Quick Reference Handbooks

Most aircraft/companies have quick reference handbooks, QRH for short. They are pretty much some form of checklist or troubleshooting manual in times of abnormalities. Pilots still need to memorize drill items that require immediate and reactive action but minor irregularities in any portion of flight can require a pilot to call out the QRH.

The QRH has index or table of contents on where to find different abnormalities. They are usually divided into seriousness of of the situation either emergencies, abnormalities, advisories or status messages on the EICAS (engine indicating and crew alerting system) which would have different colour codings as well. Then they are indexed depending on the system that is in question for example power plant for engine problems, electrical, fire protection and so on. Sometimes different scenarios require the flight crew to refer to other pages in the QRH and all this while trying to fly the airplane and maintain situational awareness. This is primarily the one important reason why pilots can never be replaced by computer alone and why we still need at least two pilots for (most) commercial operations. QRHs can range from a few pages to a few hundred pages depending on the simplicity or complexity of an aircraft.

It makes the pilots life and workload that much easier because there is simply no way any pilot can memorize every possible scenario that can arise from a flight. The QRH tries to put all that into one little package...even then the randomness of situations still occur and pilots eventually will have to use their judgment if the QRH doesn't outline the problem.

Canadians have gone plane crazy!

Gather 'round kids I've got some awesome news!

I'm good to fly for another year! woohoo! Thanks to all the flying gods for making this possible: Chuck Yeager, Alan Sheppard, John Glenn, Ernest Gann, HAM (first ape in space) and all the others I can't think of right now...again Thank you!

Anyways that was just a sidenote...the real story is "Have Canadians gone mad?"

So up to this day in 2009 there have been many incidents, accidents, funny, weird, strange and sometimes unbelievably insane stories related with Aviation and well Canada.

Now that I've been flying for just under a year now, it seems that I notice more things in News about Aviation...or 2009 is just a crazy year and it's not just me that notices these crazy things happening lately.
Just to name ones that I know of:

US Airways 1549
Continental "Colgan" 3407
Turkish Airlines 1951
Montana PC-12 Crash
FedEx MD-11 Crash
Stolen C172 from Confederation College
Man jumping out of King Air 200 at FL230
King Air pilot dies
Our very own Bonanza having engine failure...

That's all the ones I can remember from memory, it's only almost May and it seems quite a lot already.
And some of these accidents have some sort of Canadian content to it, maybe the news people are trying to tell us something; we Canadians have gone haywire.

Maybe the media is trying to portray that Canadians are in some kind of northern drug that you can only get in Canada and it's available for everyone...even geese.

Cactus 1549 puts blame on CANADA GEESE
Colgan 3407 was a Bombardier Dash Q-400 (Canadian eh?)
Canadian man stealing an airplane possibly trying to get shot down by F-16s
Canadian man opening the door of a King Air 200 at FL230 (23 000ft) and jumping out.

Maybe we are a bunch of whackos, but I still don't think we're the biggest maniacs out there. But that's that, I don't really know how else to put it. Maybe we'll see some more Canadian Content in the future of Aviation...hopefully not so much in accidents and crazy mischief of suicidal people.

But as for me, I can safely say that I'm still sane to fly according to my recently renewed CAT I Medical at least.

People like us (pilots)

Today I was buzzing through the world of interweb, and to my surprise I find my way to the glamorous and of course infamous world of youtube. I usually have subscriptions of different channels that I tend to watch but this time I was looking for something different and something more grandiloquently grotesque.

I then come across a what I would think as a tv series much like How it's made or Extreme Machines., and it's something that it also lies in the genre of satirical comedy. It would seem to me after watching that it is a similar to "Burn After Reading" movie which is categorized as a black comedy film. It is not a film of black people being comedians no, it is actually quite a difficult form of comedy as some people may not appreciate the intended sarcasm and irony involved in such pieces.

Anyways it is a three-part segment, but definitely worth watching...

HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT as much as I did at least!

Hobbies

By Definition: a hobby is an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation.

Everyone has them, whether we know it or not, all of us are bound to have interests and therefore have quite a few, some more than others but nevertheless, interesting hobbies. However I am not really interested in knowing what everyone's hobbies are because it would just be a whole array of activities which I may or may not find interesting. One person's hated activity can be another person's hobby.

I'm more interested in the hobbies that pilots have, and that is of course other than flying. A lot of people fly for the pleasure of flying and that is a hobby but many others fly for a living but that doesn't mean it isn't a pleasure, in actuality pilots should be flying for a living or choose to fly for a living for the main purpose of pleasure and interest...however I know that may change as time passes by.

So other than flying, pilots do have a variety of other pleasurable activities. I (and quite a few of my classmates) for instance enjoy photography. It's our way to express our creative side since we're all bound to the same old, SOPs or Checklists, so I guess it is our way of expressing ourselves in a more artistic way. We learn not only to have a good eye in approaches, flying, or seeing things ahead of an airplane, we also learn to see light, shapes, lines, context, depth of field, all the many things a good photographer uses his/her eye for. Since a camera can't see things exactly the way a complex human eye does, we have to learn to adapt and see how the camera would see it and so on. Just like when people squint one eye and make a small rectangular box with their fingers to see things in a rectangular shape because that's what the camera sees! With that I think its an opportune moment to advertise my flickr account here.


Anyways, that's one of the many popular (I think) hobbies a lot of pilots do on their free time, for fun, for relaxation, for whatever it may be. Others (and some of them I do enjoy as well) also write to express their feelings, some take acting or dancing lessons, sing, watch sci-fi movies, read,...the list just goes on.

There are a number of websites that list the most popular hobbies that people do in the world, one website lists some agreeably top 50 ones here.. However I have yet to find a list of the most popular hobbies that pilots do, and I would guess that a lot of these hobbies would have some kind of similarity to each other, since most pilots already do have one thing they share with each other...enjoy watching or being in...airplanes.

When I find one, or compile one if no one has yet to take the initiative to do so, I shall post it here and see what kind of things would be on the list and possibly be one of my many hobbies as well.