cowl Flaps], Climb, Call ATC) for an overshoot (go-around, for our American cousins).

I have a strong feeling that these so-called mnemonics (which don’t usually help you remember anything, as Aviatrix pointed out) come originally from the military, where people have to memorize lots of procedures for their own sake, whether they were practical or not. When the goal is to remember the exact words of the procedure rather than learn the procedure itself, the mnemonics might work.

Do they actually help us fly, though? During training, I did find occasionally find that phrases were useful, like “time-turn-throttle-talk” at transitions in an instrument approach, or “aviate-navigate-communicate” when I found myself a bit behind the plane, but memorizing these as TTTT or ANC would not have done me any good. I don’t consciously use either of these any more, though, just as I don’t actually have to count two steamboats to make sure that I have a safe following distance on the highway.

I can remember some mnemonics that never helped at all, like AMORT for an approach — I think it was “approach [right one?]-minima-overshoot-radios-timings”, but if I spent too much time trying to figure it out, I’d probably blow through the localizer or fly the plane into the ground, so I’ve pushed that one from my memory. In real life, as opposed to IFR training, you have lots of time to set up your approach anyway — you’re probably starting to fiddle with the radios 50 miles out, trying to see if you can pick up a hint of the localizer yet, just because you’re bored. You read the approach plate over and over again like a cereal box on the breakfast table, because there’s not much else to do but look at the white outside the windows, scan the gauges, and listen to the airline pilots messing up their clearances on the radio (“XXX flight 000, please confirm you want direct Sudbury; your flight plan shows that your destination is North Bay”; “Umm, yeeeeah, thanks Ottawa terminal — request North Bay, please”).

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Backup

Posted on February 23, 2005 by David Megginson

Yesterday, I got into a situation that I couldn’t handle on my own and needed to call in backup; fortunately, it had nothing to do with flying.

I was a few kilometers from home just before 7:00 am, running in -10 degC weather, when suddenly I felt an intense pain with every deep breath I took. When I stopped, I realized that my upper back was somehow injured, and that I could barely walk, much less run. I shuffled slowly, like an old man, for about three quarters of a kilometer past many houses where I could have knocked on the door and asked for help, but was too shy to risk waking people up. Finally I came to a public school, and fortunately the front door was unlocked — I found an early-rising teacher with a cell phone, called home, and was picked up in about 10 minutes.

I’ve always known that eventually, something would happen during a run that would prevent me from finishing, though I’ve always assumed that it would be a leg injury. That could be a very big deal for a winter runner — I have run in temperatures as low as -25 degC this winter, and when you’re running, you have to dress relatively lightly to avoid overheating. An injury on a deserted country road, outside of cell phone coverage, could possibly be fatal. Personally, I run in the middle of Canada’s fourth-largest city, so I know that there are always people around to find me, even if I suddenly crumple unconscious with no warning (backup #1); I’m the first one awake in my house, but I always leave a note saying where I’m running and when I should be expected home (backup #2); and finally, I know that there are people I can call, starting with my spouse, to come and pick me up if I’m too injured to keep going (backup #3). If I lived in the country, running would be a whole different kind of thing — I could run on the road, and risk being killed by the reckless, high-speed drivers who seem to fill country roads all over North America, or I could go on isolated paths and just hope that I was still conscious and within cell phone coverage if anything happened. Or, more likely, I’d run only with a buddy — that’s a kind of backup that can work.

As pilots, we get pelted with safety warnings about almost everything, to the point that we eventually become a bit numb and cynical. Really, though, I think that just about all of those warnings come down to the same thing that saved me in my running: backup. Staying current on partial panel? Backup, in case your vacuum pump fails. Setting personal IFR minima of, say, a 1,000 ft ceiling? Backup, in case you have to go VFR underneath. And so on.

I’ve had exactly one icing encounter so far in my flying. I was coming home from Toronto in IMC last last winter (or early spring — I don’t recall) when I noticed that the temperature was lower than forecast at my altitude, and that I was surrounded by drizzle. I kept an eye on my outside air temperature probe — the Piper Cherokee‘s icing early warning system, since it is a thin stick poking out the front of the windshield — and soon noticed that a small piece of clear ice was forming on it. I asked for a lower altitude, descended 1,000 ft, and the ice disappeared. I continue to Ottawa and made a slightly-fast, no-flaps landing, just to be safe.

I was never in any serious danger during that trip, because I had all kinds of backup, even before I saw any ice:

  1. I had already listened to the ATIS for the nearest big airport, Trenton (CYTR), and knew that the surface temperature was 6 degC, so there was warmer air below me (an underpowered plane like mine cannot necessarily climb above icing, but anybody can descend).
  2. I tune in NDBs enroute to keep myself entertained, and in this case, I already had the Trenton NDB tuned and identified, which would be the first step for an approach. I also had the Trenton approach plates open, since I’d used them to get the ATIS frequency.
  3. Even though I was only 1,000 ft above MEA when I saw the ice, I was much further above MOCA, flying over flat terrain with few towers.
  4. I knew from the ATIS that the ceiling below me was at least marginal VMC.

My first backup plan was to change altitude, and that worked. If it hadn’t, I would have shot an approach at Trenton just until I broke out, and then (depending on the actual ceiling and whether I was still picking up ice) either declared an emergency and landed at the military base there, or (most likely) broken off the approach and proceded VFR at 1,000 ft AGL (well under the ceiling) along Lake Ontario just off the shore until Kingston, where the airport is right beside the lake. Other options included staying on my course IFR but descending to MOCA, in the hope that would melt off the ice, but it seemed like a less promising approach, since once I was at MOCA, I wouldn’t have any further backup if things didn’t work.

I’ve already written about my experience with Hope Air. That’s another place that backup is a nice thing. Usually, there’s a backup pilot for every flight, and in my case, it’s often Frank Eigler with his twin-engine, ice-certified Aztec. Knowing that there’s a backup takes a lot of the stress out of both flight planning and winter running. Now, it’s time to get myself to the physiotherapy clinic for some more repair work on my upper back, which, fortunately, is much less expensive than body work on my plane.

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Blog: Aviation in Canada

Posted on February 21, 2005 by David Megginson

Thanks to Aviatrix, I see that Michael Oxner has finally joined the blogosphere with his weblog Aviation in Canada — welcome, Michael.

Michael is a controller at Moncton ACC (i.e. “Moncton Centre”), one the seven area control centres that handle aircraft cruising through Canadian airspace (including, in Michael’s case, trans-Atlantic flights). The stereotypical controller is a jaded, tired, complaining Don Brown sort-of person; from the little contact I’ve had with Michael so far, he’s just the opposite: in fact, he loves his work so much that he actually goes home and does more air traffic control on his own time for the VATSIM flight-simulator network, trying hard to educate the sim users about how the real system works. He seems like just the kind of person you’d like to hear at the other end of the radio after a long, tiring flight.

Before he joined the blogosphere, Michael published a series of excellent articles on the rules of flying called Aviation Topic of the Week. The articles are aimed at flight simulation users, but most of them are just as useful for real pilots, and I was thrilled to find a source of Canadian aviation information online. That was in early summer 2004, and I was planning a family trip through Michael’s airspace (I’d never flown down east before), so I sent him a quick e-mail to ask about routings, etc., and he sent me a helpful reply. I then suggested that he think about moving to a weblog format so that he could reach a larger audience, and offered technical help if he was interested (though I hadn’t started by own blogs yet). At the time, Michael wasn’t ready to make the move, but clearly now he is, and this weblog — which is already well underway — will be an excellent addition to the growing aviation blogosphere. It’s great that he’s Canadian, of course, but I expect that pilots all around the world will be interested in hearing from a Centre controller off the record.

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Canada vs. U.S.: how much do we fly?

Posted on February 21, 2005 by David Megginson

Since both countries have statistics for 2003 available (U.S. stats, Canadian stats), and I thought it would be interesting to compare trends in Canada and the U.S. Unfortunately, statistics for the two countries do not follow the same categories, so comparison is sometimes tricky. With this posting, I’ll start by looking at how many hours we logged on both sides of the border for civil aviation (obviously, the U.S. logs a lot more military hours).

Total hours

Country Flight Hours Population Hours per 100 people
Canada 3,790,000 31,300,000 12
United States 46,153,800 288,500,000 16

The U.S. logged a lot more civilian flight hours than Canada did relative to its population: a full 33% more per person. In many ways, that makes sense: while Canada is a bigger country in land mass, most of our population is concentrated in the south along the U.S. border; even more importantly, about half of Canada’s population and a much larger proportion of its businesses live in the Quebec City–Windsor corridor. A business traveller in the U.S. will frequently be making long flights from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Denver and so on; a business traveller in Canada is more likely to take a one-hour flight (or a even a six-hour drive) from Toronto to Montreal, with only the occasional hop out west to Edmonton, Calgary, or Vancouver. Many small communities in the Canadian north rely on aviation as their only transportation link, but they are small and few, and probably not enough to tip the statistics.

General Aviation

It is much trickier to come up with general aviation numbers. The U.S. NTSB statistics divide civil aviation into three categories:

  1. Part 121 Operators
  2. Part 135 Operators
  3. General Aviation

The Canadian statistics, on the other hand, divide civil aviation into seven categories:

  1. Airliners
  2. Commuter Aircraft
  3. Air Taxi
  4. Aerial Work
  5. State
  6. Corporate/Private/Other
  7. Helicopters

How do we reconcile these? It is entirely possible, for example, for a helicopter to be carrying out scheduled air service or making a private flight. My best approximation (and this isn’t a very good one) is to take Aerial Work, State, Corporate/Private/Other, and Helicopters as very roughly equivalent to the U.S. General Aviation category. With that enormous caveat in mind, here’s how general aviation compares in Canada and the United States:

Country Total Hours G.A. Hours Percentage G.A.
Canada 3,790,000 1,673,000 44%
United States 46,153,800 25,800,000 56%

Again, there’s a big difference between the two countries. Allowing for the comparison difficulties, it looks like general aviation accounts for well over half of air traffic in the U.S., but well under half in Canada. So Canadians log fewer hours per person, and we log more of them on commercial or airline flights. That’s not what I initially expected to find, given that so much of Canada is sparsely populated and accessible only by air, but again, the explanation is probably the concentration of Canadian population near the U.S. border, and especially along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor.

In future postings, I’ll take a look at the differences (if any) in accident statistics between the two countries.

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Google Maps and Airports

Posted on February 9, 2005 by David Megginson

Google

There’s a lot of noise in the blogsphere about the new Google Maps site, and most of it is good. One of the nicest features is the ability to find things using plain query strings like airports near livingston, nj or ice cream in gananoque, on and see the results plotted on a detailed map (if you zoom in far enough, you can even see the taxiways at many airports).

This will make a good first stop for planning a flight to a new town.

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AIP Canada online

Posted on February 9, 2005 by David Megginson

Canadian Aeronautical Information Publication

Transport Canada is planning to put an Aeronautical Information Manual similar to the U.S. AIM online in HTML format this fall. While we’re waiting, they’ve put the existing ICAO-conformant Aeronautical Information Publication online in PDF format.

The PDF is fully searchable (i.e. it’s proper text, not a scan), so Canadian pilots can start resolving pilot-lounge arguments about rules and regulations without spending hours reading through the paper AIP. This, obviously, is a good thing. Once the HTML-based AIM is out, web sites, newsgroup postings, emails and blogs will be able to link directly to subsections and paragraphs of the document, which will an even better thing.

What Transport Canada will need, though, is a new way to report changes in each release of the AIP. While struggling to insert page updates into the current paper AIP was a major hassle, it did give me an easy way to see what had changed each time. A change summary is OK, but what if I miss a cycle? Here’s an idea for Transport Canada: why not set up a weblog with a posting for each AIM ammendment and a back link to the appropriate section of the online document? If you need help, I know a good XML and web consultancy right here in Ottawa.

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