The Aerodrome of Democracy

Posted on June 21, 2008 by David Megginson

Tiger Moth

As I mentioned in a previous post, OurAirports now lets you invent your own tags for airports and view maps of the airports you’ve tagged. This morning, I made a map of 60 of the airports that were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP):

Map: http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/tags/bcatp/

You can drag the map around and zoom in to see specific areas (Eastern Ontario was especially dense). The map (which is still missing a few airports) shows how much the BCATP shaped aviation in Canada — while it used existing airfields when possible, many of the fields were built specifically for the plan, and most of those are still operational. Some still have original hangar buildings, and many maintain the original triangle of three runways that’s so typical of Canadian airports (often with one extended to handle light jets).

While Canada was chosen because of its safe distance from combat and easy access to fuel, wartime flight training was still a brutal business in the BCATP — you could expect at least one fatality in every class training in planes like the Tiger Moth pictured above. Little RCAF Pennfield Ridge, for example, lost 61 student pilots and instructors during its three or four years of operation as a navigational and operational school.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

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Tagging airports

Posted on June 20, 2008 by David Megginson

In OurAirports, you can now tag airports any way you want, rather than just marking them as visited, and see a map for any tag. Here are two examples:

  1. Canadian customs airports of entry (my tag “airport-of-entry”) Update: expanded to include U.S. airports of entry as well
  2. Airports where I’ve done an instrument approach in actual IMC (my tag “instrument-approach”)

You have to be logged in to use this feature, then you’ll see a tags option in the right sidebar on each airport page. You can tag airports you’ve visited in different years or flying different planes; airports with good restaurants or flight schools; or anything else you want. Each tag is a single word, or a series of words connected by ‘-‘, ‘.’, or ‘_’, e.g. ‘fuel-stop’, ‘club-member’, ‘fees’, etc.

On the TODO list: rename a tag, to export tags to KML (for Google Earth), show most popular tags on each airport page.

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Where can I land that float plane?

Posted on June 12, 2008 by David Megginson

OurAirports is getting better at filtering. While the maps still show everything, you can now filter most of the lists to show any of the following:

  • active land airports,
  • airports with scheduled airline service,
  • seaplane bases, or
  • everything, including heliports, closed airports, etc.

(I figured there’s no point showing only heliports, since helicopters can land at regular airports as well).

Here’s a list of airports in Western Australia with scheduled airline service, and here’s a list of the closest seaplane bases to Edmonton, Alberta.

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Scheduled airline service

Posted on June 11, 2008 by David Megginson

When pilots think of an airport, they think of anywhere they can safely and legally land their planes. It might or might not have a a fence, pavement, fuel pumps, or any structures at all (even an outhouse), much less a terminal building with departure gates and a security checkpoint.

When non-pilots think of an airport, they usually think of somewhere they can buy a ticket and get on a plane. Even in a small city, it will usually have an overpriced parking lot, paved runways, an ugly terminal building, fuel trucks, etc. etc.

Have it your way …

I want to make OurAirports useful for both groups of people, so I’ve been scavenging information on the web to flag which of the 33,000+ airports currently in the database have any kind of scheduled airline service (even in a light piston twin). The roughly 3,000 airports that I’ve found with airline service are now flagged in the database, and have a small note at the top of their right sidebars. Soon, I’ll make changes so that people who want to see only airports with airline service can filter out everything else.

This stuff changes all the time, and my sources might not be entirely reliable, so please send me corrections etc.

CSV format change

NB: for anyone using the CSV data export at http://www.ourairports.com/data/airports.csv, the format will be changing as of tomorrow, adding an extra column “scheduled_service” with the value “yes” or “no”. As far as I know, this is the only free, machine-readable dataset with this information available online.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Partial panel

Posted on May 24, 2008 by David Megginson

attitude indicator

I had my first experience flying partial panel in IMC on Monday, coming home from Boston. It wasn’t the classic partial panel — a vacuum failure — but a failure of the attitude indicator instrument itself, followed by the airspeed indicator while I was on an ILS approach. The AI had been sluggish for a while, but I had told myself that it was still usable as long as I allowed for a few seconds’ lag. In IMC and moderate turbulence (with a bit of light icing to distract me), however, it was totally useless, and I ended up relying on the turn coordinator to keep the wings more-or-less level, with the heading indicator as a backup.

I’ve heard that partial panel in a slick plane with retractable gear can be a nightmare, but the Cherokee is so slow, draggy, and spiral-resistant that it wasn’t more than an irritant. I’m not sure that simulated partial panel under the hood does anything to prepare you for it, though, because the hardest part is recognizing that you have a problem in the first place (I’m also not convinced that flying under a hood does much to prepare you for flying in actual IMC, but that’s another posting.)

Losing the ASI wasn’t a big deal, since I was already on the glideslope and had a 10,000 ft runway ahead of me, so I just kept a generous power setting on the tachometer and burned off the extra speed in a long flare.

The plane is grounded until the pitot system is cleaned out and tested, the AI is fully overhauled, and new wiring is installed for the intermittent landing light.

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OurAirports at DemoCamp Ottawa

Posted on May 24, 2008 by David Megginson

DemoCamp Ottawa 9 logo

I’ll be giving a short demo of OurAirports at DemoCamp Ottawa 9 next Monday (26 May 2008). Feel free to drop by if you’re in town. It’s at The Velvet Room in the ByWard Market, starting at 7:00 pm.

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Capital to Capitol

Posted on May 11, 2008 by David Megginson

Canadian Parliament Buildings

U.S. Capitol

I flew from Ottawa, ON to Washington, DC (400 nm) today, with a few pilot firsts:

  • First time flying south of the Mason-Dixon line.
  • First time flying outside the 40-49 degree north latitude band as PIC.
  • First time flying into the Washington, DC ADIZ.
  • First time dealing with turbulence, icing, IMC, thunderstorms, and extensive routing changes in unfamiliar airspace all at the same time (with no autopilot).

What a difference 45 minutes makes …

Over central Pennsylvania: cruising in smooth air, under clear skies, watching the Susquehanna River wind back and forth across my flight path, eating a bagel and thinking “it doesn’t get better than this.”

Over Maryland: in cloud in the weather that was supposed to stay south over the Carolinas, rain pounding on the windscreen, checking the Stormscope every few seconds, and trying keep the LO chart (and my head) still enough in the turbulence to find VORs I’ve never heard of for my new routing, while staying roughly on course, at altitude, and level. No bagels involved.

Easy ADIZ

The ADIZ is no big deal if you’re IFR — it’s exactly the same as any IFR flight, except that you have to turn around and exit instead of continuing to your destination if you have a transponder or comm failure. It was no different than flying IFR into, say, Philadelphia or Montreal.

Dulles

Washington/Dulles is surprisingly GA-friendly for a big airport — there’s an $8.00 landing fee, a bit over $18.00/night for parking, and that’s it (they waive the $28 handling fee if you buy gas). The FBO is right beside the main terminal, closer than you’ll usually be on an airliner (where you have to take the @#$#@ people movers from a satellite terminal).

I was flying ridiculously slowly (80kt) at full throttle into a brutal headwind, but both Potomoc approach and Dulles tower were very accommodating, vectoring me parallel to the localizer until about six miles back, then giving me an easy intercept. I had no delay to speak of, even though I was sharing the approach with much faster jet airliner traffic. They gave me the runway I requested (close to Signature), and even gave me step-by-step taxi instructions (which I didn’t ask for, but appreciated after a long flight).

Still better than the airlines

I think it’s great that I can fly from the Canadian to the U.S. capital on 38 U.S. gallons of avgas, in about the same amount of time as it would take on the airlines (when you include having to be at the airport early for security, etc.). Last time I took the airlines, the trip was actually longer than it would have been in my Cherokee, since the flight was delayed.

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Death and immortality

Posted on April 28, 2008 by David Megginson

Death clock logo

The Internet Death Clock says that I’ll die on 30 August 2038, 30 years from this summer (it doesn’t take into account the longer average life span in Canada). That’s good news, because now I don’t have to worry about running through my preflight checklists, flying VFR into IMC, going up in severe icing, running out of fuel over the mountains, etc. — after checking the death clock, I feel a lot more confident about my flying from now until July 2038.

My memorial

On the outside chance that the clock is wrong, though, I’ve made sure that everyone in my family knows how I’d most like to be remembered: not by a roadside shrine, concert, memorial web site, or grove of trees, but by organ donations.

I can’t think of a better memorial than having part of me help someone else live. My driver’s license says that I’m a donor, and I probably appear in some government databases, but all that is meaningless if my family doesn’t know and agree — few hospitals will harvest organs if the grieving family objects.

So check the clock yourself (who knows — you might already be dead), then make sure that the people you love know how important it is to you that your organs go to help someone else when you don’t need them any more.

Besides, your donations help keep medevac pilots employed rushing organs from city to city, and they need the money.

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Pilot population trends

Posted on April 15, 2008 by David Megginson

In the U.S., AOPA president Phil Boyer wants to know how to stop the pilot population from declining — it has fallen below 600,000, and is still heading downhill.

No surprise, really. Flying is a fuel- and land-intensive pastime, when both oil and real estate are expensive and in short supply.

Canada

In Canada, as of September 2007, there were 61,109 pilot licenses and permits in force, with an additional 7,683 student permits [Transport Canada]. If we had the same population as the U.S., that would be the equivalent of nearly 628,000 active pilot licenses. Granted, that’s licenses/permits and not pilots, and a few pilots will hold multiple licenses or permits (e.g. fixed-wing, helicopter, and glider), but it’s probably true that Canada has proportionally more pilots than the U.S. Furthermore, the number seems to be holding fairly steady — ten years ago, in 1998, there were 61,241 licensed pilots (excluding student pilots?) [Transport Canada].

Positive or negative vibes?

What’s the difference? After all, we’re paying slightly more for fuel than the Americans are. One thing might be the hysteria about security and terrorism in the U.S., which paints pilots and planes as, if not exactly potential terrorists, certainly high risks.

Why get involved in a pastime that will make people look at you suspiciously, where your state or city will try to run extra security checks on you, where you read in the news about small planes being intercepted in constantly-changing TFRs, where the less talented investigative reporters will sneak onto your little community airfield to see if your Cessna’s door is unlocked so that they can run a scare story on the news that evening?

That won’t turn everyone away from flying, of course, but it will make some difference — we’re all sensitive to what our friends and neighbours think. In Canada (and, I suspect, parts of the U.S., like Alaska), people still generally react positively when they hear that you’re a pilot, though they learn quickly not mention the weather as a topic of conversation.

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Canada/U.S. quiz #1: VFR operations

Posted on April 11, 2008 by David Megginson

The allowed answers for each question are “Canada“, “U.S.“, “both“, or “neither” (for the sake of this quiz, “U.S.” refers only to the continental U.S., excluding Alaska and Hawaii). I’ll post the answers in a comment later.

  1. Which country requires pilots to have a clearance to enter class C airspace?

  2. Which country requires pilots to file a flight plan for all VFR flights?

  3. Which country misuses “class F” in a non-ICAO-standard way to refer to restricted airspace?

  4. Which country requires pilots to enter the downwind leg of an uncontrolled airport at a 45-degree angle?

  5. Which country requires pilots to have a clearance to fly along (or cross) most Victor airways at or above 12,500 feet?

  6. Which country’s controllers will issue landing clearances for more than one aircraft (not flying in formation) landing on the same runway?

  7. Which country requires private aircraft to carry liability insurance?

  8. Which country levies a fee for customs services for private aircraft?

  9. Which country publishes updated VFR charts on a fixed schedule?

  10. Which country requires VFR pilots to have copies of current charts on board the aircraft?

  11. Which country has a standard, nationwide VHF radio frequency that pilots can use to obtain weather updates and file PIREPs?

  12. Which country requires pilots always to use supplemental oxygen at a cabin pressure of 12,500 feet?

  13. Which country publishes traffic circuit/pattern direction information on its 1:500,000 VFR charts?

  14. Which country plans to require private aircraft to carry 406 MHz ELTs?

  15. Which country would charge a Cessna 172 pilot/owner a fee for each IFR flight?

  16. Which country has class G airspace above 18,000 ft?

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