Information Echo

Edit 6:50PM - Sorry, I made the entry below this morning and apparently there was a publishing error, as my blog appeared as a blank page all day. Thanks for letting me know, Euan.

My appologies everyone.

Well, with negotiations running right down to the wire yesterday evening (there was still no agreement when I went to bed at 11:20p) GM apparently reached a tentative settlement before the midnight strike deadline. It was a relief to wakeup this morning and read such, as otherwise I would have been greeted at work today with a temporary layoff notice, effective upon the completion of my shift.

So, unless the workers turn down the contract at a ratification vote Sunday, which I find highly unlikely, this is all history.

It really makes people sit back and realize exactly how much a good portion of Southern Ontario revolves around this Autoplex when situations like this occur.

Alot of people think of a vehicle manufacturing facility as a single “plant”. This is what most facilities consist of.

GM’s Oshawa Autoplex has 7 plants.

In detail, two car plants, a truck plant, a battery plant, a metal processing and stamping plant, a chasis plant, a paint plant, and numerous other support and maintenance facilities.

It’s so large that it has it’s own power generating facility and a sewage treatment plant all it’s own.

Not only do we build a ton of cars and trucks here, but the Autoplex is also a source of parts for alot of other plants in in the USA. We go down, they go down.

The long and the short of it is that here in Southern Ontario (And especially the Oshawa area) we have alot of our eggs in one basket, so when GM coughs, the rest of us get pneumonia.

When times are good, prosperity is *very* good around here…but everybody is keenly aware that GM is the big kahuna of employers in the area, so this sort of thing can put a scare into alot of people.

I am looking forward to my seniority at my employer building to the point where GM no longer effects me, and I can float through interruptions in our GM division by just bumping elsewhere. I would not have been so lucky this time around, as there was a layoff notice already typed up with my name on it - I saw it last night.

Anyhow!

Barring anything strange happening between now and then, Sundays flight should be a go, and the weather is looking great. I’m looking forward to getting things back in gear after an unforunate 3 week absense of flying.

Yes, I’m still on the face of the planet. It was a hectic week at work, and there wasn’t much time to blog.

I’ve had bigger things on my mind - GM’s Oshawa Autoplex may strike this coming Tuesday if they don’t settle on a contract with the union. As the company I work for is a tier-1 supplier to the Autoplex, this could directly effect me.

In other words, I may end up on layoff…at least as long as any potential strike lasts. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen.

Barring that, hopefully if it *does* happen, it’s short lived.

So, that aside, I mentally tackled with a few things, flying wise. First, should I even have kept my scheduled reservation this weekend and flown?

If I end up on layoff, I would probably have kicked myself for spending the cash on flying.

But, since it was to be a solo, and I had planned on keeping it short (an hour or so) I decided to stick with the plan.

But it’s all rather moot - I didn’t end up flying today, nor can I tommorow even if I wanted to.

As of today, my student currency (14 days) has expired due to me not flying last weekend. My instructor is booked off tommorow, and going back to the GM strike issue, I couldn’t justify the added cost of a dual flight tommorow regardless - especially since my next scheduled flight is a cross country…AKA, long and costly.

So, I’m stuck in a rather vicious circle, it seems.

I did have intentions of flying solo for an hour or so today, everything aside. I had wanted to get another solo diversion exercise, and probably a precautionary landing exercise in.

I was originally booked for noon today..unfortunately things started going downhill yesterday.

We went out last night to watch a movie (The 40 year old virgin, absolutely *hillarious*!) and foolishly I guzzled two super-duper-ultra-gulp pails of Coke at the theatre.

Now, normally caffiene doesn’t bother me in the evening, but as I laid in bed this morning at 2:30AM still wired for sound, I rather regretted my stupidity.

I finally got to sleep at 3. But to add insult to injury, I had to get up at 5 to help a familly member with something at 6AM.

The long and the short of it was that I was exhausted this morning by the time I got back home at 9AM. I then proceeded to think long and hard about whether I should even fly in that sort of condition.

I decided that I was not fit for flying unless I got some rest and felt better. I contemplated how I would explain that to CFA on the phone.

“Uhhh, I have to cancel my reservation today. The reason? Uhh.. insomnia?”

I laid down at about 9:30, still rather fried. However, quite to my chagrin, I still couldn’t sleep.

But the rest helped, and I got a second wind. I crawled out of bed after an hour and a half of tossing and turning, and I felt surprisingly revived. A second wind.

Then the phone call came, as I really kind of expected anyways - The winds were gusting 25+ knots - beyond my solo limitations.

Scratched.

I rebooked for 5PM, as there was an opening.

At 4:15, another call - winds still too high.

I confirmed that the plane was available untill after dark, so I thought I’d head to the airport anyways at about 5:30 and see what happened.

When I got there the ATIS was still calling 18G20..but it seemed to be getting better, so I kept my hopes up. My student max is 15kts, with 8kts max crosswind.

Hedging my
bets, I went out to the apron and preflighted my plane. I didn’t bother undoing the tiedowns however, as I had a sneaky suspicion I was wasting my time.

With sunset now arriving much earlier in the evening, I would have to be back at the airport for 7:15PM, so unless I was up by 6:15 it wasn’t even worth my time to depart.

After I preflighted, I put the pitot cover back up, brought the flaps back up, and put the control locks back in place. I wasn’t holding out much hope.

I returned to dispatch, and desk-guy was nice enough to call the tower and ask for a wind check, as the ATIS was rather stale. 6:10PM now, and the winds were still gusting 20′ish the tower reports.

Scratched.

So, in hindsight…

On a positive note, if GM does strike I’ll have an extra $125 or so in the bank that wouldn’t have otherwise been there.

On a negative note, I lost my currency.

On a related positive note, having lost my solo currency my next flight will obviously be a dual. As per previous discussion with my instructor, we won’t waste it on a currency flight - we’ll just skip ahead to the cross country.

I’ll regain my currency, and then after the cross country I can proceed with my original plan for today - to do some additional diversions/precautionaries.

On a negative note, if the GM strike does happen, and drags on, I may have to put off flying indefinately.

On a positive note, I’ll know about that by Wednesday morning, so I can scratch my next booking if that ends up being the case.

On a negative note….oh, what the hell… See a theme with this?

Like I said - a vicious circle.

So, here’s to hoping that GM settles their differences and everything continues as normal.

And next weekend, I’ll have a cross country to blog about.

In the meantime, I’ve done alot of armchair flying in lieu of the real thing. I’ve gone through alot of procedure in my head, especially the diversion routine.

I even airchaired stalls, slow flight, comm and nav. Well, as best as you can armchair those sort of things.

I’m pretty confident that next time I’ll do much better on my solo diversion, as I was surprised how much clearer the routine became by just going through it in my head.

So, I’ll post an update on the GM situation come Wednesday.

First off, a small preface. Stick with me here, there’s a neat outcome to this.

I use Firefox as my web browser. You can find it here for free download.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last year, you’ve probably heard of it. A good portion of my readers already use it, based on my stat counter.

For those that don’t use it, seriously consider giving it a try. It’s more secure then IE, and may quite possibly solve all of those “mysterious” spyware and virus attacks that Internet Explorer is so vulnerable to.

It’s also just a neato browser with lots of great features, aside from the fact that it’s very secure.

That aside, part of Firefox is that “Extensions” that add functionality can be added to it. It’s an amazing feature that, based on your needs, adds tons of neat and new capabilities to the standard browser experience. There are litterally hundreds (thousands?) of extensions available for every immaginable use…well, except for aviation…yet. Well, there are weather extensions, they count!

Today, prompted by the fact that it was one of the most popular extensions listed on the Mozilla website, I installed StumbleUpon, an extension that automatically surfs websites based on topic, ratings, and other users popularity clicks.

So, naturally, I set it up to strictly show me Aviation related websites. There are many other topics you can set it up for based on your interests.

The result was amazing, and it’s kept me busy all evening surfing a multitude of great aviation sites - not only the big-boys such as Airliners.net and such, but countless smaller sites with everything from amusing aviation related pictures, to videos.

Here’s some intersting links I ran across:

Airplane Homes!
Comm Humour
General Aviation Humour
How to build the best paper airplanes
The Red Bull air race. (Would YOU drink that pre-flight?)
More ATC Humour. (It never gets old..)
Neato Pulse-Jet Engine Info
Cabin Crew Humour
Airport Identifier Codes Explained
A silly little flash helicopter game

I “Stumbled” upon all of these simply by clicking on the “Stumble!” button now part of my Firefox browser. Every click provides another website based on your “Stumble Preferences”. It’s a really neat idea to find websites that relate to your interests.

I can see me burning away lots of time with this neato little button.

Consider giving it a try for yourself - Aviation websites is only a fraction of what it can surf.

The cure for boring “Been there, done
that” websurfing!

I received another email from a reader of my blog’s alternate home at Aviation.ca. It seems that my blog has compelled yet another aviation-dreamer to actually stop dreaming, and start his own path down the student pilot road. He starts ground school in a few days.

This is the second time this has happened, and never fails to make me feel that all of my verbal-diarrhea blog entries have accomplished something, other then occupying a tiny bit of hard-drive space on a Google server somewhere.

So, other tidbits.

I ran into the new Google Blogsearch yesterday after reading about it in news article…which, curiously enough, I found via Google News.

Is there anything Google doesn’t do anymore?

Heh.. Anyways, I ran a Google Blogsearch for “Student Pilot”, and I had mixed results. It seems that Aviadisto’s blog (Which I’m a regular visitor of) has been indexed.

My own blog, well, posts show with the correct keyword searches, but it doesn’t show in the “Related Blogs” section yet.

Perhaps I havn’t been fully indexed.

And yes, I must remember that it’s still “Beta”, so I can’t expect miracles.

Performing the above search also found Another Student Pilot blog. I think I’ll subscribe, it looks good, and the student is not far from the beginning of his training.

Yes, there’s lots of blog search engines out there, but I think that Google has something good happening here.

I don’t know what it is I really love about Google. Perhaps it’s that they just do so many things so well, for free. Perhaps it’s the simple fact that they’re not Microsoft. Actually, they are the anti-Microsoft.

I think it’s the former. And a little bit of the latter.

But anyways….

No flying this weekend. But, A little change in plans after discussing things on the phone with my instructor. It’s clear I need more solo practice with the diversions and precautionary landings, so I’m going to run one more solo before the cross country in order to concentrate on these.

I’m kinda anxious to do the cross country, as I’m rather hyped about visiting Lindsay and Peterborough airports, but at the same point in time I do recognize that I really need to get more proficient at the current lessons at hand.

I totaled up my logbook when I was last at the airport, and I think I was at 38 or 39 hours.

I figure that this puts me at my Checkride in the mid to upper 40’s.

That’s certainly a great deal more then I had anticipated when I started, but I’m still going with the flow.

Speaking of such, I’m only 10 days away from my one year anniversary of my first official training flight on September 25′th of last year.

And that makes my training having taken longer then I anticipated when I started.. But you know, I’m still going with the flow.

(Grin).

Well, as was expected, the costs of flying have increased thanks to the cost of fuel.

The 152 fleet is now renting for $110/Hr Hobbs.

100LL AvGas is $1.50-something per litre.

(Sigh)

On a bright note, the cost of Mogas crashed back down to something remotely resembling reasonable levels this past week. I guess $1.06/L is the “New” reasonable. It seems like only a few weeks ago I was paying 0.89, and lots of people were complaining about that at the time.

I presume that the price of AvGas has (or will) drop accordingly over the next week or so, and here’s to hoping that the rates get adjusted accordingly, as this will squeeze more and more people out of GA. Todays 1.3 was $160+ after taxes, insurance, and my headset rental.

On a side note, I’m still irked about the headset rental. These things have been getting “rented” for over a year to students. The deal when the school upgraded to a full complement of new David Clarks last summer was that the rental charges (for students) was supposed to be only untill they were paid off, or so the word was.

I can understand still charging rental to licenced pilots who are just renting aircraft and don’t own their own…. But still charging students too? Boooooo!

I bet if I added up all of the rental I’ve paid (at $5/Hr) I’ve probably paid for a good portion of a set on my own.

End Rant.

So anyways, this mornings solo went pretty well. I awoke to a beautifull bright sunrise this morning at 6:15AM. The winds were at about 5Kts from the east as well Hardly a cloud in the sky except for some high cirrus.

See a problem with that combination?

I ensure the sunglasses are in my flightbag.

Guzzling a pail of coffee, I head out to the airport. It’s obvious it’s going to be a great morning for flying, so I’m hyped.

I checkout GRPQ, the 152 I rarely fly since it’s heavilly laden with extra avionics and isn’t much use for dual (without skinny students and instructors) as it’s easilly put overgross.

I will be departing towards the east today. Tower gives me a left-turn-out clearance when I had hoped for a straight out departure for simplicity’s sake. I make a soft field takeoff. The right turn out clearnace works out good in the end, as the sun is blinding me pretty badly as I climb away from runway 12. I turn north and stabilize my climb, with the sun now out of my eyes.

As I roll back east again I get blinded, but I’m trimmed for the climb now so it’s not as bad.

I climb up to 3500 and continue to head east. I fly east and pass over our house at the edge of the CZ.

I decide to head out to the Orono area again, where I was last week. It seems to take alot longer to get to highway 35/115 then it did last week. I keep referencing my VNC keeping tabs on where I am. I get there eventually, and spot Orono.

I decide to do a precautionary landing first, which makes my decision to climb to 3500 seem pretty stupid now.

That goes well, all in all. I probably wouldn’t have actually landed in the field I choose, as upon the 500AGL pass it looked less then ideal after the fact, but for simulation purposes it worked - I didn’t have time to abort and start all over
again at another field.

I make a long spiraling climb back up to 2500′ to start the diversion. I gawk out the window and realize that the Orono fair is on this weekend, and there’s lots of activity at the fairgrounds.

I snap a quick picture of a friends house on the eastern edge of Bowmanville.

At altitude, I start planning the diversion. I didn’t want to pick Blackstock again as my diversion destination, since that would kind of defeat the purpose of doing something new, versus last week. I decide to head to Jannetville instead - northeast of Blackstock.

I start orbiting Orono, and plan. I find it a little bit of a challenge doing three things at once - actually flying, watching intently for traffic, and planning the diversion.

That done, I remember to reset the HI before striking out. I make one more quick orbit of Orono before setting my heading, almost straight north.

A few minutes into the diversion I look ahead for my halfway checkpoint, to see if I’ll be there on my ETA.

Oh yeah, an ETA. Crap, I forgot to note the time when I actually started the diversion. Sheesh.

I estimate I’ve been flying the diversion for 2 minutes now, and make my ETA’s with that understanding. That should put me over my first halfway checkpoint (The powerlines, again) at about 6 minutes.

I initially think I’ve reached my halfway checkpoint about 1.5 minutes early untill I realize that I’ve referenced the wrong set of powerlines - there are two sets, a few miles apart. Sure enough, pretty much on my ETA, I cross the correct set of powerlines.

I look at lake Scugug ahead and visualize where Janetville is based on sight, and my VNC. It’s clear I didn’t add in enough of a heading adjustment to take the wind into consideration, as I’m somewhat west of where I should really be.

Looking down at my watch I realize I’ll be in the general vicinity pretty close to my ETA regadless. I also realize that it’s now 8:35, and my reservation ends at 9AM, with another pilot awaiting the plane.

I chock the diversion up as “Mostly Successfull”, although I clearly need to do another few of these solo to get really proficient. I turn west towards Port Perry.

I seem to be crawling along again, so I take the opportunity to have a few minutes of downtime and sightsee a little, while still keeping an eye out for traffic. I’m heading into the training area over the lake, so I quit sightseeing and watch for traffic more intently now. Nobody is on the Unicom except one other plane doing IFR holds near the Simcoe VOR….a long ways from myself. A second plane calls in from the Uxbridge area, and it’s clearly a student on the radio.

I laugh when he announces himself at 35,000 Feet. He keys up and says a few words each time, and then lets go of the mic before finishing his announcement. This happens about 5 times.

I kind of feel bad for laughing now, since I know how hard it is for some students to get comfortable on the radio, and this guy is definately having problems.

The IFR plane calls up the plane in question and advises that they will be at the same general altitude, but they are quite aways from each other so there should be no conflict. The other plane responds, but it’s clearly an instructor speaking now and not the student.

Anyhow, I turn south from Port Perry now and start my track back towards the airport. The ATIS has changed to bravo, so I update accordingly.

Tower clears me left base for 12, report abeam the university.

Unlike the rest of the flight where it was perfectly smooth with nary a bump of turbulence, I’m getting thrown around pretty good on final. It screws with my airspeeds.

I do a soft field landing for good measure, since I havn’t done one of those in a while either. I touch the mains with a small bleat from the stall warning and the
nosewheel stays up untill I’m long past the taxiway.

ATC guy comes on the radio as I’m touching the mains, and begins to instruct me to take taxiway Charlie if possible. As I blow past it, still rolling out, in mid sentence he directs me to exit left at the intersection instead. Heh.

Anyhow, that’s pretty much it.

It was all pretty routine except the cost. 1.3 on the Hobbs today cost me $160-something. A noticable increase, indeed.

So, next flight is a dual cross country.

Since my wife has commitments next weekend, I likely won’t be flying, so it’ll need to wait.

I’ll save up some cash for the ever-increasing cost, as well.