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

Changes in work

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

Recency Lost

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

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

Recency Regained (part 1)

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

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

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

Victory lap to Toronto and back

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

Other ways to protest that a person can do.

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

Please all the people of Vietnam Hero follow Libyan people:

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

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

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

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

The United States — saviour of the Vietnamese people?

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

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

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

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

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

You see, a TFR isn’t a very Canadian thing. It’s not that we don’t know what fear and terrorism are — around 1970, bombs were going off in Montreal, and a provincial cabinet minister was kidnapped and murdered; even more recently, the Iranian embassy here in Ottawa was bombed; 24 of the 9/11 victims were Canadian; and the police in Toronto recently arrested a bunch of bozos who were talking big about doing terrorist stuff, though it’s unlikely they were smart or motivated enough to pull anything off. It’s just that, like the British with their IRA crisis, at least some of us have learned that heavy-handed security doesn’t actually solve problems; instead, it makes people more scared, and when people are scared, the world becomes more dangerous for everyone.

So we don’t shut down hundreds of square miles of airspace for our amusement parks, our Prime Minister, or even our Queen. In fact, our Prime Minister sometimes walks his kids to school. Before 9/11, you could essentially fly right past the windows of Parliament; now, you have to fly 1,000 ft AGL over Parliament, or 0.5 nm away, but you can still fly pretty close (and even those restrictions don’t apply if you’re landing or taking off IFR under ATC control).

‘Nuff said. Here’s the TFR for the president’s visit next week:

CYOW DESIGNATED AIRSPACE HANDBOOK IS AMENDED AS FOLLOWS:
1) CYR537, PARLIAMENT HILL ON, REVISED TO READ: CLASS F
RESTRICTED AIRSPACE IS ESTABLISHED WITHIN THE AREA BOUNDED
BY 12 NM RADIUS OF 452529N 754159W (PARLIAMENT HILL),
SFC TO 12,500 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE
AREA EXC FOR STATE ACFT, MIL, POLICE OPS, REGULARLY SKED
COMMERCIAL PASSENGER AND CARGO CARRIERS, EMERG OR HUMANITARIAN
FLT AUTH BY ATC.  FOR AUTH ACFT OPR WITHIN CYR537,
THE OPR RULES FOR EXISTING AIRSPACE APPLY.
DLA MAY BE ANTICIPATED.
0902191600/0902192030.
2) CYR539, OTTAWA ON, CLASS F RESTRICTED AIRSPACE IS ESTABLISHED
WITHIN THE AREA BOUNDED BY 10 NM RADIUS OF 451921N 754009W
(OTTAWA/MACDONALD-CARTIER INTL), SFC TO 12,500 FT MSL. NO PERSON
SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA DESCRIBED EXC FOR STATE ACFT,
MIL, POLICE OPS, EMERG OR HUMANITARIAN FLT AUTH BY RCMP AT
1-888-420-7958.  FOR AUTH ACFT OPR WITHIN CYR539, THE OPR RULES
FOR EXISTING AIRSPACE APPLY.
0902191515/0902191545 AND 0902192210/0902192255.
3) CYR540, OTTAWA ON, CLASS F RESTRICTED AIRSPACE IS ESTABLISHED
WITHIN THE AREA BOUNDED BY 30 NM RADIUS OF 451921N 754009W
(OTTAWA/MACDONALD-CARTIER INTL) EXCLUDING CYR537 AND CYR539.
SFC TO 12,500 FT MSL. NO PERSON SHALL OPR AN ACFT WITHIN THE AREA
DESCRIBED EXC FOR STATE ACFT, MIL AND POLICE OPS, REGULARLY SKED
COMMERCIAL PASSENGER, CARGO CARRIERS, EMERG OR HUMANITARIAN FLT.
FOR MIL AND POLICE ACFT OPR WITHIN CYR540, THE OPR RULES FOR
CLASS G AIRSPACE APPLY. FOR OTHER ACFT LISTED ABV, OPR WITHIN
CYR540, THE RULES FOR EXISTING AIRSPACE APPLY.
OPR PROC FOR ALL OTHER ACFT ENTERING, EXITING OR TRANSITING
THROUGH CYR540 AUTH BY ATC SHALL:
-PRIOR TO FLT PLANNING INTO CYR540, HAVE AN AUTH NUMBER OBTAINED
FM THE RCMP 613-949-1737, 18 FEB 1300 TO 2100,
OR 1-888-420-7958, 19 FEB 1200 TO 2300. THE REQUEST WILL INCLUDE
THE NAMES AND BIRTHDAYS OF ALL PERSONS ONBOARD.
-HAVE FLT PLAN WITH AUTH NUMBER IN THE REMARKS SECTION IN ORDER
TO OBTAIN CLEARANCE TO OPR WITHIN CYR540.
-BE ON AN ACTIVE IFR OR VFR FLT PLAN WITH A DISCRETE CODE
ASSIGNED BY ATC 1-866-WXBRIEF AND SQUAWK THE DISCRETE CODE PRIOR
TO DEP AND AT ALL TIMES WHILE OPR WITHIN CYR540.
-REMAIN IN TWO-WAY RDO COM AT ALL TIMES WITH ATC.
-ACFT DEP FM AN AD WITHIN CYR540, MUST ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN,
AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, TWO WAY RDO COM WITH ATC.
-PRIOR TO ENTERING CYR540, ACFT MUST ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN TWO
WAY RDO COM WITH OTTAWA TML 127.7.
-ACFT ARR OR DEP LOCAL AD WITHIN CYR540 AND AUTH ACFT TRANSITING
THROUGH CYR540, REQUIRE AUTH FM OTTAWA TML FRQ 127.7.
DLA MAY BE ANTICIPATED.
0902191500 TIL 0902192300

Basically, unless you’re security, an airline, or medevac, don’t fly within 30nm of the Ottawa Airport from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm next Thursday below 12,500 ft MSL, period. That’s actually harsher than the typical presidential TFR in the U.S.

ICAO Class A (“class alfa”) airspace is the strictest of all, allowing only IFR operations (without special permission). In the U.S. and southern Canada, most airspace between FL180 and FL600 is class A (the floor is higher as you get further north in Canada).

Even the busiest airports rarely designate their control zones as class A: the U.S., for example, contains 15 of the world’s 30 busiest airports by passenger traffic, but they are designated only Class B (“class bravo”), so routine controlled VFR operations are still permitted (I’ve flown my warrior into some of them, IFR and VFR).

Around the world, however, there exists a tiny handful of Class A airports. Here are the Class A airports I know about so far:

• Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Paris, France
• El Dorado International Airport, Bogatá, Columbia
• Gibraltar Airport, Gibraltar
• Heathrow Airport, London, UK
• Le Bourget Airport, Paris, France
• Orly Airport, Paris, France

There appears to be no single reason for the designation — it’s certainly not due to traffic alone. Tel Aviv is probably Class A for security reasons, being so near hostile soil, and Bogatá’s designation may have something to do with drug smuggling. Heathrow is busy (though not as busy as some U.S. airports), but it also operates in very confined airspace. Gibraltar has about three scheduled flights a day — go figure. (It’s near the Spanish border, but many major airports operate very close to international borders; many busy airports also operate near high terrain). Le Bourget has no scheduled flights at all, but Parisians are Parisians, and zut alors! if London has one Class A airport, Paris will show them by having three two.

Reagan National Airport in Washington DC has additional restrictions that make it similar to Class A, but is still designated Class B. Does anyone know of any other Class A airports that I’ve missed?

1. Expand my horizons. This year, I pushed my southern limit a bit by flying all the way south to Dulles Airport. My other extremes flying from Ottawa are Sault Ste. Marie to the west, Baie Comeau to the north, and Port Hawkesbury (Cape Breton) to the east. Maybe this is the summer I’ll fly up to Hudson Bay, just for the hell of it.

2. Seriously consider taking on one or two partners for my Warrior. It’s a lot of work taking care of an airplane, and it could be fun to share.

3. Ace my IFR renewal and my medical. I did my last medical when I was 39, so it was good for five years. My last IFR flight test was in 2007, and was good for two years. They both come due this summer/fall, and the medical will be every two years from now on (since I’m over 40). Recurrent training will help with the first one, and exercise and healthy eating will help with the second.

4. Don’t get stressed. After around 700 hours, I still get stressed (as in can’t-eat, rush-to-the-bathroom stressed) before almost every flight, especially if I have passengers. Some time between starting the pre-flight and starting the engine, it all melts away. I’d like to enjoy the anticipation of the flight as well as the actual flying.

5. Use the blog test for all my flying decisions. Would I be comfortable blogging tomorrow about my decisions and actions today, without making any excuses, modifications, or omissions? If not, time to come up with a new plan.

Support and encouragement from my friends reading this will be very welcome.

Teterboro Airport, March 2005: loading bags into the Warrior for the flight home, after our first family trip to New York City.

I’d been an aircraft owner for 2 1/2 years at that point. I’m still not used to it now. My girls loved all the free swag in the ladies’ room at Atlantic Aviation (it was the FBO that Oprah used to visit NYC).

Toronto City Centre Airport (commonly called “Toronto Island”) is a great airport for baseball fans, since it’s only about a 15-minute walk from the Roger’s Centre/Skydome, where you can drop by to see the Jays play the Bosox, Yankees, etc.

It turns out that the airport has an even closer connection to baseball. The Boston Red Sox signed Babe Ruth in 1914, but sent him down to their triple-A Providence Grays farm team for the 1914 season. Late that season, on September 5, when the Grays were playing the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team at Island Stadium in Toronto, Ruth hit his first professional home run, pounding the ball right out into the waters of Toronto Harbour. The next year, the Bosox called Ruth up to the majors, and he famously hit his first major league home run — but not his first professional home run — against the Yankees on May 6, 1915.

Meanwhile, the [baseball] Leafs decided to move their stadium north to a mainland location, and in the 1930s, Toronto built its main airport on that empty land. After World War II, when longer runways and less fog became desirable, most airline operations into Toronto shifted northwest to the distant Malton airport (now Toronto Pearson International Airport), but the little airport built over the stadium where Babe Ruth started his professional home run hitting career is still in operation, still has airline traffic, and still sees lots of baseball fans passing through.

(Image via Wikipedia)

It was easier getting around L.A. than other big cities because LAX‘s control zone is small, and the surrounding class B has generously high floors. We had no trouble getting VFR flight following for a local sightseeing flight during LAX’s dinnertime rush hour, though SoCal approach didn’t bother calling out most of the traffic we saw.

Smog

On the other hand, there was the smog. I’ve experienced the haze around big cities like Toronto or New York, but that did not prepare me for flying in L.A. and Orange counties late in the afternoon.

It was a good VFR day (CAVU for our intents) and from the ground, the sky looked, if not the brightest blue, blue all the same. At 3,500 feet, however, it was a different story — to the west, where the sun reflected off the smog, there was nothing but a wall of white, and I actually had to use the gyros from time to time (depending on our heading). When the smog was a little lower, it looked like a solid cloud layer, even though it was transparent looking up from the ground. I think it topped out around 4,000 feet.

Again

It was a great experience seeing L.A. from the air after spending so much time there on the ground in the late 1990s, consulting for McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing, and I plan to go up again the next time I’m in town. If I had a U.S. license, the FBO would let me rent the Archer without a checkout, based only on 90 days currency on my Warrior — an excellent deal. I don’t know if I have time to get a U.S. courtesy license, but it would be fun to fly up the coast to a different airport.

Previously, you could search for a town or city in OurAirports only if that city had an airport; for example, you could find Smiths Falls, Ontario, but not Perth, Ontario. With geocoding, OurAirports shows the closest airports to any address, and that’s now the default search mode. You can also filter the search results to show only airports with scheduled airline service, only seaplane bases, etc.

For example, for a commercial air traveler, here are the closest airline airports to the Grand Canyon; for a film-star bush pilot, here are the closest seaplane bases to Hollywood, California.

There’s a lot more information, and many more examples, on the new search help page

Map of customs airports near Vancouver and Seattle

Zoom out and drag to see other parts of Canada and the U.S., or start with the full customs map.

Note that some airports have only seasonal service and/or limited operating hours, and that U.S. “landing rights” airports sometimes charge a fee for customs services. I have not included CANPASS-only airports on the map, because they are available only to pilots who have preregistered in the CANPASS program. I have also excluded unofficial (but frequently-used) customs airports like Maxson Field and Sanderson Field that are located near border crossings.

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

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).

These are real costs, including sales taxes, not the BS costs you hear people throwing around at the airport. Reserves are $20/hour for engine and paint. I also pay about $500/year for charts and recurrent training, but I’d pay the same as a renter, so I don’t count those as ownership costs.

2007 was by far the cheapest year I’ve had with C-FBJO, and also the fewest hours I’ve flown (I’m usually over 100). I was parked at a less expensive airport and used less gas (flying less), but the biggest difference was maintenance — annual maintenance for a small plane like mine can be $2,000 one year and $10,000 the next, depending on what goes wrong (and even the simplest plane has a lot that can go wrong). I’m keeping a nearly 30-year-old plane operating, so stuff wears out and has to be replaced all the time, just as it would with a 30-year-old car; unlike with cars, however, buying a new plane isn’t a solution — I read recently that routine inspection and maintenance for an SR-22 runs $8,000-$10,000, and that’s without any problems coming up.

Fees include tie-down (and required club membership) at my home airport, transient landing and parking fees during trips, and the compulsory $75/year Nav Canada and $27.50 US customs fees. Consumables are oil (mainly), filters, fluids, etc.

When so many of the costs — tie-down fees, insurance, and (most) maintenance — are fixed, I can see the logic in taking one or two partners. You’ll still pay just as much for fuel and engine/paint reserve, but you slash the other overheads. I don’t think I’ll take a partner in C-FBJO at this point, but if I move up to something bigger like a Cherokee Six, I probably won’t try it alone.

So where did this money take me and my passengers (besides the Ottawa area) in 2007? In chronological order, Maniwaki QC, New York City (Teterboro), Drummondville QC, Pembroke ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville), Sault Ste. Marie ON, Toronto ON (City Centre), Brockville ON, Waterloo ON, Toronto ON (Buttonville) again, Sundridge ON, Sault Ste. Marie ON again, Toronto ON (City Centre) again, Burlington VT, Boston MA (Norwood), Alexandria Bay NY (Maxson), New Jersey and New York City (Caldwell), Montreal QC (Trudeau), Baie Comeau QC, Maniwaki QC again, and Burlington VT again. Not all that exciting a year, but it kept the rust off the wings (mine and the plane’s).

Take a look at Ottawa Rockcliffe or Teterboro to see some examples, then mark some of the spots at your local airport so that I’ll know where to park, fuel up, and eat next time I fly in.

Like pilots, flight attendants are highly-trained professionals; remember that next time you’re tempted to treat one like a waiter or bellhop (though you shouldn’t treat waiters or bellhops that way, either).

To see just how important they are, check out this high-res video of China Airlines Flight 120, the Boeing 737 that caught fire when a bolt punctured the fuel tank after the plane taxied to the gate at Naha Airport in Okinawa last August. The flight attendants had about a minute to evacuate 165 passengers and crew off the plane before the heat became so intense that it started warping the airframe (long before the firefighters arrived):

http://podcast.sankei.co.jp/movie/news/wmv/070820china_air.wmv

It’s terrifying how fast the fire can intensify and spread. It’s fortunate that they were already on the ground, and that the plane had already burned off some (most?) of its fuel during the flight.

Cheers to the flight attendants who got everyone out alive.

Jeers to the moron passengers who you can see carrying coats, carry-on bags, etc. with them on their way out — each item could have cost a fellow passenger’s life.

Cuba has a nice selection of small-town/rural airports, including many with good, paved runways, judging from the satellite views. When I zoom in, though, they are mostly sadly deserted, with sometimes a single piston twin parked in the middle of an empty apron. Who are they maintaining these airports for? The military doesn’t need so many so close together, and I doubt that many Cubans could afford to fly private aircraft even if they were allowed to.

Now that Fidel is pretty-much confined to writing OpEd pieces in the party propaganda rag and Raúl, who’s running the show, is making speeches about opening up the economy and talking seriously with the U.S., maybe it won’t be long until U.S. pilots are allowed to visit again. Cuba’s an easy flight from Florida, and it looks like it will still be able to offer some decent flying, with lots of nice, rural airports to go along with its friendly people. Cuba’s already a huge tourist destination for Canadians, though I don’t know anyone who’s flown his/her own plane down (it would have to be via Mexico).

Maybe change isn’t too far away …