It’s my first time

The other new thing I’ve got to get a handle on is filing a flight plan. It you are vaguely interested you can download the form and guide here.

The form itself is not exactly important. You fill it in but then file it by phone. The same number that I call to get the low down on the weather also allows me to file and then close a flight plan, the latter being incredibly important; we’ll get back to that later.

Again there are many subtleties that may escape you if you are not careful. When you phone file the flight plan, you specify a takeoff time (In UTC or Zulu time of course!). You have to kinda guestimate this, you could be early/late (more likely) for a whole plethora of reasons. As soon as you phone through that plan, it gets automatically opened at the time you designate. So in reality when you are airborne you need to contact flight services and let them know when you actually took off and adjust your ETA accordingly.

The adjusted ETA ties in with the importance of closing the flight plan, if you don’t show up where you are meant to be at the end of your flight, you’ve technically got one hour before the search and rescue people turn up. Actually they usually start getting a bit twitchy around half an hour after you are overdue. It’s a big country and there’s a lot of space for them to cover. And as tempting as it may be to have your own hunky military guys at your beck and call, it really is rather frowned up to call them out unnecessarily. You file and update as needed and then remember to close it.

Of course, the whole process revolves around the fact that I have to call someone, on the phone. I am not a fan of that. Although the form will help set the frame of the conversation, I know the guys from London FSS tend to speak a little on the fast side. If I’m not careful I could end up on an IFR flight to Thunder Bay at a planned altitude of 500 feet. Still I think I have a plan, it’s a human on the other end of the phone after all and I can rely on them knowing the phonetic alphabet! So any difficulties in communications can at least be spelled out one painful letter at a time. And there’s always the “coming clean” option and admitting this is my first time and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Hey, a plea for help and a cute foreign accent has gotten me most places so far!

 

Could there be a worse combination?

Another fairly intense briefing session today covering the final aspects of the impending cross country trip, radio procedures and filling in the flight plan. More about the latter in another post. Let’s focus on the radio stuff.

There’s a lot to focus on. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that this route has been carefully designed by sadistic instructors to cause maximum workload to their students. The radio situation alone has been picked to cover pretty much every scenario or communications type you can come across. It terms of airports you deal with one controlled, towered airport with full ATC, one in a mandatory frequency zone where you talk to a person but they are not a “controller” per se and are located many many miles away, probably dealing with multiple airports and the final one with a UNICOM set up, where you basically chat amongst yourselves and figure it all out.

Between the airports I’m dealing with controlled airspace, the practice area frequency, London radio on various frequencies and other delights.

Bob has little scripts available for me to look at and adapt as needed. I plan to write out a script card for each radio call and then just discard them as I go. I told Bob as much, he nodded approvingly.

“I really hate the radio stuff, “I confessed

Bob laughed like I was making the world’s biggest joke.

“No, honestly. It causes me a high level of anxiety.”

Bob cocked his head at me, the embodiment of disbelief “YOU, of all my students, do NOT have a problem with radio work!”

I think that counts as a compliment!

The truth is though that radio work comes into the same category as talking on the phone. I’m fine if I know exactly how the call is going to pan out. If I have my little script and they stick to theirs. Even now, I still have to draw a deep breath before making my initial call to Toronto ground, each and every flight because I hate being the one initiating. Same on the phone , you can call me but I really hate calling other people. At work my phone goes straight to voicemail. I'll call you back almost instantly but I want to know what you want first.

So with all these plethora of radio calls for me to get stressed over, how could we possibly make it worse? Yeah we could make one of them I have to deal with a DRCO – that’s a dial up remote communications outlet. Basically it’s a radio station that you click your mike 4 times and it phones them up. Yay radios and phones how could this possibly go wrong? Yuck!

This is  going to be messy, I can tell.

Sometimes I wonder

If Bob is actually in the same plane that I am. Today’s flight wasn’t a disaster but it wasn’t exactly ideal. My instrument work took me some time to get into, my forced approach missed on the first attempt and my diversion got off to a rocky start although admittedly it got much better, with me being pretty much on course. My pitiful attempts to locate where I was after emerging from the hood was, well exactly that, pitiful. How anyone can fail to notice Lake Ontario is beyond me.

Bob must have a slightly different view on proceedings though. After our debrief, I braced myself for the inevitable “we need to work on ….. before your cross country.”

Hmm apparently not , Bob said  “next flight we have options, you can either go up and do some more solo airwork or we can aim for the cross country. Your choice.”

Obviously the fact that Bob thought I’d done well enough to be let loose on the wider flying community must have temporarily knocked out my sense because it would seem that I simply replied “let’s go for it”

What have I done?!!!!

Creepy stalker time

I got up in time to see D in the run up area for 26. Handy being able to keep an eye on the airport from my front window!

I tuned into tower long enough to hear him get take of clearance and remained on frequency until he was cleared out of the zone.

He has a SPOT beacon on board, so that we can track his progress in realtime.

Worryingly at the moment he appears to be back at CYTZ with “mechanical delay”

Hope all is OK

I will keep you posted

I’m not exactly helping am I?

RTH is currently working on his night rating, seeing as we don’t get much in the way of night in the summer (tower shuts by 23:00) so far this has been limited to him getting the extra instrument time he needs.

Today though, he potentially has his first “night” flight, something I think he is approaching with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension that I know all too well. He started off by digging his red flash lights out of our telescope kit, one handheld and one head mounted (complete with obligatory Dalek impression). I started thinking about all the things that are going to be harder in the dark.

“taxiing’s going to be fun,” I commented “I hope you’re not on 08. I have enough trouble getting into that corner when it’s daylight!”

It was meant to be a flippant, throwaway comment but then I started thinking about ALL the things I do visually that are just that much harder in the dark.

·         How the hell do you fly a circuit? All my landmarks are visual.

·         How do you follow the shoreline to the practice area , it’s dark.

·         How icky must it be to practice stalls in the dark?

·         How do you spot cloud?

And so on. As I thought of the next “how the hell do you….” They just kept coming out of my mouth. Then I took a look at RTH and realised “ermm, I’m not helping much am I?”

He politely suggested that no I really wasn’t.

“I’ll just be quiet then shall I?”

We agreed that might be best!

 

Half an hour….

….and 80 bucks later and I’m in the possession of a valid Ontario driving license. Eeek!

About to attempt something a little crazy

Yes even more crazy than a person who is afraid of flying being let lose in a plane on her own.

I am about to ……

….renew my driving license.

You may not really understand the enormity of this so a little history lesson for you.

“Once upon a time WMAP learned to drive. Back in England where roads are scary and transmissions are definitely not automatic. Eventually after many, many lessons she even reached the stage where a driving examiner was willing to say “you’ve passed.”

However, young WMAP was only 18 at the time and a penniless student. Purchasing a car was out of the question and her parents didn’t drive. WMAP was without wheels. A condition which lasted well into her graduate and post graduate studies.

Along the way WMAP married RTH, as it turned out RTH was a much better driver than WMAP, who secretly didn’t really like driving anyway. It involved things like quick decision making, spatial awareness, not hitting things, none of which WMAP would list as her strong points.

So WMAP and RTH came to an understanding, you see whilst being an excellent driver RTH was not particularly fond of alcohol. The deal was WMAP drank, RTH drove! This understanding lasted over 16 years of marriage.

When RTH and WMAP started their new life in Toronto, a car was not needed. In fact having a car was a liability in their chosen locale. Occasionally RTH would rent a car for a few hours or days as needed and WMAP would happily sit along for the ride. WMAP did however manage to acquire an Ontario Driving license because technically she’d held a British one for over 2 years. This was used purely for photo ID purposes.

In total since acquiring either driving license WMAP had driven a grand total of less than 10 miles. All of it in England, all of it on the left hand side and all of it in a manual transmission car.”

…history lesson over then you may ask yourself as to what has caused this sudden desire to get back behind the wheel.  Well nothing major or Earth shattering, there’s just a little part of me that thinks it is totally ludicrous that I fly a plane but won’t drive a car. I mean even parking a car should be a doddle now that I can happily taxi a plane around.  Cars don’t have massive wings bolted to the side for one thing.

It’ll give me more options if I want to go away and do stuff on my own, or if we are away and RTH just wants a break from the driving. I really have no plans to drive in Toronto (few sane people do) but I guess it’ll be a handy skill to have as a backup.

The short term aim is that next time we rent a car. I’ll go on as a named driver and we’ll find a quiet stretch of road for me to have a go on. I honestly can’t be as bad as some of the people I see out there.

First step though, dealing with Service Ontario and renewing my expired license.