Bang. Bang-bang-bang.

 

  I liked Wednesday's. Wednesdays were crew-change days. We had a contract to move oil field workers from our Small Northern Alberta town over to another small northern town, that was rife with oil field projects.  There was so much demand for workers in Fort Macmurray that most of the major, and even some not so major, companies, had to entice workers into working there by flying them in and out. In addition to the demand for workers there simply wasn’t the infrastructure to house and feed this influx of workers. Most of the projects had a construction timeline where they would bring in hundreds or thousands of workers for a couple years and then once operational, they only needed a fraction of those workers. It’s one thing when it’s one company doing this, but there were dozens. 

  The Northern Alberta Oil Sands had been around as a developing resource for decades. Several major extraction facilities had been in place since the 60s. Technology advancement in the area of extracting oil from sand, the continued rise in the price of oil, and some geopolitical forces had made Fort Macmurray a bustling hive of oil field boom activity. Again. And again.  One thing I always found interesting was reading that the Alberta Oil Sands deposit is/was and are, one of the last major, publicly available oil deposits in the world. Most other deposits of anything close in size have long since been nationalized by the host country or otherwise made inaccessible to foreign investment. Not so in Fort MacMoney. The Canadian Government has been trying to find players willing to make the massive dollar investments in extraction projects that they’ve pretty much dangled ownership of a Canadian resource to anyone with the funds to buy in. I can see why, too, without foreign investors, Canada has had a tough time convincing the tax paying public to invest in something like these deposits, particularly in recent years with concerns over the environmental implications of putting all our tax eggs in as large and unsteady basket as fossil fuels.

  I’m rambling a bit, so I’ll try and get back to course here. On Wednesday's, the charter airline that I worked for had a contract to move the workers that lived in our little town, over to Fort Macmurray to work their two-week shift, and fly the guys home who were getting off shift. The Oil Field company housed, fed and transported the guys to and from the job site from all over Alberta and other parts of Canada as well. There were guys who lived out East and flew into Calgary, to be flown up on a charter flight every week from Calgary. Other flights came in from Edmonton, and our, much smaller flight, for the guys who chose to live in our little town.

  The Wednesday charter was well liked by most of the pilots, for a couple reasons. It was an early start, but it was an early finish too as a result. It was predictable, unlike most of our ad-hoc and on-call business, the charter and Medevac side. You showed up at 5AM to get the plane ready for the outbound flight and you were back and done by 3 PM if memory serves. The day before you were pulled off the Medevac schedule fairly early, as they couldn’t risk you getting called out on a medevac trip that ran late and cut into your pre-duty rest period for the Wednesday scheduled charter.  

  I enjoyed it as well as it was easy and predictable. There wasn’t any pressure to get it flight planned, fueled and ready in the rushed, but not rushed, timeline of a Medevac call-out. The trip was the same, the only thing changed was the passenger count, anywhere from 2 to 9 guys. It departed from the terminal, so you would have a ramper or two to help you load dudes and bags. The office and maintenance staff were around as well. Unlike the Medevac calls where you were opening a cold and empty hangar, by yourself in the middle of the night, this one felt like you had all kinds of help.

  The run was helpful for the company as well, apart from the revenue. Because it was a private charter and not being pad for by the Government Health Authority, the rules were a little different as well. The Government as part of the contract process for awarding Medevac contracts, had long since mandated minimum experience levels or the flight crews. In years gone by, this was a non-issue, competition for pilots heavily favored the employer and they could simply limit their hiring to more experienced crews, because, frankly, they could. The resumes piles were tall, stacked with guys with tons of hours and experience. The Low Time Pilot could simply keep looking, a Medevac job was not going to be an option till they had several thousand hours of flight time. Times had changed though, the hiring pools were a lot skinnier and we’d hire guys with fresh licenses and few hours of experience in their log books. This was a problem however, as the Government would not allow a First Officer with less than 500 hours to partake in their revenue trips, it was a contractual requirement. Charter trips like this one were perfect for throwing the new-hire FO’s on, to help them build towards their 500 hours they needed to get included on the Medevac roster and be of more utility to the company.

  I was a fairly junior Captain on this particular trip, I’d only had the left seat upgrade for a couple months. I was paired up with Michael, formerly our dispatcher, who had a bare commercial pilots license and had taken the dispatch job as a way to work up to a flying position, which he had only gotten the nod for a couple weeks ago. He’s been with the company for over a year though and had done a stellar job in dispatch, so was rewarded with the upgrade to First Officer and a flying position. I was actually worried for him, that he did TOO good a job in dispatch and risked being un-promoteable with the difficulty they were going to have in replacing him with someone who worked as hard or as diligently as he did.

  I showed up at 5, with coffees for Michael and myself. I was tasked with stopping at the Tim Hortons on the way in and picking up the “ catering “ for the trip, a half dozen donuts and a half dozen muffins, for the passengers to munch on for the one hour flight to Ft Macmurray.  The charter trip was actually for a broker, who worked for the oil field company in arranging all of the flights, we happened to win the contract for this little piece of a much bigger pie. The donuts and muffins were their requirement.

  Michael had the plane out, tidied up and was manning the check in counter. We would get a manifest the night before as to how many guys were expected on the flight. As such, my flight planning had actually been done the night before, required fuel load calculated based on how much weight I had left to play with after the passenger count and baggage estimate. Therefore the plane had also been fueled the night before. Along with my flight planning having been done already, there really was little to do other than get updated weather, winds and check the NOTAMS, plug the numbers into the computer to spit out an Operational Flight Plan. Hang out at the check in counter while Michael welcomed our passengers, checked their name off the list, help stack their bags on the cart and await our departure time at 6. 

  Around 540, we’d call it closed. If anyone hadn’t showed up, it was technically too late. Although, if they came huffing into the terminal at any time prior to us actually taxiing away, we’d likely take them. Even then, more than once we’d been radioed to taxi back, shut one engine down and board a late arriving passenger.

  Michael was great, as a newly minted FO in his first flying job, he was eager, enthusiastic and on the ball. He hadn’t seen enough of commercial aviation to have as much perspective on things. From his point of view, this was the big leagues. I know when I was in his shoes, and frankly, it hadn’t been that long ago at that point, everything was amazing. The captains never failed to impress me with their knowledge and competence, making me look forward to that day myself. Looking back though, I really didn’t have all that much more experience than he did. On top of the normal enthusiasm and diligence though, he was, and is, just a switched on guy.

  The guys in the back were oilfield technical workers. A variety of trades, plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, engineers of varying skill level. To us though, they were all “ Rig Pigs “, maybe not to their face, but most definitely to anyone else. They came by the moniker honestly though. The oilfield trades attracted a certain type and the things that they had to endure as part of that job, tended to weed out a few demographics. A fairly rough crowd was all that was left that would put up with living in trailer camps for two weeks, away from family and friends, and working outside in some pretty miserable Northern Alberta conditions. Some of the Rig Pigs that lived down south in the bigger cities were a lot worse though. Our guys were actually pretty decent dudes.

  It was a point of pride to estimate the time it would take to load the last of the bags, get the guys in and settled, safety brief done, pre-start checklist and cockpit setup completed, engines started and brakes released at exactly 6:00 AM, our scheduled departure time. Working for a charter broker as well, they were, in my opinion, unnecessarily anal about the times. If we routinely released brakes at 603, there would be a phone call from the broker to the chief pilot, questioning our ability to satisfy their needs as a vendor. When we could routinely have winds in our favor, or working against us, that changed our arrival times by plus or minus ten minutes, those three minutes were irrelevant in my opinion, but what I do I know, I’m only the pilot.

  At 605 we lift off the runway. Positive rate, gear up. Four hundred feet it was flaps up, climb power, after takeoff checks. By 0615 we were cruising along at our cruising altitude of somewhere between 19 and 25 thousand feet, depending on where my flight planning juju had determined the most favourable winds and wether would be found for the one hour flight. It was roughly 200nm from our town over to Fort Macmurray.

  I find it interesting that if you took a map of Northern Alberta and drew our flight planned route onto it, almost exactly at the halfway point you would find yourself in a semi significant point. At that point, you were likely going to be in the most remote area of the province. In terms of distance between towns of any size and highways or roads, there is a spot that we were very near, that is farther from any of that than any other place in the province.

  So, naturally, that’s when the engine on the left side of the airplane decided to fail, catastrophically and with great fanfare.

 BANG. bang-bang-bang.

  You could feel the noise, the first bang very loud, and a series of smaller bangs followed. I looked over my left shoulder at the engine that sits just outside my window. There was a 5 foot long blue torch of flame coming out of the exhaust stack. It was just like the torch you would see off the end of a household propane torch, or the afterburner of Tom Cruise’s F14. Blue, precise and steady. No ragged orange bonfire or black smoke, just a nice neat blue blowtorch coming from the exhaust stack. For those unaware, the King Air 200 does not possess afterburners, and the torch was not supposed to be there. Neither were the little red/orange specks, or “ meteorites “ that randomly came out as well, disturbing the perfect blue torch and randomly shooting off over the back of the wing.

  I turned to Michael and said, “ Let’s shut that down, engine shutdown drill please “. I think that’s what I said, it’s been a few years. Michael, having just finished his initial type training and very first PPC several days before this flight, executed the calls and actions perfectly. Likely better than most would, the experience of having trained for this so fresh. Left side power lever, confirm? Confirmed. IDLE. Left side Prop lever, confirm? Confirmed. FEATHER. Left side condition lever confirm? Confirmed. CUTOFF.

  Next up I called for the checklist. I must have not called for it properly, which would be by the title it appears in the QRH, or Quick Reference Handbook. Michael queried me as to which checklist, suggesting Engine Fire in Flight. I chuckled and said no, the fire is in the exhaust, that’s where its supposed to be, lets do the engine failure in flight checklist. I must have said “ alright, checklist “ or something, for him to ask which one.  The flames had gone out with us taking away the fuel and the propeller had stopper spinning, with us moving the prop lever to the feathered position. Michael grabbed the QRH and read out the remaining engine clean-up items, turning the generator off, turning off the bleed air switch, and confirming we’d done all the necessary steps from the Engine Shutdown Drill, or memory item, portion of the checklist. I’d actually missed the step of shutting off the fuel firewall shut-off valve, so we caught it in the checklist.

  I can’t remember if I had left the autofeather system running at the time. The system is designed to detect  an engine failure and automatically, with no input from the pilot, move the offending engines propeller to the feathered position. Feathered simply means that the prop blades are turned/rotated so that they face edge-on to the wind, instead of paddle-on to the wind, if you will. This stops the wind from turning the propeller and showing an edge-on profile to the wind. This cuts down o the drag the propeller creates as it is no longer providing power. In some cases, Like right after takeoff, or at high weight, low airspeed conditions, the drag created by a windmilling propeller might be the difference between limping a steady climb or being unable to climb and being forced down…or worse. It’s one of the key differences between flying a propeller driven aircraft and a jet, and is one of the few things that might need to be done expeditiously…or else….

    Back to the autofeather, a lot of people and a lot of companies, mandated that the system be turned off at some point after takeoff. Usually when you’ve got enough altitude or airspeeed, like in cruise, that the feathering of the prop isn’t so time critical anymore.  You let the auto system help you on takeoff when seconds count, you do it manually yourself later on in flight, when you have lots of time. Knowing the system, I actually liked to just leave it on. There are no moving parts being worn by leaving it on and I felt like turning it off and on every flight, you were only increasing wear on the switch. At the time too, that company didn’t mandate it being turned off, so I rebelled in my ability to show off my knowledge of the system and my ability to make “ command decisions “ and usually opted to leave it on…and tell anyone my reasons when they invariably asked why I was leaving it on.. I had since fallen in line with turning it off, as it was mandated to be done so in a later update of the SOP’s. The reasoning for the change, I think, was that it gave you a “ clean board “. The annunciator panel would have two green lights that indicated the Autofeather system was armed. If you turned it off, the board would be clean. The thinking being that if you were accustomed to seeing lights there, you might grow accustomed to ignoring them or be subject to confirmation bias as you expected to see lights on. But they might be different lights, on a panel that was your first clue that something might be amiss.

  I was a new captain ok, leave me alone. Anyways, because our engine failure happened in cruise, in the only airplane on the fleet that had autopilot, I suspect that I don’t remember if it was left on or not as there was little noticeable effect when we “ feathered “ the prop and shut the engine down. Either I didn’t notice the adverse yaw from the failed engine due to the autopilot compensating for it, or wether it feathered automatically due to my leaving autofeather on, or wether I simply gave it the corresponding amount of rudder input to compensate and don’t remember doing it, I’m not sure. Some parts of flying are automatic, like turning off your headlights in a car, or closing door when you leave the house. You think back later and can’t remember doing it or not doing it, because it’s such a rote action.

  Checklist complete, it was time to tell ATC. I was Pilot Flying, so Michael was Pilot Not-Flying the guy on the Radios. Most companies use Pilot Flying and Pilot Monitoring now, PF and PM, but at that time and that company it was PF and PNF.  I looked at the GPS and it said 98 miles to go to get to Destination, 102 Miles to go to get back to where we started, and the closest airport with any decent services was Slave Lake, 79 Miles away. I figured we weren’t really in any dire need of getting it on the ground in a hurry, and landing anywhere other than back at home base, caused a lot of new problems for everyone else. One thing was certain, when we landed that plane, it wouldn’t be going flying again anytime soon. Anywhere other than home base and the maintenance guys would be loading replacement tools and engine in a truck(s) and doing an engine change on a cold winter ramp somewhere and we’d be stuck driving for hours to get home, our passengers facing similar logistical issues to get home or to work. I decided we could go back home, it was a choice I felt I could defend, other than simply wanting to avoid a bunch of work. 

  “ Mayday, mayday, mayday”,  He keyed up his mic and said, “ this is Northflight102, declaring an emegency, engine failure, wed like to return to HomeTown.”. The controller cleared us for a 180 turn back to whence we came, and got a few more details from Michael, souls on board, fuel remaining, whether we needed any additional assistance. “ Seven Souls, 1500 pounds of fuel, no additional assistance required. “. I had turned off the autopilot when we had ran the shutdown checklist, so I made a gentle turn back, to the right, to avoid turning into the dead engine, and get us established on a GPS direct track back home. 

  “ Northflight102, would you like a lower altitude? “ they queried next. Naw, I thought, we’re doing fine here, as I glanced down a the cabin pressurization instruments. Doh. We weren’t doing fine, the bleed air coming off the sole remaining engine was now responsible for providing all of the pressurization air to keep our cabin air breatheable up here at 22,000 feet, and it wasn’t keeping up. In theory, one engine should be able to provide all the pressurization you need. This plane however, had come off the factory line several decades ago and it now had all kinds of things ham stringing that ability. Little holes and leaky seals that allowed that air to escape, enough that our one plant couldn’t pump enough air into the cabin and keep it there, to keep it to a “ cabin altitude “ of less than ten thousand feet. I could see on the cabin rate of climb ( or rate of leak ) gauges that we were climbing around 800 feet a minute, it should have reads zero.” Oh, uh, yeah, tell him we’ll take a descent down to 14,000 feet and we will seee if we can hold the cabin there “. I think if he hadn’t said anything, I likely would not have noticed till the Airplane warned us with a “ Cabin Alt High “ warning once the cabin had climbed up over 10,000 feet. 

  Down we went in a slow descent towards 14,000 feet and it was time to talk to the passengers. Since I was flying the plane, I elected to delegate Michael to jump in the back and tell the guys what had happened, that everything was fine and that we’d be back home in Northtown in a little under 45 minutes. For my part I turned and nodded to the guys in the back, hoping to convey that this was no big deal and we were all safe, calm and casual up front. Michael came back in a minute or two and said he’d let them know, that they seemed fine. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, other than I had fulfilled my responsibility to keep them informed, I could check that box and move on to the next item in the list of things we needed to do.

  Up next was talking to the company to let them know what had happened and that we were coming back. I seem to remember talking to the dispatcher on the company frequency myself, although it technically would have been Andrew’s role on the radio as PNF. The chief pilot came on after I had relayed in broad terms to the dispatcher what had happened and what our plan was. He seemed overly calm, almost disinterested, and to his credit, I’m fairly certain that was intentional and he was just trying to help keep everyone calm. He let us know he’s meet us on landing with the tug, so that we could shut down and he’d pull us on to the ramp. The Kingair is not easy to steer on the ground with a bunch of power on one side and nothing on the other. The nose gear turns, but it was usually a combination of differential power and differential braking that you’d use to taxi around. Attempting a turn against a running engine with a dead one, wasn’t easy and you could risk an embarrassing end to a great single engine landing but running off the side of the runway or taxiway at low speed.

  The slog back home was slow on one engine, but eventually we got in range of the control tower at our home field and called them up on the radio.

  They said something about fire trucks and emergency equipment would be standing by, to which I casually told him that I didn’t think we’d need them. In hindsight, that was a dumb idea, to try and call them off but he told me it wasn’t my choice anyways, that once we declared the emergency we were getting the trucks wether we requested them or not. Cooler heads had prevailed.

  Michael and I went over the single engine approach checklist in advance and rehearsed what we would do if we had to go around, and that I would plan on a long landing, with no reverse thrust off our now-uneven reverse thrust capability with one engine. It was a perfectly clear day, with light winds and we planned on a long, straight in final to our landing runway, with little maneuvering required. It really didn’t get much better than this. Even the fact that the engine had failed at altitude, in cruise, was about the best case you could hope for.

  I could see the fire trucks, police cars and ambulances, all lined up just outside the airport gates as we approached. Lights flashing away. It must have caused a bit of a spectacle in town, seeing all that equipment racing to the airport at the same time. It’s a small town, I’m sure tongues were wagging.

  The approach itself was a non event really. Honestly, everything after the first 3 or 4 seconds of startle when it calved on us, were pretty calm and uneventful. You train this scenario over and over again, so the actions are well rehearsed and other than the airplane being a bit slower than normal, there wasnt much for drama. No flaming wing, no trailing smoke, no violent bucking or shaking.

  We landed and rolled long, using the brakes to slow us down and then coasting once stopping was assured. I rolled it to the end of the runway where the turnaround bay was, to give the maximum amount of room to turn around and taxi back down the runway to the taxiway exit that leads off to the apron. I had seen the company tug sitting on the taxiway while we landed, so intended on meeting him there and shutting down for the tow-in. I didn’t know it at the time, but he had actually intended on coming out onto the runway and towing us in from where landed and shut down. I figured I could make the first two turns on one engine. The turnaround at the end would be “ towards “ the dead engine, so the good one could help pull us around and the turnoff onto the taxiway was also a left hand turn, so I rightfully assumed that those two turns would be no problem and we could be towed from there, to avoid any right hand turns. In any event, he saw us turn around and start the taxi back towards him, so they stayed put and we turned off the runway and shut down on the taxiway, facing the tug, so he could hook up and pull us in.

  Once we got pulled up to the terminal, I turned around to talk to the guys before they got off. That’s when I realized that they were a lot more shook up than I realized. I had heard them clapping after we landed, but didn’t put too much thought into it, and honestly, I had other things on my mind. However, one of my biggest takeaways from the whole experience was that I had kind of failed to account for what it felt like to the passengers.. While we were plodding back, slowly, to base, they were composing texts to loved ones and were a lot more anxious about things than I realized. 

  In hindsight, I would have delegated the flying to Michael and gone back there to talk to them myself next time. Not that Michael did anything wrong, but I feel like having the “ captain “ come back and reassure them would have been appropriate, and maybe made them feel a bit better.

  While Michael got the passengers deplaned, I got the cockpit in order and started on the logbook. We were still hooked up to the tug and they motioned that they’d tow us back to the hangar and I might as well sit tight. 

  Pulling onto our ramp and into the waiting hangar, the maintenance guys came out to look at the plane. I remember one of them giving the prop a tug on the now-defunct left engine, and it was frozen tight. Whether mechanically, or due to sitting motionless in the -40 degree air for 45 minutes while we droned back home, I don’t know. Seeing the pictures of the internal damage to the engine later on, I could easily imagine that it was mechanically seized in place. I can only speculate wether or not we would have retained the ability to feather the prop for much longer if the damage had continued, with debris and metal in the oil from the engoine tearing itself apart from the inside out. A prop that wont feather is not a death sentence, neccasssarily, but it would have definitely escalated the seriousness of our situation. Most definitely it would have made our ability to “ go around “ had anything unexpected happen during the landing, very much in doubt.

  After the plane was handed off to the mechanics, Michael and I headed inside to start work on the paperwork. The operations manager was in the flight planning room already and she had most of the incident report filled out already. We both had to provide a brief narrative while it was still fresh in our heads and this was likely a good idea, even now I find myself questioning the sequence of events or details. Even after telling this story a million times. My current job has me flying with a new person all the time, so the rehashing and retelling of favourite stories gets them polished and embellishments or exaggerations get told so many times they slide into the truths place without even realizing it.

  At one point, while we were working on the incident report, I was asked, “ what engine indications did you see before you decided to shut the engine down “. I’m pretty sure I actually laughed when they asked me that. I had small explosions off my shoulder, a giant blow torch coming out of the engine that shouldn’t be there and little red hot pieces of metal blowing out into the slipstream. I admitted that I had no idea, that was the last thing on my mind as to what the Interstage Turbine Temperature was or the Power Turbine’s RPM.

  The whole experience was actually pretty calm, as really, it wasn’t ever really a dangerous or exhilarating event. There was a moment though, after the paperwork was all done, and I was sitting in the flight planning room with the ops manager, that stuck out to me. At one point she reached over and shut the door, “ how are you doing? “ she asked, “ fine, yeah, all good “ I replied, almost automatically. “ No. “ she said, giving me a serious look, “ really, how are you doing? “ . It caught me off guard and there was a brief moment that I felt a lump in my throat and was a little taken aback at my reaction. There was an element of stress that you bury away and make sure the passengers don’t see, that your copilot doesn’t see, and it kind of hit me all at once when she said that. 

  A few months later, I was informed that Pratt and Whitney had concluded their investigation into the engine. I was told that the had determined that since we initiated the engine shutdown procedure while the turbine was still spinning, that they were classifying it as a “ Precautionary Shutdown “ instead of an Engine Failure. A precautionary shutdown is when you decide to turn off an otherwise functional engine, in order to keep it from progressing into a failure, or because you see an engine indication, like oil temperature or pressure, that you suspect might lead to engine damage if you let it keep running. It was impressive with the level of internal damage that the engine had sustained, that we never really did feel any vibration or anything, other than the initial bangs. Its most definitely a testament to Pratt engineering that even after that level of damage, that it was still producing some amount of power and still spinning, at the moment we turned off the fuel and shut it town. That being said…When I hear them advertising these very impressive Mean Time Between Failure statistics in order to sell engines, I keep it in the back of my head that they classified an engine spitting out pieces of its internal structure in an unplanned fashion, a “ Precautionary Shutdown “. Mentally, I divide their number in half. Its still a very respectable number, but….

  Anyhow, I’ve only ever met a small handful of people that have experienced an engine failure in a Pratt and Whitney Turbine engine. Maybe I’m not hanging out with enough old guys, but the truth is, its a very small club.

  I have cell phone video, that one of the passengers actually filmed from the back of the view up the aisle and through thee cockpit window, showing our landing. It’s of potato-quality and honestly, there’s not much to see in the video, it looks like pretty much every landing shot from the back of a King Air. The only clue is he briefly pans past the left wing and you can see the stopped propeller. You can also see the lights of the fire trucks and ambulances briefly as we whizz by. I tried to post it, but it wont take.

  We ended up making the news, in a couple of online articles of the local CBC affiliate. With what you can imagine is the right mix of drama and media embellishment of the hero pilots and their stricken plane.

  Anyways, I’m going through my camera roll and will be working on a couple more posts. I’m finding that if I work on the blog regularly, in small chunks, it feels sustainable. I chuckle when I see on my sidebar the list of blogs that I used to follow when I kept this up regularly. Almost all of them show a last-post date of 8 to 10 years ago. So I don’t feel so bad. I don’t presume to have any regular readers, but I know I have a couple family members that used to follow and this might pop up in their notifications as to a New Post being available.  I’m considering alernating betweeen time-travelling stories of previous adventures now that I can freely post, with former employers and maybe doing a series of Trip Reports for my current employers, that have more to do with travelling the world than with anything related to the plane I am flying now, as its even more off-limits than previous companies were.

  If you’re still along for the ride, I welcome the feedback and hope you have been amused!

Medevac Flying

  I really enjoyed flying Medevac. All told I did it for almost six years, and I still plan on doing it. My current job has me working seasonally, hopefully I can resume working with my previous employer in the off-season, and Medevac flying is part of that job.  No one really knows what things are going to look like this fall, so I might end up resuming my regular job, looking for a new one altogether, or taking the winter off. My new seasonal gig is awesome, its exciting and it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. In theory after a few years with the new company I can afford to take winters off, that's a pretty good trade for working away from home for my summers.

  I digress, I'm supposed to be writing about things I've done in the the past, back to the time travelling...

  Flying Medevac in Alberta, usually went like this.

  ( I'm fairly certain a lot of this has changed since I was there! )

  Captains had phones issued by the Health Authority, and your working schedule was given to them by the company you worked for. When I was there, there was five different contractors providing planes and crews to the Health Authority. I think there might be two now.   Each contractor might have one or two bases and each base had one or two planes. Bases in Alberta at the time were Medicine Hat, Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Peace River, Slave Lake, Fort Mcmurray, High Level and Fort Vermillion.

They'd put out an email a couple times a day with all the different districts on-duty pilots for a given day and night period, for anyone to correct if there were mistakes. Each Medevac aircraft usually had at least two full crews on shift at any one time.

   Some operators ran 12 hour day/night shifts and others ran a " rolling duty day " system. For the most part, most 24 hour medevac operations in Canada have moved to the day shift / night shift system as its backed up by a lot of science as to be the safer system in terms of managing Fatigue.   In this system, you are assigned as either Day or Night shift and you can plan your life and sleep schedules accordingly.

  In the old, dark days of medevac flying it was a bit different.

  When I say old days, there are in fact still a few hold outs clinging to the Rolling Duty Day system. It used to the standard, and operated with the blessing of Transport Canada. Then again, at one point they also sanctioned smoking in pressurized metal tubes full of kerosene and humans, so just because it was once deemed safe by the almighty regulator doesn't mean much.

  The Rolling Duty Day system basically worked by having a crew member come " on shift " on the first day of their rotation. Typically anywhere from 7-14 days in length. Once they were on shift they would essentially be on-call 24 hours a day, until their days-on elapsed. Once you got called out on a trip, you were considered rested and fresh, you could then give them 14 hours of your best efforts until you " dutied out ". At that point they had to give you " an opportunity for eight hours of prone rest ". This usually equated to nine hours off, one hour to drive home, get some food, take a shower, get eight hours of sleep and then be considered rested and fresh again, ready for the next call.

  The biggest problem is your call could come in at 11 o'clock at night, just as you're laying your head down for some sleep after having been up all day, awaiting a call. Off you go, medevacking all night long, getting home at 1 PM the next day. You are then expected to sleep for eight hours, so you can do it all again at 10 pm. If every time you came fresh, you got called out right away, there's a certain rhythm to it you could adapt to, just like any other night shift worker. The problem is you'd come fresh at 10 PM after having slept all day, and then you wouldn't get called out till 5 AM the next day.

  There is an inherent efficiency to this system, until you fall asleep in the plane or make some other fatigue induced blunder. As a company you need less crews for each airplane and no matter what time your customer calls looking for a trip, you always have a fresh crew on duty, ready to give them the full 14 hours of flying.

  When you run a day/night shift, you run into overlap issues, a 6 hour trip comes up when the the day shift only has four hours left in their day. So you call the night shift in 4 hours early, and now their shift ends before the next days day-shift comes on. This can pile up with the shifts sliding each day till you've wiped out both crews and can't give the customer the 24 hour coverage you committed to when you were awarded the multi million dollar medevac contract.

  Especially problematic is when you take the high road, put your faith in the science of fatigue, and commit to running additional crews on a safer shift system, and your competitor does not...well...it might not be your contract for long when the customer sees the bottom line dollar figure...


 Either way, you were tied to that phone

  The Company Phones were all preset from the authority, you really couldn't do much with them. Even the ring tones were all preset. As you can imagine, it was set to the alarming and jarring Klaxon type of alarm. I still set my ringtones on phones to that sound if I really want to get my pulse going.

  Trips were a mixture of Advanced Life Support and Basic Life Support ( ALS / BLS ) types of trips. In Alberta at the time, we carried two different types of Medics in the back. One was like the Sith and the other was the Apprentice. I never could wrap my head around their different levels of accreditation, Medic, Paramedic, Nurse, Flight Nurse. I do know that one of them was senior and allowed to do a lot of things, the other not as much.

  Different jurisdictions had different levels of medical personnel in the back. Some allowed single-medic trips, others had the junior/senior 2 crew setup and still others had senior/senior levels of crewing.

  Patients were predominantly stable and low acuity. Some were even Ambulatory, that is, they could walk on and off the plane by themselves. If I had to give it numbers, I'd say 80% were awake, alert, in some form of discomfort ( even if it was simply caused by riding around in a King Air on a stretcher! ), but otherwise indistinguishable from a regular passenger. 10% were unconscious, stretchered, hooked up to machines. Another 10% were in very dire straits, had some form of traumatic injury or condition, were hooked up to breathing apparatus and had ( at least the appearance ) the chance that they may not survive the trip to the hospital.

  Part of flying Medevac involves some form of training on medevac specific flight issues. The main one is the actual loading and unloading of a stretchered patient. The plane itself had some equipment installed inside to receive a flight stretcher and there was some form of ramp or " diving board " as we called it, for loading the stretcher into the plane.

  A King Air is a decent sized plane for medevacs, not too big that its uneconomical and not too small that it cant handle the patient, stretcher, medical machines, patient companion, luggage and medics.

  Still, the door width on a King Air is only 24-26 inches wide. There is a small hydraulic ram that helps lower the door softly, called a damper, and it takes away 2 inches of door width. Some carrieres had retrofitted the damper to be removable during loading, giving that extra 2 inches of width. And trust me on this one, you need every inch you can get.

  If a person was either too heavy to be lifted on the stretcher from the ambulance ground stretcher to the loading ramp, or, they were too wide in girth to fit through the door opening, they were then classified as a " Bariatric " medevac. Most of the provincial medevac contracts specified a weight limit that automatically bumped them up into bariatric territory once exceeded. Sometimes, being classified as a bariatric meant that they would have to bring in a larger and much more expensive aircraft to move you, or it simply meant a change in the loading equipment and manpower required for the loading and offloading. All of the above require more money spent by the health authority to move you to the destination where care was to be given.

  There's many reasons why a patient would move by medevac aircraft in the first place. Some of the reasons are actually bureaucratically induced, others are simply physics.  Since Canada has single payer health care, where the government looks after the health needs of its citizens as a right, it is also held to the standard that every citizen is entitled to ( roughly ) the same level of care, regardless of where they choose to live.

  Sometimes, in the case of remote communities without road access, this means flying them out to big city hospitals for surgeries or other specialized care.  Other times, the regional governments have crunched the numbers and concluded that it is simply not practical or economical to have an MRI machine or other specialized equipment or specialists in every town and makes more sense to move people to the machine. If that person is unable to travel on their own, or care is needed by a medical professional enroute, or they are not physically able to board a commercial aircraft, then they might be flown to the health centre by a medevac plane.

  I've moved patients with all manner of ailments. My lowest acuity passenger was someone travelling to the big city for an orthotic shoe fitting. I know, it sounds ridiculous to spend 10,000 dollars plus on a shoe fitting appointment, but there are many places in this country where these things might happen. If you need orthotic shoes to work, and the government is bound to provide them for you, you cant simply have the mobile shoe-van pop round to some arctic locale.. On the other end of the scale, people with missing limbs, or other grievous injury where the hours saved by moving them by plane most likely resulted in them living instead of dying.

  As a pilot, we used to be given patient details to include on our paperwork. We would see names, injuries/illnesses and other info. Eventually they realized we weren't sworn and trained health care professionals and likely shouldn't be seeing this personal and privileged information, so it soon stopped. Later still, it was realized, that flight crew may even let the state of the patient influence their decision making in regards to flight safety, based on the nature of the injury and be influenced to take more risk.  Eventually, most jurisdictions moved to a red/yellow/green classification and that was all you were told.

  Medevac aircraft get priority handling by Air Traffic Control, and you would often get asked by ATC " are you priority today? " before they bumped the commercial planes out of the queue to get you in or out first. They understood that even though we are " medevac " on the radio, the orthotic shoe fitting appointment lady may not need to have 250 people on the Lufthansa plane delayed on the taxiway so you can depart first.  If you were " red " however, you could tell them you were priority and they would go out of their way to speed you along.

  Most of the time, regardless of priority level, being a " medevac " call sign, meant you rarely had to fly time-consuming Arrival or Departure procedures. You were almost always cleared " direct ", making flight planning a breeze, haha!

  Anyhow, hope you enjoyed a little bit of time travelling with me. I’ve been thinking about getting back into doing a little blogging to get back in the habit of writing regularly. Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve worked for several companies, most demanded that I not post or share pictures, stories, tec, publicly. Not to burn any bridges, but enough time has passed that I feel comfortable sharing some of the pictures and experiences from those days.

  Even this post, actually, has been sitting in my drafts folder for several years. I’m now doing a very different type of flying, but still committing Commercial Aviation on a regular basis. Hopefully I find the discipline and interest to keep this going.

Take Care!

 

The Pox

 

Yes, well, so... I guess its time to mention the elephant in the room.

  Aviation in general, and Canadian Aviation specifically, has been decimated by the events surrounding the CoronaVirus.

  Prior to February of 2020, Canadian Aviation, from a pilot employment standpoint, was in the best shape it has been in for several decades.

  Over the course of the last five years or so leading up to 2020, things have been changing rapidly. Most , if not all, of Canada's major airlines were expanding rapidly. Smaller airlines were entering into agreements with the big airlines to take up the slack and fly their passengers to connecting hubs. The smaller airlines then stopped doing as much work on the charter side, leaving smaller charter operators to aggressively expand to capitalize on the new work floating around. It seems like everyone moved up a step.

  To a pilot, caught up in this, it has been nothing short of incredible. With Baby Boomer retirements already creating a hiring boom at the majors, you added in expansion, new airlines, new demand and increasing overseas demand of Canadian Pilots. All these things together created this giant sucking sound, hoovering up every available pilot into whatever niche or type of aviation they had their sights set on committing.

  The vacuum caused intense competition among airlines to attract crews. Pay went up, way up. Experience levels required to grace their inbox with a resume dropped...like really dropped.  When I started flying, it was pretty normal to expect that you would need to accrue at least 3 or 4000 hours of flight time before you could consider your resume suitable to get an interview at one of the regional airlines, where you could slog it out for five or ten years before being considered for a spot at one of the Majors.  At the peak of the hiring boom, candidates were being hired at the 750 hour mark, and they could expect their stay at the regionals to last 1-2 years before they would be upgraded to captain on the mighty Q400 or make the jump to a major airline.

 I'm using US terminology here, but in Canada there really is only two Regional Airlines, Jazz and Encore and two Major airlines, Air Canada and Westjet. There are several other smaller regionals and smaller Majors, but really, those are the main players in this story.

  The draining of the lower time pilots off to the airlines created scarcity down the food chain as well. At the smaller charter and medevac companies, a fresh license with no previous commercial experience was typical for new First Officers. Captains were no longer grey bearded veterans of arctic campaigns, but FO's that had resisted the siren call of the airlines and had a year or two sitting copilot.

  Everyone sat around, regardless of their experience level, and declared that this wouldn't end well and that THEY had put in their time, but these youngsters...much clucking of tongues.

  That of course is history. It is just another chapter in the cycle of aviation, that we can tell stories about in ten years and the new entrants will be wide eyed to imagine it ever happened.

  In the span of about 30 days, the shutdown of all aviation in quarantine regimes and the fear of getting into a sealed metal tube with pox ridden passengers drove passengers away from all levels of aviation. Tourism, a driver of a lot of aviation demand, collapsed in the face of international travel restrictions and outright bans.

  Some smaller airlines went under. Most reduced their flying schedules by incredible amounts, Air Canada, Westjet and their regional partners were only flying 5% of their previous schedules.

  The whole house of cards collapsed. Layoffs at the airline level have been shocking, literally tens of thousands of pilots have hit the streets in Canada in the last four months. 10,000 more are hanging on by the grace of the government providing a wage subsidy to their employer. The government is literally paying their wages so the airline doesn't let them go, their employer has no need of them. The scuttlebutt is that the subsidy is simply a way to keep some pressure of the Unemployment Insurance System while it deals with the fallout of nearly every industry in Canada shedding workers.

After 9/11 there was a similar collapse, commercial aviation demand dropped significantly and the airlines resized till demand came back. After the 2008 Financial Crisis, the demand dried up again with the loss of disposable income by the flying public. This one is a bit different, demand didn't dry up, it stopped. in an instant.

  No one knows when it will come back or at what level or what cost, but the scale is off the chart compared to the last two downturns that I've had the pleasure of seeing.

  I've been somewhat lucky, in that the niche flying that I've been doing is not nearly as hard hit. Its definitely taken a bite, don't get me wrong. My employment for this summer is pretty much unchanged, but come fall, my winter work has disappeared into thin air.

  I now get to compete with the flood gates of all the airline guys firing off resumes and hitting up old pals to try and find some flying work to put food on the table. Some of them got hired with very little experience and don't offer much to the smaller operators that Id like to spend the winter working for, but others made their way up the same as I did and have years of experience flying medevac, or other charter type flying before they went off to the airlines. The smaller outfits are a little leery of hiring the airline guys as they have a seniority number in The Big Show and would flee at the drop of a hat if ( and when ) things turn around.  I'm only seeking winter work at this time too, so I'm not the first pick either, as my summer work is not something I want to voluntarily give up. Its all moot in any case as the smaller operators are not hiring anyways as their demand has dropped off the cliff too! Good times.

So, there you go, state of the union. Not pretty, but not a new storyline either.

  You still got the number of that truck driving school, goose?


 

  Anyhow, back to time travelling!

Barn Find

  Out on a nice day Medevac trip to a small town one day, I came across something pretty cool at the airport we were sitting at awaiting our medics return with the patient, a PBY Catalina.

  Originally designed and built during WWII, as a naval reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft. The Catalina, also known as the Canso, was a flying boat, designed to land on water or on land. It had these cool "blister " windows that an observer could sit , searching the sea below for survivors of a downed ship, or an enemy submarine. I don't really know much for technical details, and frankly, you've got the google if you're interested in any case!

  I think the blister windows have been removed from this one, as it spent the latter part of its life in fire-fighting work and they weren't needed. THey would normally be on both sides of the fuselage, just aft of the wing. I'm told that's also where they would haul in the floating survivors rescued at sea during WWII.

  This particular Canso had been repurposed in its golden years as a fire fighting Scooper, or Skimmer. Refit with a water tank capable of refilling on lakes, it was employed in the service of Buffalo Airways in the NWT fighting forest fires, till it came to grief one day during a scooping operation on a remote lake in the Mackenzie Valley. My understanding is that its landing gear doors were somehow damaged during a scooping run and the aircraft began taking on uninvited water. The crew managed to abort the scoop and taxi the aircraft near shore, where it slowly sank in shallow water.

  The crew made it out OK and the aircraft was abandoned for  period of time in the lake. Far too remote to mount a proper recovery, eventually it was decided by its owners that they should at least refloat it and strip it for what parts they could. A team of engineers was sent to the site and they did just that.  Engines, Avionics and anything else of value were removed and then flown back to Yellowknife to live on in the rest of the fleet, or as is the Buffalo way, secreted away in one of Joes many hidey-holes of parts and kept for posterity and future value, not unlike a hockey card collection. You laugh now, but as any hoarder will tell you, you cant just throw that away, one day it'll be worth a fortune!

  The remains were left on the shore of the lake, inaccessible by road, for a period of time. Many moons, I'm told. How many? No idea, but the legends foretold that one day...never mind, you get it, I have no idea and am too lazy to look it up to make this a neatly foot-noted and hyper-linked historical record.

  So, now here it was at this small prairie airport, looking in relatively decent shape. I actually had no idea on the back story, till I saw it printed on a large sign erected near a small shack beside the aircraft. In addition to the story of its origins, was the story of the ongoing restoration. A group of retired aircraft engineers, who were now farmers in the area, knew of this aircraft and schemed to acquire the salvage rights to it, rescue it from a very remote piece of wilderness, drag it back to a barn and make it fly again. Some real huckleberry finn type adventures ensued, and they did just that.  Out they went, some 80? 100? 50? miles off the winter road of the mackenzie valley, they hacked and slashed a bush road into the site, prepped it for transport by dismantling the major components, wing, tail, fuselage and got it back to the winter road. From there it was moved by transport truck to the nearest town, Norman Wells maybe?

  There it sat till the summer barge season on the Mackenzie River, where it was moved down to Hay River, and then back onto trucks for the journey to the barn in Northern Alberta.

  That was as far as the story on the sign went, but underneath that was a call for volunteers and/or donations or membership purchases to their historical aircraft restoration society they had formed to help fund the project.

  As an FO, I had little in the way of funds to help, but they did specifically ask for volunteers, skilled or otherwise to help with the project.

  I wrote the number down and called them up a few days later.

  They let me know that they'd be happy for the help and that I should come out and attend their monthly meeting at one of the leaders farms a few weeks hence.

  Driving out there in the northern prairie winter darkness was interesting. There is something very surreal about being in a warm, quiet vehicle, driving over desolate winter rural roads. Reminds me a little bit of flying, inches away through a glass and steel( or aluminum I suppose ) structure, is a violent and unforgiving environment. The truck suddenly breaks down or the airplane engine stops making noise, and things change from warm and comfortable, to considerably less so in fairly short order.

  I had no idea what to expect of the "meeting",  but it turned out to be about six guys, sitting in upended milk crates and old office chairs in the shop of one of the farmers. Most brought thermos's of coffee and baked goods from home. The meeting was to plan for the next months projects, discuss parts acquisition plans and go over some of the tasks that needed doing. At this point in the restoration, most of the real grunt work had been done, the kind of stuff an unskilled person could help with. Tedious jobs of cleaning parts, tracing wiring, etc.  Although I didn't end up with any involvement in the project, it was cool to hear the story first hand. The baked goods were not bad either.

  The aircraft had been plundered by Buffalo for a lot of major components, notably engines. Luckily, they had come across a museum in the maritimes that had an intact and running Canso donated to them for static display. They had no need of perfectly good running engines, so cut a deal with these guys. If they could come up with a couple of engine " cores", non-working, but intact engines, that they could hang on their display model, they'd trade straight across for the working ones they had.

  Apparently, one of the bigger challenges they had was the wiring. As the engines are mounted up on the wing, all of the controls and wiring were routed up through a central pillar connecting the wing to the top of the fuselage. During the pillaging, this bundle was simply cut to disconnect the wiring. You can imagine too, that over the 50-60 year working life of the aircraft and its various modernization and upgrades/refurbishments, that the wiring had been changed so many times that it likely did not resemble the clean engineering drawings they had to go by. Each wire had to be traced, identified, replaced, a perfect job for the unskilled, but long since complete.

  In fact, at the stage that I came along they were nearing the finish line. The aircraft was intact, engines running and most of its systems airworthy. Odds and ends and some obscure and difficult to find parts for a few items were that was left. They even had a couple pilots lined up to fly the thing and were aiming for a flight date only a few months away.

  I asked how long the project had taken them to get to the current state.

" About nine years, eh frank? "

" Yup, about that. "

Holy crap.

  This wasn't a side hustle or hobby project, this was a lifetime achievement!

  I haven't personally seen it fly, but I know it has. As far as I know, the plan was to take it touring on the airshow circuit for a few years to try and recoup their sizeable expenses. These guys are nothing if not persistent, so I'm sure it did!

Lets go Back

Alright, lets get you updated, to a degree.

  I spent four years up North, flying seasonally, driving a truck in the off season.

  We had always known that our time up north was limited. One of our primary concerns was that when my daughter was school age, we didn't want her to be in the public school system in our far flung part of the world. There's some real challenges in the school system in remoter areas of Canada, both in available resources and the ability to attract good educators. This is by no means a slight on the school teachers that work up there, but I think even they would tell you of the frustration in seeing fresh-out-of-uni teachers coming up to cut their teeth in remote areas that the more experienced educators typically don't want to go to.

  So, there was that.  TWO was approaching the end of pre-school and getting ready to embark on her kindergarten career. We decided it was time to start the search for something that might take us somewhere else.

  The other concern of course was that while I loved the flying up north, the economics of that type of operation didn't lend itself to paying me a whole ton of money. Neither did the seasonal aspect lend itself to getting the kind of hours in the logbook that would let me earn something decent.

  Out went the resumes!

  When I first started looking for flying jobs, I sent out 100 resumes and got three responses. They were thanks-but-no-thanks responses, but I was happy to see them. Now I had 1000 hours and sent out 20 resumes. I really wasn't wanting to take ANYTHING like I did when I went looking for my first job. I knew I wanted year round work, knew I wanted to be south of 60. The industry was still very tight, jobs were still scarce and 1000 hours didn't mean much.

Crickets.

  Started to worry a bit and we girded ourselves for one more year up north. As is the way when you start to make other plans, the phone rang.

  On my resume I had listed a reference whose name was known by someone doing hiring for a King Air 200 Medevac First Officer gig.

  Funnily enough, after that resume blitz, my resume hasnt got me any of the other jobs I've held since. The industry is so small, as a commercial pilot, you're probably two degrees of separation at best from pretty much every chief pilot of every airline in Canada. If you're not an idiot, and you have a reasonably well-kept reputation, networking your friends and colleagues is going to be a whole lot more productive than the carpet bombing of resumes you have to do in the beginning! Even in this case, it had little to do with my resume, but more the fact that she knew someone that I knew and I put his name on my resume as reference.

  They called, I got excited, we chatted a bit about that person, and I made a joke or two. They chuckled, relieved I was at least personable, and was told I could expect an offer email.

  That was it.. A few days later I got the email, we talked about what it would mean in terms of moving, timelines, housing, school, pay and then we pulled the trigger.

  Notified my current employer that this would be my last season, and got busy with the details.

  Little details, like finding a place to live, finding work for my wife, finding a school for my daughter.

  We made a reconnaissance trip down a few weeks later to scope out a few places and get  the lay of the land. We made it South of 60, but not by a ton, haha. Far enough south that we now had access to several fast food places, a walmart and a canadian tire. Downright metropolitan!

  New Town had a lot going for it, including being a part of the tail end of a fairly significant oil-boom ( cue dramatic fore shadowing music ) that no one saw ending anytime soon. This is where Morgan Freeman's voice comes on in the background.... " It was going to end very soon. " he'd say, but we couldn't hear him.

  New Job also had me flying a King Air 200 as a first officer, something I was very excited about. IFR, Two-Crew, Turbine, exciting stuff! It was a medevac gig too, something that also interested me.

  We ultimately came to the conclusion that it was going to be cheaper to buy a house in New Town rather than rent. Crazy, but true. All of the local rental properties were being snatched up by the local oilfield companies for crew housing, driving the vacancy rates down and rents up.  We had managed to save up some money as my winter work paid well and the wifes government job paid well too. Our expenses were very low, living in our little trailer, so we had just enough to plunk some money down on a nice older house with a big yard and a garage.

( this picture is actually from when we moved out, we moved in with a much smaller moving truck, but like a goldfish, we expand our belongs to match the size of our tank..... )

  A close friend of mine from back in the day actually lived in New Town and we had him drive up to Northern Town and help us pack the moving truck. He'd then make the odyssey back down to New Town with us, he'd drive my Truck, the wife would drive hers, with my daughter, dog and back seats piled high with crap. I'd drive the moving truck. Of course it snowed on the way down and we ended up in a slow moving convoy, peering through the blizzard trying to stay on the road the last few kilometres. Keep it between the Mayo and the Mustard! ( yellow lines and white lines, I thought that was funny when I heard it..and in typical dad-joke fashion, I've ruined it by explaining it.. )

  One of my favourite parts of the new digs was that the backyard was big enough, and the weather cold enough, that I could put a homemade ice rink in the backyard.

  So, there we were. We made it "south" but still very much northern. We left a very small community, to a bit bigger, but still quite small community. Our winters were still cold, and relatively long, but a lot shorter than they used to be. Summers felt decadently long, at least for the first couple years, lasting from May though to October now, instead of June to September. If that doesn't seem long, well, like I said, its relative....

  I had to do a pre-employment drug test at NewCo, which doesn't bother me, I'm far too old to bother with drugs. Besides, can't really afford drugs on an FO salary!

  I dutifully showed up at the nurses "office", which was actually her home, along with another fellow who got hired at the same time as me. I have to pee in a cup twice a year as part of my medical exam to hold my license, so that's never bothered me or given me a second thought really. Until you move a thousand kilometres to a new city, with a wife who hasn't found work yet, and a young daughter, a fresh mortgage on a home you can barely afford, and EVERYTHING riding on your ability to pee in that cup. Guess who couldn't express a drop when it counted??  I had to eventually admit defeat, call the chief pilot and explain my technical difficulties.  Not my finest hour, but we laughed it off and I reported back the next morning with several litres of water sloshing around in my belly. Mission accomplished.

  Training started the next day, 5 hours of on-the-wing flight training on the King Air, taking turns with sitting up front for my training session and sitting in the back observing while the other guy did his. A training captain in the left seat up front.  I've done a few PPC's now, but I was still in single digit territory as to how many I'd done.

  A PPC is a Pilot Proficiency Check, a series of exercises, maneuvers and instrument procedures that certify you to fly a specific airplane for a period of one year. Every different " type " of plane you fly requires a yearly PPC or you lose certification on it. Most commercial pilots will have many different " types " on their license, but only valid PPCs on a couple that they fly regularly. A Type Rating is your initial course on that plane, and you hold the Type Rating for life, but if you want to be employed to fly that plane, it still requires a yearly flight test.  I'm giving you the coles notes here, as there's lots of little wheretofores, howsoevers and Unless in Accordance with the Minister legalese details, but thats it in a nutshell.

  Five hours of holding onto the mighty king air by my fingernails, followed by a hour and half  flight test with an examiner in the back. One false move and the house, the job, all on the line. Not stressful at all!

  Flight test done, 20 odd company training modules and exams, and there I was, a newly minted Medevac FO in Northern ( but not as northern as before ) Canada.

Not dead.

** Pfuuuuuu ** cloud of dust rolls off my blog, shreddies dust, goldfish crackers, an old OFP with coffee cup circle stains and a random paperclip.

Howdy strangers.

  I've been thinking about reviving this page for a long time, but just haven't had the time. As Jeff whats-his-name might say,  life, uh, gets in the way.

  I was thinking the other day about how a lot of the pilot blogs I followed when I first got into flying sort of faded out the same way. In a reduction similar or the number of guys I knew when I first started flying to the number I know that are still flying now. Eager beginnings, wide eyed and innocent, to jaded, couldn't be bothered clock punchers and folks who just dropped out of the industry in frustration or due to the reality of flying as a long term career.

  Anyway, I've found myself with some time in my daily routines and would like to keep this going.

  One of the reasons I stopped was that as my career progressed, I came up against working for companies that took confidentiality a lot more seriously. Employment agreements spelled out the posting publicly of just about anything to do with my paid employment as specifically No Bueno. Blogs and facebook posting were named specifically.

  Since the start of this blog though, I'm on my 5th employer. A lot of water has gone under the bridge. I'm thinking that I'm probably safe to time travel back and post some thoughts and experiences from a few gigs ago and be relatively safe. I will of course try to keep things anonymous, but frankly, this industry is so freaking small its likely that some people reading will pick up on my mannerisms or well worn cockpit stories and be able to identify me or my past or present employer.  Please play along and try not to comment or otherwise post anything that could endanger my ability to tell tales if a past employer was to see that they've been identified and don't like the content.

  I will also note that my current employer is strictly off limits, so I'll avoid that as best I can, and shut this down abruptly if I cant. Or my three readers aren't able to respect my need for anonymity.

  So there we go, I'm still alive, still committing aviation on a commercial basis, still paranoid about a forgotten old blog outing me. 

Saddle Up!

On Patrol

  So, a big part of my summer flying up north consisted of doing whats called " Smoke Patrol " for the local forestry department. Up here they're called the " ENR" , for  Environment and Natural Resources.

  On no particular schedule they'd call us up and request a plane ( and pilot ) to fly one or more of their guys around and do a patrol of the district for any new fires and to get updates on existing fires.

  Most of the time I flew with the same ENR guy. Occasionally when he was busy, they'd send up someone else, but most of the time it was me and Smoky the Bear. 

  Smoky had been doing this job for a long time. In fact, he'd moved further up the ranks in ENR than they would normally have someone out doing patrol. When things got busy later in the season, he'd have his hands full actually coordinating the actual fighting of the fires rather than the somewhat mundane task of buzzing around looking for new ones.

  The only thing was, during a patrol, he'd be able to have a first hand look at what the fire was doing, where it was, what kinds of fuels and terrain it was in and be that much better equipped to fight it. If someone else was to go up and do the initial assessment, the information they brought back to him was sometimes lacking... If you want something done right.....

  Anyhow. Smoky's office would call us up, usually in the morning, and book the plane for the afternoon. Smoke Patrol was usually done in 3-4 hour blocks and started typically around 2. Start too early and the fires might still be laying down from overnight dew. 2 was usually when things started to peak temperature-wise. Typical summer afternoons also meant thunderstorms, whose lightning causes 90% of the fires in the first place. If you went too early, you might miss the very early stages of a fresh fire where a helicopter or ground crew could quickly put it out.

  I'd fuel the plane right up, giving us a solid 4.5 hours of flight time. Occasionally we'd fuel up and go back out again later if things were really hopping, but usually it was just one 3-4 hour trip. The Territory is divided up into several fire districts and our district could be covered in 4 hours, depending on how many active fires there were.

 Smoky would show up and give me a brief overview of our route, usually referencing lakes, ridges, hills, towns, rivers, etc. I'd convert that into a short text message to my flight follower giving a very rough route with waypoints we all recognized. Smoky's office gave him a little briefcase-GPS tracker device which we'd set up in the back seat. I had a commercial tracker unit as well clipped to the side of the cockpit. We'd strap into the Mighty Skymaster and sweat our way through a quick run-up, before we blasted off and up into cooler air,

   It gets pretty hot in the plane on the ground, but in the air, we had " air conditioning ". Nothing so fancy as compressed refrigerant, but instead, I had a little fly window on my side that I could open and blast in 180 mile an hour air into the cockpit.

  We'd usually have a list of coordinates that they pulled from their storm monitoring program that listed clusters of lightning strikes from storms the previous day. These would be likely spots for new fires, which we'd check out. We'd also have a list of reported fires, from people on the ground or more often, passing aircraft. Up here there are a limited amount of roads, so spotting a fire from a passing car was pretty unlikely. Later in the season, we'd also have a list of active fires that we would monitor.

  Arriving on station at a new fire, I'd set up an orbit around 1000 feet and circle the fire a few times for Smoky to do his assessment. If this was a new fire, he'd also do an " ISM " report and radio it in. I'm pretty sure ISM stands for Initial Smoke Message, but I'm not 100% on that. In my head, I always thought of it as I Smell Money. A new fire meant I'd have at least one more flight to check on it, more if it got bigger and they were going to action it.

  As we'd orbit, Smoky would be recording fuel type, terrain, distance to nearest water source and a host of other details. These got recorded on the ISM report and then called in on the VHF radio we had installed in the plane for them. I'd provide temperature on the ground, wind direction and speed. Temperature derived from our temperature at altitude and corrected for lapse rate to the ground. Wind direction and speed were best guesses based on what I observed at altitude, plus visible signs on the ground, tree movement, water ripples, smoke, etc. I was pretty accurate with this as you needed to be able to figure this out for flying floats, and honestly, its not that hard.

  After the ISM was completed, we'd usually have to climb up to get better radio reception and range, so we'd either start the climb, or if we planned to map the fire, we'd duck lower and do the mapping first before calling it in.

  Mapping out the fire meant flying the perimeter of the fire as close as you could, while Smoky used a handheld GPS to get record the ground track so they could upload it into their fire map database. It also allowed them to calculate total area of the fire in Hectares. This was pretty important, so I assume a degree of their funding calculations were done based on reported hectares of fires for the season.

  Down we'd go to 200-500 feet depending on terrain and visibility. I'd usually slow to about 120 miles an hour and drop a notch of flaps. Flying the perimeter of a fire was fun and challenging, Fires are not nice and round, they often have "fingers" that run out from the fire that might only be a couple hundred feet wide. Sometimes the fingers were so long and thin it would be tough to make the turns to keep yourself over the fire, so you occasionally " took in some green ", where you ended up flying over unburnt ground. I'd usually cut in over the fire to " take in some black " and even things out, so the total size was accurate even if the actual map wasn't.

   Helicopters would do mapping too and they could do it much more accurately then me. If the actual map was critical, they'd send a helo out to do the mapping later. We were "ad-hoc" chartered too, where the helo's were usually on a fixed contract for a certain number of hours for the whole season, I think it was 300 hours. If it was a slow season, they'd send the helos up to burn off those hours doing something productive as they were going to pay for it anyways even if they didn't use it.

  The trick with mapping too, was to make sure that you " cut-off " the GPS track. You had to completely encircle the fire, with your ending track running over where you began the track, closing the loop. If they stopped the GPS tracker short, all they got was a circular line on the map and the computer couldn't calculate the area inside, Down low, concentrating on flying the perimeter, it can be easy to mistake where you started the track, so you made sure to pick a good landmark when you started. Picking part of the fire didn't work as it all looks the same, you needed a lake, a ridge or swamp, something distinct.

  Mapping was fun and challenging, probably my favorite part of Smoke Patrol. Mapping out an actively burning fire was another challenge as well. You had to navigate the burnt part, but you also had to deal with the burning side as well, the " head " of the fire. You wanted to fly as close to it as you could to get an accurate map, but now you also had flames up to a couple hundred feet high, as well as a column of smoke and hot air to get around or through, depending on the wind. If the wind was light, you could usually duck down low and duck under the smoke, beside the flames and get pretty close to the edge. If the wind was up though, you either had to go through the smoke down low or cut around it so wide as take in a lot of unburnt ground ahead of the fire.  I'm not a huge fan of flying down low in low visibility and flying through heavy smoke and ash was hard on the plane and its air filters, so it was a tough call sometimes. On really big fires, sometimes you took in huge mounts of unburnt ground to get around the head and sometimes you just couldn't map it.

  Flying through smoke always left tell-tale signs on the props, windshield and leading edge of the wings, so the Boss always knew too. I was to avoid it when practicable, but we all knew sometimes you had to go through the smoke a little.

  I really regret not taking more pictures of this part of the job. The smoke creates some really weird and beautiful lighting underneath it, with the sun trying to get through. I remember one fire in particular, it was so big it had a dozen or so really active heads, each creating huge columns of smoke. The air was pretty still so the columns formed up overhead to make a huge dome over us. Inside the "room" below the air was perfectly still as the sun couldn't heat the ground to make any convective currents and the light was this eerie red colour.

  You had to be careful though as the hot air of a fire can create its own weather and can really rock a small plane if you get into it. Occasionally the rising air is so hot and rising so fasst it punches right up into the stratosphere, making its own thunderstorm overhead the fire. There were a couple of these " Pyronimbus " clouds formed this season that deposited ash from the territories as far away as Portugal!

  After mapping, we'd climb back up to 1500 feet if we were going to transit to the next fire, or higher if we were going to radio everything in.

  Fires were assigned a number, in sequential order of their discovery. at the beginning of the year, up to about fire 40 or so, you knew them all by heart. Chances are, you discovered all of the, anyway. Later in the season, when they got up to 90 or so, there were lots that had been found by helo crews, others that had gone out and you needed coordinates to find them. The Garmin 430 in the plane I flew the last two seasons, it was a piece of cake to enter coordinates. Prior to that we were using a plane with a Areamap something-or-other that had you using a little joystick to physically move the pointer on the map while the coordinates displayed underneath. This was a bit of a pain as to get precise locations and the map turned if you were turning at all, making it hard to keep oriented with the joystick, while flying.

  Smoky's GPS tracker gave real-time location info to the fire dispatch centre, mine only plotted a location when I pressed a button, for my flight follower to know where we were. I'd use the aircraft timer to do 30 minute check-ins, and usually do my fuel calculations or tank switching on the same schedule. I needed to burn an hour of fuel out of my main tanks before I could switch over and use my aux tanks. I had to burn my aux tank fuel as soon as that hour was up, and they burned for 45 minutes. You couldn't burn aux fuel first as the fuel injection system returned half the fuel pumped to the main tanks, if they were full, the returning fuel would go overboard, out the vents. you couldn't burn aux fuel last either as they didn't have a boost pump for the aux tanks, meaning if the engine quit, you couldn't restart it.

  Fire dispatch would give us updates on other aircraft working around us, letting us know if a fire was being actioned, so we could keep our distance. We'd also talk to the bird-dog pilots who would warn us if the bombers were en route. In civilian aviation, airspace around a fire is automatically restricted airspace and you need to be either 3000 feet above it or 5 nautical miles away from it. Since we were involved in the fire action, it didn't apply to us, but if there were bombers on the fire, we'd stay at least that distance away, if not more. They were being coordinated by the bird dog aircraft flying above, and had restricted airspace to work in, so weren't looking out for other traffic most of the time, focusing instead on the ground and their bombing run. Helicopter pilots working a fire were simply crazy and would run into you, just to see what happens.

  I had one instance where we were going to a fire we spotted that was right on the edge of the territorial boundary with a neighboring province. We couldn't tell if it was on the border or outside our jurisdiction, so we flew over to it to check the GPS coordinates. Arriving, we found it just outside our territory, but it looked fresh, so we decided to do an ISM to pass onto the neighboring province, as long as we were there. Problem was, they did know about it and had two helicopters working it when we arrived. We didn't see them until our second orbit or so and they weren't on our radio system so didn't hear them either. I usually monitor the enroute frequency of 126.7 as well, but had turned down the volume earlier as I had three radios squawking at me, and had forgotten to turn the volume back up. They had been making calls, and I thought I was monitoring, but I couldn't hear them. As soon as we saw them we did a 180 and got out of there. I went to make a radio call on 126.7 and that's when I discovered the volume turned down, turning it up, i heard them talking about the " white fixed wing ". Apologized and beat feet for home. oops.

  This past fire season was their worst season in, I think, recorded history. A big fire for us would normally be 30-50,000 Hectares. We'd get two or three of those in a typical season, with the rest being much smaller. This season we had four fires that were each 500,000 plus Hectares in size, along with many more in the 50,000 plus range. It got so bad later in the season that Smoke Patrol pretty much died off to nothing, as they couldn't spare the manpower to go up and look for new fires. Quite frankly, I think they were scared what they would find.

  Crews and tanker aircraft, helicopters and ground crew were brought in from pretty much every other Canadian Province and probably the States as well. 200 Man camps were set up and moved around as they tried to fight these huge fires. Communities were threatened and we were grounded more than once due to extremely poor visibility in the smoke, blanketing thousands of square miles.

  Once community in particular was completely encircled by one fire, 

Before. 

  With the ground crews fighting the fire from the streets of the village. I had been flying a charter and was listening on the VHF radio as the drama unfolded, with the fire jumping the only road into town, they were trapped in town and the radio calls were getting pretty panicked. Vehicles abandoned, all they could do was put their pumps in the lake and fight the fire. They managed to save the village, but the luck of the winds was on their side or it could have ended quite differently.

After.

  There is an old debate about fighting these fires. One side is to let them burn, its a natural process and keeps the fires small. The other side is to fight everything and hit them when they are small and can actually be put out.

  If you let them burn, the right combination of winds and fuels can let a monster set up and then threaten a town. Why didn't you fight it?

  If you fight everything, the unburnt fuel builds up to unnaturally high levels, setting the stage for monsters to get going, which you can't fight, even if you wanted to. Why did you fight them?

  I felt bad for Smoky, as it was often his call as to whether to fight a fire or not. He had decades of experience in making those calls, which is why he got stuck in the plane so often. But so much is out of his control. He'd fight something small and they'd accuse him of wasting resources. He'd let a fire go and the winds would change around a couple times and suddenly a Value-At-Risk was burned down.

  Value-At-Risk or VAR, was the term for pretty much anything man made that a fire might threaten. A key factor in the decision whether to fight a given fire was whether or not their were any VAR's nearby. a VAR might be a trappers shack made of a few sheets of plywood and tarps, hauled in by snow machine in the winter out to the middle of nowhere. It might only be worth a couple hundred bucks in materials, but they'd send in 10,000 dollar an hour bombers to save it. Then again, next winter when the trapper gets stuck in bad weather and needs his shelter that he put up and finds it gone, when he needs it the most.....well, you get the idea.

  As a pilot up here, you got to know where all these little shacks, lodges and cabins were. Either by flying the owners or materials out in the first place, or just from mentally cataloging them as you drone along over hundreds of miles of wilderness. the ENR guys, even Smoky, would ask you first if you knew of anything nearby, as the location of a lot of this stuff isn't recorded anywhere else.

  Couple random pictures;

  This is a test-block. Used for testing different methods of firefighting, fire control and who knows what else. They'd burn sections of these from time to time, maybe to train firefighters, I'm not really clear on the whole purpose. I'm sure google knows and I'm too lazy and/or uninterested to look.

    Hope you enjoyed your time On Patrol!