Cockpit Conversation

One of the problems I asked to be looked at during the maintenance stop was that the right gear door was occasionally dropping down after shutdown, instead of staying closed over the opening into which the wheels would retract after takeoff. The mechanic looked at it, made a little adjustment to the oleo, and said it shouldn't happen again.

It did. Only worse. I did one day of work, back on the jobsite after maintenance, then the next morning when I came to preflight the aircraft I found the door not only open, but leaking hydraulic fluid, the lifeblood of the landing gear extension system, onto the ramp. It was a pretty steady flow, one big drop per second, and appeared to be coming from the oleo controlling that door.

First order of business was to stop my airplane from bleeding all over the ramp. I took my pocket knife to an empty one-quart oil container and cut out one of the side panels, making it into a small, flat one-quart bucket. The airfield was all neat and tidy, so I had to scrounge in a decorative garden arrangement (yes, there was a decorative garden arrangement on the apron, these California airports are fancy!) for the all-purpose northern airplane accessory: a fist sized rock. I put the rock in my improvised drip tray, to keep it from blowing away. Now I needed a spill kit for the puddle already on the apron, and someone who could apply first aid and a blood transfusion to replace what was lost. (My hydraulic fluid is red, inviting all these blood metaphors).

There was a helicopter operation on the field, and I knew that their mechanics were in early, so I walked over to see if a simple hydraulic leak was something they'd be able to cross the streams to help with. They said no, but recommended another outfit, and while I was in their hangar I got to ogle a very shiny R44. I saw a curious chart, visible through the plastic window, so I asked them about it. It seems that Vne, the "never exceed" speed on a helicopter is a function of temperature, and very much so. I don't know why, so rather than googling it and coming up with a half-baked explanation, I'll let one of my helicopter flying readers explain it. I'm guessing it has to do with air density and those long flexible airfoils called rotors.

The other maintenance unit was locked and unresponsive on the call-out number, so I cancelled the flight. I swapped places with the other pilot, because she was pushing monthly duty time limits and I wasn't, so I flew the other, functional, airplane while she sought out someone who could fix the broken one.

After work my improvised bucket was getting full, so we bought a bigger bucket at the dollar store. And, as always happens at the dollar store, because everything is only a dollar, we bought a bucket for the other airplane, and some extra brightly coloured spray bottles too. I guess my distant ancestors who eagerly sought out brightly coloured things got more tasty ripe fruit to eat than their competitors who didn't care one way or the other, and thus passed down to me an attraction to colourful objects. I blame as much as possible on prehistoric genetic selection. And as I look at my shiny new bucket, I can't help thinking about the lolrus, subject of grammatically dubious captioned photos about the search for a lost blue bucket.

Labels: density, helicopters, humour, maintenance, rocks

My airplane is in the hangar for scheduled maintenance. I flew it here in the dark, with a slight tailwind that brought me in 0.2 h before the maintenance was due, rather than 0.1 before as I had planned. (The 0.1 early was of course planned in case the wind or ATC situation went the other way. I've been here before, and because this is a hundred hour (performed every hundred hours, not taking a hundred hours, but longer than the regular oil-and-filter-change) inspection.

When I arrived I parked outside the maintenance hangar and phoned the mechanic for a ride. Company has rented hangar space and flown one of our mechanics down to do the work, so we have someone familiar working on the airplane, and we're not paying the local shop rate for a simple oil change. I hauled my stuff up to the airfield gate and discovered it was locked, even from the airside. The plate where the combination to get back in would usually be written instructs me to call airfield security to get through, from either side. Both they and my ride arrived quickly and I was allowed out.

Next morning at the hangar they're laughing at my list of snags. Most of it is label-related: the little plastic cover over the emergency exit handle has become brittle from time and sun exposure and cracked into many pieces. The cover isn't essential, but I suspect the exit operation instructions on it are legally required. There are several circuit breakers with illegible labels, and one of the tanks has lost the label declaring its fuel type and capacity. They point me at an electronic label maker and tell me to go for it.

This appears to be one of the areas in which I am mentally arrested at the age of ten. I love making labels. The label machine allows me to change the height and width of the letters independently, print up to four lines of text on one strip of label tape, and choose black or white letters on black, white or clear label tape. I label everything. Now I don't have to squint through scratches to identify my CBs, and I no longer have two radios labelled "Com 1."

I also remove the pilot's seat from the airplane. This is much like one of those twisted wire puzzles, at first appearing completely impossible, without turning off the physical existence of one of the wooden bulkheads. When finally I twist it the right way and get it out of the cockpit, I wonder if I'll ever be able to get it back in. The co-pilot's seat comes out more easily and then three cents (two Canadian, one U.S.), several pistachio shells (definitely my chief pilot's), and assorted small fasteners are no problem to remove. I vacuum the interior of the plane, and am contemplating washing the bits that still have cowls on when I'm called to do another job. They explain my task.

An oil drum has been rolled over next to the airplane on casters, and it is fitted with a hand pump. The outlet for the pump is inserted into the crankcase. To refill the crankcase with clean oil, I should turn the crank handle on the pump backwards until it stops, then turn it forward until it stops again, from stop to stop is about two and a half turns of the handle and equals one quart of oil. I have to add eleven quarts of oil to each engine.

"Wow," I tease our mechanic. "I am going to tell all my friends about the time a mechanic trusted a pilot with a task that involved counting past ten!"

We're just about through the inspection checklist when everything grinds to a halt. An emergency airworthiness directive came out a few weeks ago for this airplane. It passed on initial inspection, but somehow in the last fifty hours, the plug has become out of tolerance. The airplane fails the test and is now grounded until the part can be replaced. It looks fine to the naked eye: the threads seem undamaged and there are only a few nicks and scratches. But a micrometer shows a different story. I could experience a power loss if I go on flying with this one.

While the replacement part is couriered in, we get an avionics tech to come and have a look at a transponder that ATC reports as intermittent, after several hours of flight. It's a KT76, exactly the same model that died on me in Florida last year. I hope it won't be as expensive as that one was. The tech goes into my avionics bay and sets up test equipment that looks like something Mr. Spock would use to analyze zeta radiation density for Captain Kirk. It tells the tech that the transponder is putting out the right power, and has some frequency drift, but likely not enough to produce the problem. He traces the problem to an antenna the length of my finger and the diameter of a chopstick. It needs replacing, and--this is amazing--he has one, and it only costs $160. In aviation maintenance budget terms, that's equivalent to the pennies I found wedged in the seat rails.

Even more amazing, the antenna replacement solves the problem, and ATC is one again happy with my blips.

Labels: avionics, costs, maintenance, radar, wind

While I'm flying in California, a hard-working flight follower tells me that "Traffic is an əlɐɹ'əs, one o'clock five miles east to west." I report "Looking," but the truth is I'm not sure what an Elaris, or Alaras or Ayloras is. I've never heard of it. From the calls that it has been making, I am guessing that the pilot is working on his initial IFR rating. And there's a bunch of them in the airspace, with similar tail numbers, so they must be a flying school fleet. I must be somewhere in between a light sport plane and a trainer twin.

I go online after landing to look for likely candidates. I find Alaris Aviation, but they are a used aircraft broker, not a manufacturer. Elaris Designs makes classy sweaters. Aha, I score with Alarus. It's an all-metal, low wing, single. It has sprung steel landing gear, like a Cessna, in the tricycle configuration, but it looks a little like a Tripacer, with the mains further forward proportionally than I expect. That must be truly the case, as it includes a tail skid with shock absorbers, something I've never seen on an aircraft part that is not supposed to contact the ground on landing.

It cruises at 95 to 100 knots, so it's purely a trainer. I think someone who wanted an airplane for personal use would want one either faster or that had some kind of history or interesting reason to be slow.

Anyone ever flown one of these?

Labels: ATC, private flying, radar, training

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From: FLT_XXXX 04-May-2008 19:15 UTC
N30 04.192 W084 28.314
625m (2050ft), 245 km/h (152 mph), 272 T

I just want to say that I love my coworkers. I avoid blogging about them because I don't have the right to tell other people's stories without their permission. I am willing to suffer--or at least to get into a big snit about--the consequences, of readers completely misinterpreting what I write about myself, but I don't want to visit that upon my co-workers, even anonymously. That said, here's a slice of life after meeting up with the gang.

As the pilot, I'm coming on shift to relieve one of the pilots who is already on the job. There's a lot of work to do here, so there are already two pilots down here, and four technical specialists, and they've been working fourteen hour days for two weeks. They're all a little crazy, but today they finished early, that is to say around six p.m., while the restaurants are still open, and tomorrow a later start is planned. They've seized the opportunity to go somewhere that isn't Denny's for dinner. (Denny's is a North American restaurant with supremely ordinary American food; its only virtue is that it's open twenty-four hours a day).

We all head towards two rental vehicles in order to play follow-the-leader towards the chosen restaurant. I get in the back of the second vehicle and as the co-worker who will be driving gets in, she tells the driver of the lead vehicle, "Okay, but no U-turns and no cutting across three lanes of traffic to turn left from the curb lane on a red light!" That sounds like a reasonable request. I buckle up, imagining that she is exaggerating for humour some previous navigational gaffe by the guy driving the other vehicle.

We go several blocks, at a speed not entirely inconsistent with local speed limits, and then suddenly the vehicle ahead does a U-turn in the middle of the block and turns right into the parking lot of a "Center for Digestive Diseases." Those in our vehicle are agreed on the unsuitability of this as a place to eat dinner, but before we need convey our veto to the lead vehicle, it circles the parking lot and turns back onto the street, initially in the curb lane, but then with a single flash of the turn indicator, he crosses three lanes of traffic and turns left. I look at the others for some confirmation that he only did that to tick off our driver. Deliberate defiance of her stipulation, I guess. But no, this is the way the drive goes. There's another U-turn, more turns, both left and right from the wrong lane, and another circuit of a parking lot.

We finally park at the restaurant. The driver denies responsibility, claiming that the maneuvers were all specified to him by the navigator. The navigator blames the GPS unit. We all eat dinner. It is good.

In defence of the driver and navigator, U-turns are acceptable, legal and normal in this town. Many times when a light turns green everyone who was stopped at the light makes a U-turn. It's a rare town in Canada that allows them and we all think they are crazy manoevers. I can't defend the lane changes though. They were bizarre.

Edit in response to a question:

A U-turn is a procedure by which a driver going down a street maneuvers the vehicle such that it is going the opposite direction down the street, without actually leaving that street during the procedure. If the street is wide enough or the turning radius of the vehicle is tight enough, this can be accomplished in one continuous turn resembling the letter U. In the Canadian cities where I have lived, and the cities where my coworkers live, this is not normal driving behaviour. People do it, but not without checking carefully for police as well as traffic. If you don't like your direction of travel, you have to leave the street and reenter it, perhaps by going around the block, or turning into a parking lot.

Labels: CRM, driving, food, navigation

Looks like de Havilland is off the hook for this one. I spoke to a guy on the ramp whose girlfriend works in the tower, and it turns out the gear didn't collapse at all. They just forgot to put it down. The airplane in the picture is partly supported by a now-mangled radar dome on its belly. He also confirmed that no one was injured.

I taxied by it today but didn't get a good shot, as clearance delivery called me back with my transponder code right at that moment. The props, as you could see if I had a cleaner side window, are pretty chewed up, but the fuselage appears to have been somewhat "protected" by the ridiculously expensive radar dome, the wreckage of which must have been removed. I couldn't see wing damage from my vantage point.

Poor pilots. I was thinking as I watched it being swarmed by firetrucks yesterday that that was going to entail a painful amount of paperwork. According the the controller's boyfriend, the tower shares responsibility for the gear up landing. The controllers are supposed to identify extended landing gear and have standard calls to make if they can't see it. I'm not sure I believe him. Long ago Canadian controllers made a "check gear" call to retractable types, and the pilot would acknowledge with "down and locked" or "three green," or the like. The standard joke when the controller accidentally issued that challenge to a fixed gear pilot was "gear down and welded." They stopped doing it officially years ago, but some controllers continued until quite recently, when I believe it was actually banned. Nav Canada, the new tower agency was concerned about liability issues if a pilot thought he could rely on that reminder. I've never heard a "check gear" challenge from a US controller.

I can understand that a controller might feel responsible if an airplane landed gear up on his watch. "I should have seen it!" he might think. But will the FAA controller in question seriously be found at fault for not reminding the pilot to move the wheel-shaped switch to the down position before the flare?

In other news, the airplane I fly is now bigger than a commercial jet, assuming the commercial jet is the one pictured below, a Dayjet Eclipse 500. It has a greater range than I do, but a smaller cabin, smaller payload and smaller engines. (Okay, maybe I'm cheating a bit on the engines. They are physically smaller, though). Hey I wonder if it has a toilet.

I can imagine the passengers squealing, "oh my god, it's so small." Passengers say that about anything. I once overheard someone emphasizing the tininess of a B737 with, "It only has one aisle!" Meh, whatever. My hotel room is huge. It's a suite. I think if you took out the dividing walls you could park my airplane in here. The Eclipse 500, easliy.

Labels: accidents, ATC, engines, hotels, paperwork, responsibility

Today I am in Tallahassee, Florida. Specifically, sitting in a nice FBO, waiting for a member of the crew. The wonderful staff remember us from our last visit and still seem to like us. I am informed that there are free cookies available, information that gladdens any pilot's heart. Free food plus pilot equals happy.

I stand up to wander over to the cookie distribution area and something catches my eye on the runway. Our eyes take in images constantly, and our brain processes them, but I suspect that the brain doesn't actually pass things on to the conscious mind unless they represent something out of the ordinary, or particularly relevant to us. It's why you didn't hear anything, but your friend says he heard someone call his name. Or at least I like to think that's the reason, not that years of sitting near propellers are taking their toll. At any rate, the part of my brain monitoring peripheral vision reports that there is something distinctly odd on the runway. I pull my attention circuits away from free cookies and onto the runway. There's an airplane there, but sitting at a distinctly odd angle.

I point it out to FBO staff and can hear, "look at the runway" echoed in the back room. I can also hear silly things like "why is it there?" and "was that there this morning?" and then I can hear fire trucks. The yellowy-green airport firetrucks race out and surround the aircraft. They spray the runway around it with foam. A few minutes later another set of red firetrucks arrives, probably a city fire company, and a few minutes later there's a third set of ladder trucks and an assortment of police cars and other emergency vehicles.

There is no fire evident, and no ambulances arrive, so presumably there were no injuries. We sit around and speculate on whether the airplane will have to be scrapped. Airplanes are sturdy enough for doing what they are supposed to do, but the wing spar isn't designed for balancing on the side like that.

This isn't good news for Bombardier. There's only so many times you can say, "poor maintenance" before you have to admit to poor design. And I picture the military being pretty by-the-book when it comes to maintenance, at least in a training environment. I'm surprised Air Canada Jazz hasn't had one of these collapse, if it really is a weakness of the type. Jazz flies them on long and short routes, and hot and cold and freezing weather, and has done so for years.

I was going to blog this "live-on-the-scene" but I had the pictures uploaded and it all typed in on FBO computer, when the connection died. Before I could investigate why, my crew arrived and it was time to go, so you get it some hours later.

Oh and the cookies were good. They had Smarties in them. Except I guess they were M&Ms;, because the Americans don't have Smarties, they think these are Smarties, while Canadians know them as Rockets. There is a historical reason.

Labels: accidents, food, landing, maintenance, military, smashing, US-Canada relations