Thursday, September 28, 2006

Flashing Lights

We've just leveled off at 17'000 feet and I'm starting to get comfortable in my sheep skin seat for the two hour trip north. Looking out the window into gray nothingness thinking about grabbing a hot cup of coffee to warm up the dreary day, when red lights start flashing across the glare shield. The "left engine fire" light is brightly glowing on the warning panel. A short breath hops out of my lungs. My captain swears and then looks out his window to check out the engine for any sign of fire. There is none. A quick scan over the engine instruments shows normal and matched indications. No low torque or high temp on the left engine that would indicate a fire was happening.

We call up ATC and ask for a heading change to the left. A common problem with the fire sensors on the King Air is that they are susceptible to other elements than just fire to set them off. The King Air has three photo sensors placed inside the cowling of each engine nacelle. They don't sense temperature but instead they work on detecting inferred rays that fires produce. Therefore if a ray of sunlight somehow sneaks through the cowling and rests it's beams on the photo cell it will set off the engine fire sensor. Standard procedure is to steer 45 to 90 degrees off of heading to change the angle that the sun is contacting the plane.

However, today we're under a thick layer of cloud and when we turn off our heading the light does not go off. Now we start to suspect that some moisture has sneaked on board and triggered the fire sensor, another susceptible spot on the photo cells. It had been raining all morning and the plane had sat outside for sometime, so we figured it was just a moisture problem. But because we couldn't get the engine fire light to go out, we decided to return to Saskatoon as we had only gotten about 60 miles to the north enroute. We asked for clearance back to the airport and quickly explained to the passengers why we were returning to Saskatoon. One passenger figured his business that he was going to was more important than a chance with his life and argued with us to continue on. He lost the argument needless to say.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Autumn up North

Following a DC9 Down Taxiway Alpha

Well it's been back on the ol' flying pony for me. I worked a solid seven days this week due to being on call last weekend. A lot of it was up north to the mines, including one over night. Only one out of the province trip to a fishing lodge in northern Manitoba. I was really impressed with the land up there. The ground was made up of sand and sand and more sand, not a spot of dirt seen. And with more poplar trees and very few evergreens (which so commonly cover the North) you could see the hand of autumn on the land. Beautiful bright colors of yellow, red, orange and green stood out everywhere. Gentle hills, bright blue lakes and open sandy spaces made up the terrain. I've never cared to own my own plane but after seeing this place I started considering buying a small plane of my own so that I might be able fly up here on occasion to fish, camp, hike and hunt. Ahh, what a wonderful thought, too bad I'm not a lawyer pilot, or a doctor pilot that could afford such a sweet deal. But maybe someday...I guess another goal to add to my list...

Monday, September 11, 2006

ADF's

ADF - Automatic Direction Finder

Used for picking up bearings to NDBs (Non-Directional Beacons).

A useful navigational tool for finding airports, flying an airway and for navigating an approach through clouds to a runway. Almost all aircrafts produced up till modern day times had this Nav aid installed as mandatory equipment. However with today's technology the ADF has become nearly obsolete on all modern aircraft, replaced by the amazing GPS (Global Positioning System). The GPS can do near all the functions of the ADF plus a whack more, and it can do them all ten times more precisely. But back to the ADF's, since most of the aircraft that are flown today (especially the ones in the skies I roam) are installed with the ADF. Luckily the ADF presents one option that the GPS does not, and today we're using it for most of our trip.

Although not the primary purpose of the ADF, but nearly it's most useful asset to an IFR GPS equipped aircraft is it's ability to pick up AM radio stations from hundreds of miles away. This allows the pilots to pass a long quiet trip by with up to the day sport results, maybe even a Riders game, or just turn the dial and pick up the latest news, usually something along the lines of a combine accident involving two fence posts and a scare-a-crow. Of course it also allows you to pick up important aviating info such as the weather in nearly all the towns across whichever province the station is in.

Yah know, like ..

"it's a warm day here in SmallTown although the wind is starting to knock a few of Grannies flower pots off her south porch ledge, and o-yeah as for clouds there's...1, 2, uh, 3, uh...yep I'd say it not be much more than 5 out there. And that there is your on the hour weather report for SmallTown! Now about those Riders..."

Which of course translates into : 18015G20KT P6SM FEW040 20/15 A????(the altimeter is your only guess). So yeah useful info can come from using the ADF as an AM receiver. But I'd have to say the feature I enjoy them most for is when I can find the soft drawl of a lonely country musician, singing his heart out to all the pets on the farm. This and a cup of strong black coffee will really make the time on a long quiet flight pass by in real comfort.

Post Script: The Land of Living Skies is not actually this rudimentary. I have exaggerated it for humor. Although some would argue with me...

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Sun & Moon

The Moon Rising Out The Left Window

It's homeward bound at the days end. Through the broken glass on my wrist watch I'm seeing the small hand on seven and the bigger hand around the four mark, telling me it's about 7:20, PM that is. I scroll through the pages on the GPS till I find the Sunset/Sunrise page and punch in C-Y-X-E. It's tells me that sunset is going to be in about ten minutes, that mean official night time starts at around 8:00, one half hour after sunset. We're going to be arriving in Saskatoon in 55 minutes, that means we'll be logging between 10 to 15 minutes of night time in our log books tonight.

The sun has reached the horizon on my side of the plane when the moon starts to peak his round head over the earth's curvature out the captains window. It's a neat sight as the moon is still below the horizon for anyone standing on the ground beneath us. But at 25,000 feet, we get an exclusive first peak. It is a pale pinkish blue colour, sitting lonely in a soft blue-white sky. I haven't seen it like this before, luckily I'm able to catch this 'moon birth' on film, well on about a million 1's and 0's, as I'm using a digital camera...sorry, got technical, we'll stick with film, sounds better.

The Sun Setting Out The Right Window

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Quikie


CRJ200 Taking off RWY34 as we fuel up in YYC


Time: 1903 Local
Altitude: Fl250
Position: 104 miles West of Saskatoon
Ground Speed: 256 knots

We're empty in the back right now as we knife through the smokey skies quickly making our way home after a pop-up charter to Calgary. We were called up at 1515 this afternoon and asked to fly a few clients to Calgary in an hour. After quickly getting dressed and driving the 15 minutes it takes to get to work, we got off the ground only 10 minutes late and were soon settled in for the 1hr10minute flight to YYC.

Now Saskatoon is 10 degrees off our nose, due to a strong 50 knot wind coming from the North, and we're planning our decent and approach. I'm feeling good about the flight, I always enjoy flying into bigger airports. The busy chatter on the radio and ATC instructions are enjoyable to hear and follow. There are many planes coming in from all over the nation, all coming together to form a single line onto the runways. Although today there were three active runways, 34, 10 and 07. We were given 34 to land on this afternoon, which worked well as we easily exited off onto taxiway A3 and had a short taxi to Apron 6 were the Shell FBO(Fixed Base Operations) sat. After dropping our passengers off and grabbing enough fuel to wavier off the ramp fee we turned around and left off RWY07 for the bright blue again.

We're 75 miles back, time to start the decent. A WestJet B737 is behind us now, ATC is barking on the radio to take up a new heading 20 degrees to the left. Looks like the 737 is gonna be passing us by. Soon we see the silvery shine of the plane as it passes about 4 miles to the south of us, we keep it in sight until it lands and we're put on a five mile final. Soon we're the ones squeaking the tires down on RWY09, ending our short 4 hour day.