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.

For example, here’s why there are so many accidents around Hope, BC when the weather gets low.

I’ve finally gotten around to adding free data downloads to OurAirports. You can now download nightly CSV-formatted data dumps of all the airports, countries, and regions in OurAirports at

http://www.ourairports.com/data/

These will open with most spreadsheet and database programs (make sure you import them as UTF-8).

All data is released into the Public Domain and comes with no warranty. If you have any corrections or additions, please make them in the spreadsheet and then send them back to me.

I’ve written a web site called OurAirports that lets you make a map of the airports you’ve visited (either as a pilot or as a passenger, your choice). Here’s my personal map — note that you can share your maps with anyone, not just other members:

http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/

To make your own map, set up a free account (takes about 30 seconds), then just click in the “I’ve been here!” box on each airport’s page. You can also browse the airports of the world on The Big Map or drill down geographically. My favourite, though, is warping to a random airport.

I have no objection to the suggestion that people try using a chart track up, but frequent claim that it’s easier — and some pundits’ and instructors’ insistence that it’s the only proper way — grates a bit. In informal surveys on aviation mailing lists, I’ve found people split about 50:50 between north up and track up, and I suspect that it has to do with how different people’s brains work, something along the lines of left-handedness and right-handedness.

Personally, if I’m flying west, my mind already pictures me flying right to left, so it’s by far easier to hold the chart north up so that it lines up with what I’m seeing in my head. Track up would be a double annoyance, since (1) I’d have to rotate everything in my head, and (2) all the text on the chart might be sideways or upside down. Likewise, when I’m walking, cycling, or driving around a city, I think of myself as heading northwest, south, etc. — I never memorize a trip as a series of left or right turns. I imagine that people who do navigate that way probably also find track up easier.

So if you fly, hike, boat, or whatever, do you prefer to hold your charts (or set your GPS display) north up or track up? Why? If you’re an instructor (aviation, seach-and-rescue, orienteering, etc.), have your students generally found one or the other easier? Has anyone every done a proper scientific study?

Well, the DAFIF — the free database of worldwide aeronautical information that used to be available free from the U.S. Department of Defense — has been gone for a few weeks, and it’s having repercussions that I hadn’t anticipated. It turns out that the most popular flight planning web site, Aeroplanner, was using the DAFIF for their non-U.S. data, so Canada has suddenly gone blank: aside from a few major airports and navaids that happen to be in the FAA database, and the segments of a few airways crossing the border, the airways, intersections, navaids, airports, terminal airspace, control zones, restricted airspace, and everything else that used to crowed their online maps is gone, leaving the site useless for anyone (Canadian or American) planning a flight that doesn’t stay entirely within U.S. airspace. The company graciously offered me a pro-rated refund for my subscription, though I decided not to take them up on it.

Lots of other people use the DAFIF for cheap or free flight planning, for controlling aircraft in flight simulators, and much more. In many cases, they can keep using the last public edition, which will slowly get more and more out of date, but that obviously wouldn’t be a responsible choice for a real-world online flight planning service like Aeroplanner.

Who’s the real villain?

So who should we be mad at? The U.S. DoD is an obvious target, since they’re the ones who pulled the data from public use, but let’s step back and think for a second:

1. In the U.S., the FAA still publishes a free database for American airspace, with a bit of Mexican and Canadian thrown in.
2. Almost every other country in the world refuses to release its air navigation data free to the public, period.
3. The U.S. military used to make up for that by publishing a lot of every other country’s airnav data as well.

No more charity

Sure, I wish they still published the DAFIF (and I suspect their reasons for stopping are silly), but the real villains here are the Canadian government, the British government, the Australian government, and every other government that refuses to release free information to their own citizens about their own airspace. We were lucky that the U.S. DoD was willing to help cover that disgraceful gap for so many years, and that they have given us a good starting point for a free,collaborative airnav database (we still have the last DAFIF edition to start from), but our years of living off American charity have now ended.

A new start?

Speaking of free, collaborative databases, Paul Tomblin has set up a wiki to start discussing life after DAFIF. Why not swing by and take a look. And don’t be surprised if, in the meantime, your favorite flight planning tool suddenly turns Canada into the huge, empty white space that the rest of the world always imagined it was.

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.

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.

DAFIF is a free (soon-to-be-closed) database of major airports, airways, airspace, etc. around the world.

Now, the Russian Academy of Science has created a mashup of the two (via the Google Earth Blog), so that you can see airways, navaids, etc. while you’re flying around Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed, here’s the link to the DAFIF information.

How long until we can get satellite weather overlayed on Google Earth?

GPS

Will be the primary federally-provided radionavigation system for the foreseeable future. Will continue to work on augmentation, both through initiatives like WAAS, and by providing two new civilian signals, L2C and L5, to support special operations (like lifesaving).

Loran-C

Will continue to operate until the end of 2006, while evaluating long-term need. Promises at least six months notice if the system is going to be shut down.

VOR

Will phase down the VOR system (enroute and approach) beginning in 2010, based on anticipated decline in usage, but will still a “minimum operational network” (MON) of VORs as a backup to GPS.

DME

Will maintain the existing DME service to support RNAV systems. Plan to install more low-power DMEs to support ILS precision approaches.

TACAN

Will keep the air-based TACAN system until all military aircraft are properly integrated with GPS for national and international controlled airspace (not sure if this applies to all NATO aircraft, or just the U.S.). Sea-based TACAN will continue indefinitely.

ILS

Will reduce the role of Cat I (regular, 200 ft DH) ILS approaches as GPS precision approaches come in, beginning in 2015. ILS will still be available at major terminals.

MLS

Not installing any more systems. Will phase out existing installations beginning in 2010.

NDB

Most NDBs will be phased out, except for those that serve International Gateways, and those in Alaska (for LF airways, similar to the airways in northern Canada). Some may be kept for missed-approach procedures. Phase-down began in 2005.

Marker Beacons

Will be phased down, replaced (in many cases) with published DME distances, navigation waypoints, etc.

So, I’ll be good for IFR in my Warrior for a few more years without an IFR-certified GPS, but I’d better start a savings fund if I want to do precision approaches after 2015. It looks like the DME receiver in my panel will be useful for a while longer, though.

Some related postings

• Fogged in without an ILS
• Upcoming changes to Canadian airspace
• Do you like your ADF? (Not as much as these guys.)
• Thumbing it: Playing with the Rule of 60

Thanks to a posting by Paul Tomblin, I just discovered a new aviation Google-maps mashup. Normally, Google maps lets you switch among a map view, a satellite photo, and a satellite photo with map info superimposed (called a hybrid view). In this mashup, Runway Finder, an anonymous developer (“dave”) has added a view based on tiled and geo-referenced US sectional charts. So now you can go anywhere covered by US sectionals — including many Canadian cities — and zoom in or out, and switch among sectional, road map, and satellite views. Very nice. Unlike other free online sectional viewers, this one gives you a decent size viewing window, on top of all the Google Maps bells and whistles.

The site also shows airports near your current location, with colour coding for weather conditions reported in METARs, as well as TFR outlines. Unfortunately, all of this is available only for the U.S. right now (hint to dave: Paul Tomblin maintains a free database with worldwide airport, navaid, and intersection data). Looking at the sectionals makes me even sadder that the U.S. is the only country with the decency to make geodata and charts available free to the public — it would be nice if VNCs were available for full Canadian chart coverage.

One current shortcoming is that it’s not possible to bookmark a view and come back to it, but I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

I’ve thrown together a quick demo of several segments (almost 400 miles worth) of the V316 low-level airway westbound from the Ottawa VORTAC to the Sault Ste. Marie VOR/DME. The best part, in my opinion, is the ability to switch to a satellite view and then zoom in on different parts of the route — for example, switch to satellite, zoom in on the Killaloe VOR, and you will be able to see the abandoned airfield beside the VOR.

There is no server-side code involved in this demo: everything happens inside your browser (as a result, it won’t work without a fairly new browser). The demo consists of a simple HTML page, a few lines of JavaScript, and a short CSS stylesheet.

The flying geeks who read this blog will understand the implications of this immediately; for the rest of you, it means that any web site (any free one, anyway) can now reliably build web applications integrating Google’s maps and satellite photos. Do you want to see a scrollable, zoomable satellite photo of British Columbia with victor airways overlaid? See an outline of the newest TFR on top of a detailed street map of New York? Web site designers with only the most basic LAMP and Javascript skills can now deliver sites that do that with days or weeks, rather than months or years of work, and people with advanced skills — Paul Tomblin knows I’m talking about him — will be able to do much, much more. With wireless Internet in the cockpit, we could even have live Google maps with weather overlays on a tablet PC in the our cockpits, and laugh at glass-cockpit pilots for their primitive technology.

Seriously, expect to see some interesting aviation-related applications appear in the next few months. I’ll link to them from my blog if I hear about them.

As a result, I am happy to report that someone else has succeeded where I failed. George Plews, of North Battleford SK, has managed to get all of the airports, ICAO identifiers, latitudes, and longitudes from the CFS into an excel spreadsheet, and also has it available for viewing on the web on his page Airports in Canada, together with lots of totals and statistics (for example, Ontario has 218 airports, while PEI has 4). Give his page a visit or grab the spreadsheet. Maybe the rest of us can find a way to contribute to make the spreadsheet more useful; at very least, people could commit to scanning part of the CFS each cycle for change bars, so that George can keep is spreadsheet up to date without redoing the whole thing. It would also be nice to add altitudes for the airports. Then there’s the runway data …

On the way out, I took off just before a Dash-8 heading for Toronto. We were flying south on different airways (by 20 degrees), but the protected airspace initially overlapped. That meant that the Dash-8 had to stay 1,000 feet below me to maintain safe separation — when I reported 4,000 ft, the Dash-8 was cleared to 3,000; when I reported 6,000, the Dash-8 was cleared to 5,000; and so on. Fortunately, I was alone in the plane and climbing at 700-800 fpm; a fully-loaded Warrior is lucky to see 200-300 fpm above 5,000 feet, and often goes negative when it hits a downdraft. Finally, the airways diverged far enough that the protected areas no longer overlapped, and the Dash-8 was cleared to climb quickly into the oxygen altitudes and then fly GPS-direct towards Toronto. I applaud the crew for their patience climbing underneath me at Cherokee speed. ATC picked them up on radar climbing through 11,000 feet, and I levelled out at 9,000, still hand flying in IMC, and making position reports until I was half way to North Bay and finally showed up on Centre radar.

(Update: Michael Oxner, an air traffic controller in Moncton, has posted about exactly how this kind ofVOR/DME, non-radar separation works.)

Timmins is at 48° latitude — south of the 49th parallel that forms much of the Canada/US border, and only slightly north of Seattle — but in Ontario, that counts as pretty far north. Once you pass Sudbury, the population density drops so dramatically that every single building (such as a cabin) is depicted on the aviation charts, and there are surprisingly few of them. Not far beyond Timmins, the roads stop completely, and most communities are accessible only by plane. In the end, I think, the idea of north in Canada has more to do with population density and accessibility that it does with latitude, and while Timmins itself is a perfectly normal small city with a nice downtown, malls and fast food chains, you get the impression that you’re sitting right on the edge of something huge and completely different stretching thousands of kilometers beyond you.

In fact, one distinguishing feature of north in Canada is how important (and ordinary) general aviation is in day-to-day life. Along a river just outside of town, every third or fourth dock had a floatplane tied to it (they’re probably all on skis in the winter). One house had, not a rusty pickup truck, but a Piper Cub sitting in the yard (does he take off from the dirt lane out back?). Everyone who doesn’t fly has a boss or friend who does, and non-pilots seem quite comfortable talking about things like instrument ratings. Toronto is 13 hours away by train, probably 10 hours by car (I haven’t checked), but only 2:30-3:30 in my Warrior (depending on winds) and probably 2 hours or less in a high-performance single or twin. Many of the nearby communities have no roads or railroads at all, and a round-trip ticket for a very short scheduled flight to one of those communities is at least $900. As a result, even small business people like insurance brokers and real estate agents find that it makes enormous business sense to learn to fly and buy a small plane.

People who spend time in Edmonton, Yellowknife, or Iqaluit can laugh when I call Timmins “north”, but what it lacks in latitude it seems to make up in attitude.

There are two projects currently underway that will not help to feed our GPS’s directly, but will, at least, give pilots a chance to share more information with each other. First, the Wikipedia has a large number of airport articles underway, and anyone can contribute to any of the articles (or start a new one). The best place to start is the Airports category, which has a top-level entry for each country, and then drill down. Coverage is uneven, representing the interests of the people who happen to have contributed so far — for example, there are currently only 7 airports listed for New Jersey, but 22 airports listed for Nunavut — and many of the airport articles are short stubs, but those are problems that more contributors can easily fix. Please go over and add information (and pictures) for airports that you know well, or start new articles. Since most of Wikipedia’s readers are not pilots, this is a great chance to educate the public about general aviation.

Another new collaborative resource is the COPA Places to Fly directory. Unlike the freeform Wikipedia, the COPA directory is set up to be highly structured, closely mimicking the layout of the Canada Flight Supplement, and its audience is clearly pilots. There’s not much there yet, but it holds the promise of some day providing a free electronic replacement for the CFS, assuming that there’s some way to export it to portable devices, and that people find some way of ensuring data quality in a collaborative environment (i.e. some kind of peer review and reputation management).

In his most recent posting, Moncton Centre controller Michael Oxner makes some friendly but justifiable complaints about summer recreational pilots who don’t bring paper charts in the plane and tie up ATC time when their handheld GPS’s fail (for those pilots’ sake, I hope that their GPS’s had terrain information when they were working — there are mountains pushing above 5,000 ft MSL in Maine on the way from central Canada to the Maritimes).

Here’s a trick I thought of after arriving at the airport once for a long (VFR) family trip, loading up the plane, then realizing that I had left my charts at home: I always, always, carry a couple of 1:1,000,000 scale World Aeronautical Charts (WACs) in my flight bag. WACs have lousy detail but very wide coverage — just two Canadian WACs (F-21 and F-22) cover nearly any single-day trip I’d fly inside Canadian airspace, and add no appreciable bulk or weight. The problem with Canadian WACs, though, is that they’re not updated very often — they may be legal, but most of them haven’t been amended for 10 years or more, so their airspace information is of historical interest only. For that reason, I actually carry American WACs (CF-18 and CF-19), which are updated regularly and happen to include a lot of Canadian airspace.

Since I own my own plane, I also keep a bunch of charts and approach plates for Ontario and Quebec in a small bag under the pilot’s seat — the WACs are actually the backup to my backup now — but for a renter, a couple of WACs in the flight bag seems like a no-brainer, though 1:500,000 scale VNCs/Sectionals and 1:250,000 scale terminal-area charts are, obviously, preferable.

For anyone with time to kill, a high-speed Internet connection, and no concept of the cost of inkjet toner, you can download the U.S. sectional charts here and print them out on your own.

Now, the same thing written out in proper English prose.

Hearst/René Fontaine Municipal Airport (ICAO code CYHF)

Location

The Hearst airport is located at latitude 49 degrees 42 minutes 51 seconds north, longitude 83 degrees 41 minutes 10 seconds west, 1.5 nautical miles northwest of the town. The magnetic variation is nine degrees west, and the time zone is five hours behind UTC (four hours during daylight savings time). The elevation of the airfield is 827 feet above mean sea level. The airport appears in the AIR5008 Visual Navigation Chart (Thunder Bay), the E-18 World Aeronautical Chart, and the LO-4 low-altitude IFR enroute chart. It has at least one published instrument approach in the Canada Air Pilot.

Operator

The airport operator is the Corporation of the Town of Hearst, which can be reached by phone at (705) 362-4341. The airport can be reached directly at (705) 372-2842. The airport is certified by Transport Canada.

Public Facilities

The airport has a terminal building with telephone and taxi services available. Food, medical facilities, accomodation, and car rental are available within five nautical miles of the airport.

Flight Planning

NOTAMs for this airport are available in the NOTAM file CYHF. Flight planning services are available through the London Flight Information Centre at (866) WXBRIEF.

Services

Services are available from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm local time (1400-2200z, 1300-2100z during daylight savings time) Monday to Friday. At other times, a callout charge may be levied for one or more services. 100 low lead avgas and Jet-A fuel are available, as well as all grades of engine oil. Airplane storage, services and minor repairs, long-term parking, airplane tie-downs, and airplane plug-ins are also available. The airport offers supplementary de-icing fluid and 1000/1500 amp jet starting units.

Runway Data

The airport has one runway surface, serving as runways 04 (magnetic heading 41 degrees) and 22 (magnetic heading 221 degrees). The surface is 4500 feet long, 100 feet wide, and paved with asphalt. Runway condition reports are available from the operator, and there is only limited winter maintenance.

Lighting

Both runways 04 and 22 have flashing strobes serving as runway identification lights, together with green/red threshold and runway end lights and three-position, medium intensity edge lights. There is also PAPI approach path lighting at each end of the runway designed for an eye-to-wheel height of up to 10 feet. The pilot must key the microphone seven times within five seconds on the frequency 122.8 MHz to activate the runway lights. The pilot may then select the brightness by keying the microphone seven times for maximum brightness, five times for medium brightness, or three times for minimum brightness, also within five seconds.

Communications

The unmonitored aerodrome traffic frequency is 122.8 MHz. It is in effect for a five nautical mile radius up to 3800 feet above sea level.

Navigation

The nearest navigation aid is the Hearst NDB, on the frequency 241 KHz broadcasting the Morse code identifier “HF”. It is a medium-power (50-2000 watt) transmitter located at latitude 49 degrees 40 minutes 2 seconds north, longitude 83 degrees 43 minutes 28 seconds west. From the NDB, the airport is 2.8 nautical miles on a magnetic track of 38 degrees.

Procedures

Right-hand circuits are in effect for runway 22, in accordance with the Canadian Aviation Regulations, section 602.96.

Caution

There is a possibility of winter maintenance equipment on the runway outside of operational hours. There is also a possibility of wildlife on the runway. There is bird activity during the months of April to October.

That is a lot of information packed into a tiny space (and I left out the information printed on the diagram, including the safe altitudes around the airport). There is a certain ugly beauty about it. Now, if only I could remember all of those abbreviations …