Eddie and the steel pans

Eddie Alleyne, a musician from Trinidad and Tobago, who plays the steel pan drums in and around Ottawa, bringing his music to the children of Ottawa schools from time to time, came to play for Rockcliffe Flying Club members yesterday evening, under the gazebo near our Mile High barbecue. He's known as Eddie Steel-Pan, so Tony told me, Tony's own speciality being the barbecue. Last night (August 9th) he and his wife Joy offered a change from the usual burgers and hotdogs, bringing rice and peas with barbecue chicken or jerk chicken or chicken curry roti to serve. I had a substantial helping of the roti! Joy told me it had taken her all day to prepare those meals.

The moon rose as we sat at the picnic tables with our flying friends, enjoying the food and the music.

At the end of the summer we are going to have another such evening organised by Tony, when a jazz band is going to play for us. On that afternoon evening there'll be games and children's races and a flour bombing contest as well.

Day 12: PTN, homing pigeon

Our whole route as recorded on the iPad's "Foreflight" application

We're back. North Bay wasn't our favourite stopping place because the hotel had a noisy air conditioner that kept us awake half the night; we have a few more complaints besides which I'll post on the Tripadvisor website. We were at the airport before 9 and (after PTN's engine made up its mind to start, being temperamental again for the first time since we'd left home) could take off for Ottawa-Rockcliffe before any clouds developed.

Little clouds over the hazy Algonquin Park

We had hardly any wind at ground level and a little tailwind at altitude. We flew in hazy conditions again, across the Algonquin Park, past the old radio telescope by Lake Traverse and, avoiding the military airspace around Petawawa, to the Killaloe VOR near the cottage country at Bonnechere, Round Lake and Golden Lake, where we turned slightly left onto the airway that leads to the YOW beacon. The Ottawa River beyond Pembroke was out of sight in the haze with morning fog in the valleys behind it, and on the last stretch of the journey, it was hard even to make out where Arnprior was, though we were just the other side of the Ottawa River from there. ATC kept us "no lower than" 4500ft on the Quebec side until we had almost reached the city, before allowing us to descend to very familiar territory and swoop in to Runway 09 at CYRO like a homing pigeon, Chris allowing PTN to do a rather steeper turn than I'd prefer over the Montfort hospital in order to enter our home circuit from the south.

A familiar view!

Too many other aircraft at the pumps so we've postponed the refuelling––no more flying this weekend! We tied down, unloaded the luggage, forgetting the bag of dirty laundry in the back that we'll have to fetch tomorrow, and went to sit in the shade under the gazebo with Tony before he fired up his barbecue. After a while Laurie joined us too; Chris chatted to the men while I finished reading the last couple of chapters of a Howard Engel whodunnit (set in a fictional St. Catherine's at the west end of Lake Ontario) that I've been reading on this trip, where the detective unravels the plot and ties all the loose ends together.

Here are the statistics for our trip:

Engine on-time: 30.2 hours
Time in the air: 27.3 hours
Total distance flown: 2494 nautical miles (4619 km)
Average speed: 91 knots (169 km/h)

Summer flying trip, Day 1

Third time unlucky. We must be jinxed. We should have set off for Rouyn-Noranda (QC) today. Twice before, when we tried to fly to Rouyn-Noranda, we were prevented by unsuitable weather. This time looked more promising and we had a hotel room booked there for tonight at the end of what was supposed to be the first leg of our flying holiday. We had finished packing, left the house on time on a beautiful morning for flying, filed a flight plan, loaded the aircraft (fuelled up the night before), did all the pre-flight checks, climbed in, strapped on our harnesses, plugged in our headphones ... and the engine refused to start.

PTN being towed to the hangar

PTN is an old lady who sometimes doesn't feel like getting up in the mornings. She's now having her fuel feed and engine parts checked by Red Sutton and his team. Red towed her into the hangar this morning, mournfully accompanied by Chris.

It is better that this set back happened at the start of our trip rather than half way through, or we might have been stuck for a long time in somewhere like Hearst, some 100 km from anywhere else.

In one day

I know how lucky I am.

Here is a selection of photos I took yesterday, when I left the house at 7:30am to drive to Kanata with Chris. Later in the morning I helped to host a party at the Smithvale Stables for diplomats' families, the repeat of an event that took place this time last year.

Ottawa riverbank, early morning (view from Dick Bell Park)

Bales of straw for the horses at the stables

Sleigh ready to take passengers

First ride: they're off!

The horses' breath, between sleigh-rides

On the wagon, looking down

View from the ride, looking forward

Looking back the way we'd come

Musical chairs (my camera steamed up when we came indoors) 

The band, wearing their nautical hats for a sea shanty

Warming up to the music

A "Musical Ride"

 

Two hours later, in PTN.... the River Gatineau from above

Final approach for a touch-and-go at Gatineau aiport

Returning to Rockcliffe with the sun setting beyond the city

Turning base above the Ottawa River, in the Rockcliffe circuit

Chris had taken the afternoon off work in order to make the most of the good flying weather. After an hour in the air we came back home, spoke to my mother in Cardiff, to our daughter in London and to our son in Australia. Then friends visited us for a cosy supper with wine and one of those Bougie Doozie candles from Chelsea on the table.

I do not take my privileged life for granted.

The RFC newsletter and a Caribbean book

I spent an interesting hour this morning interviewing the gentleman who will be featured in Rockcliffe Flying Club's next edition of Crosswinds. I won't anticipate the article here because I haven't written it yet, and in any case the interviewee will have to give his approval before it's published, but there's no harm in mentioning that Terry learned to fly (in RCAF Harvard trainers) in 1955 and has flown innumerable aircraft since, including some home built models as a test pilot. I asked him what made him want to take to the air in the first place and he told me that while he was growing up in Hong Kong he once saw a Spitfire fly overhead. That did it. He has been a loyal member of the RFC since its inception in 1961, fifty years ago this year.

Another publication I've been helping to bring out is the book compiled by Francilia Greaves, Lessons My Mother Taught Me, A Celebration of Caribbean Motherhood, now available in print, thanks to the help of Gilmore Printing Services and a couple of corporate sponsors. It's an anthology of thirty-five essays by people from the Caribbean islands written as a tribute to their mothers. Fran and I worked for months on the layout of this book last year and it's gratifying to see the finished result now: 156 pages. There's a handwritten note of thanks to me on the front page of my copy:

[...] May you reflect on your own fond memories of being 'mothered!'

I didn't design the cover but my husband suggested the use of that picture for it. This is a painting by a Barbadian artist, Trevor Burnett, which hangs on a wall in Francilia's house.

The pilot Terry talked to me about flying to Antigua and to Barbados this morning; he has written about the Caribbean himself.

There's many a link to be found between people and places. Only connect, as is said in E.M. Forster's Howards End. That's what I attempt to do with this blog of mine.

Bombing runs

Bomb gone!

This is the draft of a report for the flying club's newsletter:

Spot Landing / Flour Bombing Contest,
Volunteer BBQ / Cricket Match, August 21, 2010

It was a cool, damp day for the Flour Bombing and Spot Landing contest at CYRO this summer, but fun was had, nonetheless. A dozen or so aircraft made fly-by circuits so that their bombardiers could observe the bombing target, the pilots then announcing their bombing runs, the bombardiers being “responsible for ensuring that a bomb is dropped in such a way as to remain within the confines of the Rockcliffe Airport and … does not hit aircraft, or buildings, or people.” Rainfall tended to erase the perimeter of the target so that flour from the used bombs had to be recycled as a target marker; it was later pointed out that this wouldn't have been such a good stratagem in the winter. Some bombs, falling to the north of the mark, came quite close to hitting spectators and adjudicators, and, despite everyone's best efforts, all the bombs dropped (identified and with streamers attached) fell wide of the mark, but Chris Hobbs and Nicola Vulpe in Cessna 172 C-FPTN won the trophy by dropping their bomb the least far from the mark. It was probably an advantage to be flying in a high winged aircraft with the co-pilot's door removed, although not so comfortable for their back seat passenger who was obliged to wrap herself in a blanket to keep warm. They landed in a downpour.

After burgers and sausages cooked out of doors by Tony, but eaten in the clubhouse because of the inclement weather, Nicole announced the competition results and presented trophies and prizes to much amusement and applause. Kevan received the winner's trophy for the Spot Landing competition, flying his Cessna 150, C-FIII. The objective of this contest was to "land in or as close to the box as possible," using power, flaps and sideslips as necessary, the box having been marked on Runway 09, with lines before and after it at 5 metre intervals.

A novel end to the party for the club’s volunteers and their families was the showing of the movie Amelia in the ground school classroom, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere, but in a rain-free interval before that happened, fortified by pieces of celebratory cake, Chris Hobbs managed to persuade a number of people, young and old, to practise some cricket-playing skills on the field, to the west of the new hangar.

"Co-pilots," aka willing passengers

Last Saturday morning I did a spot of teaching in Rockcliffe Flying Club's classroom, being a guest speaker at the Co-Pilots' Groundschool run by a friend of ours, Jean René de Cotret. As a typical (?) right seat passenger, I'd been invited to enthuse the nervous participants in the course, who seemed to have little if any experience of going along for a ride in a small 'plane. I told them what they could do to lighten their pilot's workload—before setting off, during the flight and after landing—what to carry in the 'plane, how two pairs of eyes were better than one up there, when they should say something in the cockpit and when they should keep quiet. I spoke for almost an hour and hope I didn't regale them with too many horror stories, like the one about a gusty landing on the Isle-aux-Coudres in the summer of 2005, that caused me to scream.

What a super trip that was, though. We eventually reached Halifax by way of the Gaspé peninsular. We might head in an easterly direction again this month or next month, stopping at the Isle again with the intention of travelling on to explore the Saguenay Fjord northwest to Chicoutimi. We'll see. First I have to persuade my husband to take a break from working so hard to make QNX's ultra reliable software ever more ultra reliable.

Creative construction

Written last Wednesday evening at the "Booking / Weather Station" in the Flying Club's temporary premises, outside "Briefing Room #1"...

The temporary clubhouse used to be offices at a hospital before it was transported to Rockcliffe airport in four pieces, then stuck back together, as it were. The doctors' name plaques have now been replaced by more suitable designations. Although the cardboard boxes have been tidied away, there's still a heap of fibreglass insulation and copper pipes lying around in the corridor and pictures are leaning against the walls. In fact it all looks rather similar to my own house at the moment; we're about to undergo a renovation there, as well.

The contractor wants to come and take another look at his construction site, our kitchen, and will arrive "at around 6:37 p.m." tomorrow, he says. Goodness, if he's that precise and disciplined with this schedule it augers well for the care he's going to take with the cupboards. I booked their delivery for the second week of February because other work will have to be done first—reconfiguring the downstairs "powder room" (where Chris is meant to powder his nose?) and reflooring the whole L-shaped area. Not looking forward to its being done, but I am looking forward to its being finished. In the meantime everything movable has to be stowed in boxes in our living room and I shall plug my ears against the sawing, drilling and hammering and get out of the way, to commune with my computer or take long walks in the fresh air. Very fresh, in fact, with a windchill of minus 33.

I'm glad to report that I finished work on Crosswinds today, the 20 page winter issue of Rockcliffe Flying Club's newsletter for which I'm chief editor. You can download and have a read of it if you click here.

A cricket match at the airport

Earlier this month I sat in one of my usual coffee shops, writing two essays, one in French for a talk I'll have to give (see above) and one in English for the Flying Club's newsletter of which I'm the editor. I think the essay in English was the easier one to write:

This year's thank you took place on September 12th, club volunteers mingling on the grass outside the clubhouse in perfect weather to enjoy the reward of supper from Tony's Mile High Bar-B-Q, with carrot cake for dessert. In order for some of the crowd to work up an appetite for this feast, Chris Hobbs organised and umpired his usual cricket match on the field behind the hangar between two teams spontaneously recruited, The Rockcliffe Flyers and Valerie's XI. Meanwhile, Bopper Sensation, a five-man jazz band from the city, were tuning up for a performance on keyboard, trombone, guitar, percussion and vocals, that kept our feet tapping until well after sunset, some of their lyrics being as spicy as the dressing on Tony's burgers! By the time darkness fell, we also had telescopes erected on the field, courtesy of our guests from the Astronomy club, who were able to show everyone interested four of Jupiter's moons. A fortuitous extra thrill was the transit of the international space station moving smoothly and rapidly across the evening sky, spot-lit by the sun from well below the horizon. The space station, unlike high flying jet aircraft, does not leave a contrail.

Triumph and Disaster

(This is an abridged version of the Special Edition of the Rockcliffe Flying Club's newsletter, Crosswinds, which I produced this week. You can read the original version on the club's website. Click on RFC Crosswinds - Special April Edition to download the pdf, if you're interested.)

While club members and guests were cheerfully celebrating a record number of flying awards at our “Centenary of Flight” Wings Dinner, held at the Canada Aviation Museum on the evening of April 25th, 2009, disaster struck. A freak wind blew in, tearing across the airport just as we were being served the first course of our supper, mutilating more than twenty aircraft parked there, some irreparably, with wheels and tails sheared off, wings crumpled, some having cart-wheeled and landed on their backs, wheels in the air. We were so well sheltered inside the museum that everyone was oblivious of the wreckage until the end of the ceremonies, three hours later. There's some irony in that, but it was fortunate that because of the indoor celebrations no one had run the risk of being injured.

The Aviation Museum where our dining tables had been set out was very spacious and quiet inside and thoroughly insulated from the elements. We were sitting a long way from any windows and from the entrance so that we noticed neither the 10 cars damaged in the car park, nor the revolving entrance doors spinning round uncontrolled in the wind (as the door man later reported). At one point a faint banging noise could be heard from some part of the building, but it didn't register as anything important.

The whole region had been hit, with roofs torn off houses both sides of the Ottawa River and big trees torn up by the roots or simply snapped in half. In each place affected, the 100 km/h squall, tornado, microburst or whatever it was, only lasted a couple of minutes. There had been a similar incident on a July afternoon in 1999 when one of the parked aircraft at Rockcliffe had been flipped over during a storm, but this time more than twenty aircraft parked at CYRO were harmed, over half of these completely written off: five ultra-lights and a Cessna-172 belonging to the club, GWZA, among them. The Piper Cherokee Six, whose tumbling flight wrecked GWZA, ended up with its tail smashed through the window of another of our club ’planes, GPHV. For anyone who’s a member of Facebook, by the way, a new group has been formed: I once flew in GWZA. If you're feeling bereaved you can share your memories and photographs there.

Ten club members' cars were damaged in the museum parking lot as well that evening.

Another especially sad loss to the club was the old willow tree that fell onto the western end of the clubhouse; by 11a.m. the following morning it had been sawn into pieces. Some members have planted willow twigs along the fence in the hope that the tree might resurrect itself in some sense. It will be a long time before we have another one as large and as shady, but it's certain that the willow and the swing that hung from its branches will continue to live in our own and our children's memories. Tony's barbecue equipment was also smashed in the storm and owing to the fall of the willow tree the shed he used for catering is no longer usable.

Club members spent half the night and all of the next day tidying up. The club's staff and supporters hurried round. Chris let the police into the clubhouse while Simon, Don and Laurie, working literally in the dark, did a great job of putting an emergency response team into action. Many of the helpers that night worked till after 2 in the morning, still dressed in their party clothes, rather flimsy in some cases; the female contingent learned that there's not a lot you can usefully do on a muddy field at midnight while still wearing your high heeled party shoes. Simon contacted the insurance companies. Don, Elva and their assistants made as thorough an inventory as possible in the dark of the damage that had been sustained. Marie-Eve, Brenda and Laura didn't flinch from the challenging task of phoning all those owners whose planes had been wrecked. René, Marek and Gary checked the state of the runway, taxi-ways, and clubhouse. Ian took the necessary photographs.

Next day, Sunday, in response to an emailed appeal for help from the CFI, about eighty volunteers turned up to assist with clean-up operations. Some felled the remainder of the tree with chain saws, others shifted the broken aircraft off the taxi-ways and everyone worked at clearing away the debris left by the storm. Michael Brown delegated each volunteer to a specific part of the field, working parties being spontaneously formed in this manner. Throughout the day, people continued to turn up, including press and TV reporters. Rozy, a Safety Management professional, voluntarily assisted with the plan of campaign and took notes, so that in the event of another such catastrophe there'll be an improved response plan in place. Nothing like experience itself for honing one's emergency preparedness!

By Monday afternoon the airport was effectively back to normal, due to a tremendous amount of outside help. Two mechanics from Vintage Wings of Canada (based at Gatineau Airport) had came across the river to offer their services and a couple of mechanics who specialise in metal work had also arrived to help with the repairs. The other two Ottawa clubs had offered spare aeroplanes so that flight training operations at Rockcliffe could continue without a hitch. Belinda, the Insurance Company representative, had arrived from Toronto and the chopped pieces of the willow tree were being removed from the field by a club member who had organised the pick-up on his own initiative.

The team spirit had turned out to be as phenomenal as the weather.

...If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same...

(Rudyard Kipling)

Staff dinner

It was the Rockcliffe Flying Club's free dinner at Friday's for staff and board members and their guests, last night. In photo-journalist mode, as Chris' guest, I brought the camera with me; actually it was Chris who took most of the pictures. Here are the dispatchers and young instructors, René, Marc, Benoit, Stéphane, Stéphane's girlfriend, Joey and Adam. With a view to including this photo in a future edition of Crosswinds, I'm trying it out here in black & white.

I'm reluctant to make any additions to my 12-page January issue, as this is now ready for printing. If I were to add any more material, it would have to fill four more pages; I have only just realised that, for ease of stapling, newsletters need to be prepared in multiples of four pages—obvious, when you think about it, but I hadn't.

Don stood up half way through the meal and told us that 2008 had been a fantastic year, the most active in recent history, with 5,200 hours of flying time on the club aircraft. "As a team, it all works!" he said, praising instructors, staff and maintenance people (chief of whom is 'Red'—in the picture—wearing an extraordinary hat last night that had belonged to his father; someone on our table commented that it made quite a statement of its own). Our achievements have been amazing, said Don, considering the weather, and as we can't possibly have such bad weather this year, we're expecting 2009 to be even better.

Simon, Chief Flying Instructor, also made a speech, telling us that 2008 had been the club's second best year for flying (2003 was the best) and the best year ever from a financial point of view, despite the fact that the management was beset by challenges: not just the weather but also a high turnover of qualified staff, resulting in a severe shortage of instructors last summer. The aviation industry's expansion has slowed down, however, RFC has fast-tracked its Class 1 instructors and we now "have depth", with sixteen instructors employed by the club, eight of whom are currently in training for a higher rating.

At this juncture Simon made a joke about how it was the instructors' job to break the club's aircraft ("...and PHV will be fixed shortly!"), saying how the 'planes are being upgraded, a couple of them acquiring GPS, a new Cessna 182 added to the fleet, and a fully VFR-certified simulator on order to replace the old one. There's even a new toy (the recently acquired tractor-trailer-snowblower) for Steve. So Simon is looking forward to continued progress using all the available new technology. Meanwhile, to nobody's surprise, the clubhouse is in urgent need of replacement, the roof falling in, animals falling in, the walls tilting, the doors sticking, with leaking pipes, frozen pipes ... Never mind; Simon promises to manage the transition to our New Facilities (when we get 'em) and this year is going to focus on developing his staff, rather than standing in for missing instructors, and be altogether more managerial.

He thanked the board of directors for their "unbelievable" amount of support.

Wedding on the airfield

An unprecedented happening at the Rockcliffe Flying Club today. We watched a newly qualified private pilot getting married on the lawn in front of the clubhouse, with the usual airport activity going on around the ceremony, aircraft taxiing in, being refuelled, tied and untied, and from where I stood (not an official wedding guest) the engine noises were drowning out the couple's wedding vows and the officiator's homily. But a happy atmosphere prevailed, the guests keeping out of the northerly crosswind inside a large white marquee erected for the reception.

PTN is just visible in the background of this photo in her winter tie-down spot. After I'd taken a few more pictures, Chris took me for another wandering flight around the Gatineau Hills and RFC instructors took some of the wedding guests for joyrides in the club 'planes, too.

Another mishmash

Since our holiday it seems another load of juxtapositions has been piling up in a chaotic manner.

Last Saturday was the Flying Club's volunteer appreciation event, Chris winning a trophy for coming first in the Spot Landing contest, and participating in the flour-bombing contest with PTN's passenger door removed. He didn't come anywhere near winning that one because his bomber, Pete, entangled in the headphones that blew off his ears in the slipstream, had dropped not only the "bomb" but also his glasses, causing a bit of a distraction. Bill radioed up to ask if they could fly over and drop another pair of glasses to help with the search for the first pair (eventually retrieved unharmed from a taxiway).

Straight after this came our volunteers' annual Cricket Match during which I was out for a duck, same as last year; I redeemed myself by bowling someone out in the second innings and had I done it again during the last over, our team would have won, but their last man "in" managed to score the winning run off my bowling. The vast majority of the other participants had never played cricket in their lives before, but appreciated their initiation. Chris was groundsman, instructor, umpire, scorer and commentator, and now I'm commissioning him to be our sports reporter as well, since he is the only person who has any idea of who was playing or of what was happening and we need a report in the next edition of our Crosswinds magazine.

After the sun had set and all the cake gone, we lingered outside the clubhouse to look through the telescopes some amateur astronomers had brought along to observe the moon's craters and four of the moons of Jupiter.

We flew to the St Lawrence again the next day, to the closest part, at Iroquois. Knowing that there's a bathing beach at the eastern end of that meadow-like airfield (the surfaced part of the runway only 23 feet wide) I'd brought a swimsuit with me, which meant that after lunch seven of my friends had to wait around on the shore while I indulged myself by swimming back and forth in river water nicely warmed by the sun. Well, they should have brought their own swimsuits along.

Back to our music-making this week, Chris and I have been working on Borodin's cross-rhythms in an arrangement for clarinet and piano of the Notturno from his 2nd string quartet; we've also been singing/playing renaissance duets and the usual Schubert and Schumann song cycles.

To celebrate Indonesia's Independence Day I attended a reception on the Indonesian Ambassador's lawn (on a hilltop in Rockcliffe overlooking the Ottawa River). The young children of the Embassy, dressed in traditional, regional costumes, came forward in ones and twos and made a solemn bow to the distinguished guests and Excellencies present, having sung the Canadian and Indonesian national anthems in chorus.

This afternoon Chris and I took an interest in The Greeks, visiting the exhibition of this name at Gatineau's Museum of Civilisation (or Civilisations, plural, as it is called in French and ought to be called in English). Having read several books about the history of the eastern Roman empire, Chris was particularly interested in the Grecian-Byzantine artifacts and the information given about Greece's four hundred years under Islamic jurisdiction.