phik

Before we begin: for anyone hoping to buy aeronautical charts at the Toronto Island airport, forget it. You can maybe get a local Canadian chart from Island Air, but nobody has American charts, not even for the airspace that begins less than 30 miles from Toronto. Assclownery.

One public service announcement: mothers already nervous about general aviation may wish to skip the final anecdote about landing at Medina.

Flying from the United States to Canada is pretty easy. You have your paperwork in order, you give at least two hours’ notice, and you arrive plus-or-minus 30 minutes of your ETA. If nobody’s there to meet you when you land, you call again, and they clear you over the phone. Done and done.

Flying the other direction is stressful. You fax a form (honestly, who even has a fax machine any more?), give them at least an hour’s notice (up to 24 hours’ notice for some airports), and arrive within 0 minutes before and 15 minutes after your stated ETA.

Think about that; more often than not, even the airlines can’t hit a 15-minute window in their schedules. Fortunately, if there’s some big change to your plans, or the winds, or your ATC routing, or the weather, or any of a million other variables, you can usually get the word to customs via Flight Services.

Today we cleared customs at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, and to make it yet more stressful, they only provide customs services until 14:00. The very earliest our schedule will allow us to arrive is 13:30, so the window for delays is narrow, with serious consequences if we miss.

The first customs woman I spoke to was a delight. She was cheerful and bubbly and talkative and extremely helpful.

The supervisor who called back was all business, with zero charm. She also said — I am not making this up — that due to heightened awareness, we can only offer customs services at Burke until 14:00.

Heightened awareness is apparently the reason. Heightened awareness.

Anyway, KBKL is a really nice airport! It’s on prime lakefront real estate, so of course people are clamouring to develop it, but fortunately it seems to be pretty heavily used by business and other GA traffic. It’s also basically right downtown. With any luck, it’s probably here to stay.

After dropping Jacob and clearing customs, my final leg was a short one to Medina.

I could have gone VFR, but the weather was marginal, and I’m not familiar with this airspace (though presumably someone at this airport could have sold me a VFR chart). It would have been a hell of a lot faster, it turns out.

Getting from Burke to Medina should have been a 20-minute direct flight, but instead I got vectored from hell to breakfast, presumably to keep me away from the Cleveland Hopkins approach traffic, and it took about an hour. It’s 24 nm point-to-point; my flight was 79.

Getting into Medina was fairly tricky. The airport unicom advised that the winds were variable, favouring runway 19, 20 knots gusting to 30. When I arrived on the final approach leg, it was exactly as advertised.

The wind socks were swinging around — usually pointing straight down the runway, but occasionally 30 degrees to either side.

Not only that, but the two wind socks on different parts of the field were getting different effects from the surrounding trees, and were usually pointing in totally different directions. (!)

The first approach went pretty well until I was over the threshold at about 30 feet, when the wind shifted and pushed me off to the right.

Go around.

The second approach was easier. Still gusty, but I got lucky and the winds stayed straight down the runway long enough to get the wheels down.

My dad was watching from the deck of the FBO and I think it made him nervous, but he approved of the landing. I’m glad my mother was not around to witness it; she doesn’t need that kind of stress.

Medina Airport used to be called Freedom Field. I thought they renamed it after 9/11 because they were embarrassed about everything else in the country being renamed Freedom This or Freedom That, but it turns out it was renamed when Medina County bought the airport in 1987.

It is also a nice little airport! Two perpendicular paved runways, one of which I hear is being extended to handle bizjets. I believe they’re getting FAA airport improvement funds, which basically guarantees that the airport land won’t be sold off to developers. Decently-priced fuel, a nice guy manning the FBO, and it’s 3 miles from our cabin.

If you need a place to park in northeast Ohio, I recommend it highly.

Today I flew what one might call a photography mission, shuttling my cousins over their house and our family retreat to get a view from above. It would have worked better in the helicopter, but they were keen to go up, and I’m never one to turn down an excuse.

I checked in with Cleveland Approach since we were only two miles from Medina Airport, and he asked what we were photographing. It turns out that he lives on the same street. He wanted to know if we were taking pictures of his wife relaxing by the pond.

Afterwards we took a quick trip up the Cuyahoga River — yes, that Cuyahoga River — and over the valley, then back to Medina.

Today is not an ideal day for flying, as such, but it’s ideal for someone with an instrument rating. It’s marginal VFR in the western part of our route, and very low IFR in the east, which is expected to continue through our arrival.

It turns out, however, that 7,000 feet was the perfect altitude to file, because for the first two hours we were VFR between cloud layers. blizzard would have really loved this part of the flight, enjoying flying above flat cloud tops as he does.

The last hour and a half to Albany was solid instrument conditions, although the clouds were very thin — we could still see the wingtips perfectly — and the air was very smooth. We broke out at some point during the initial descent, and made a visual approach into Albany.

Word to the wise: Albany has a good self-serve fuel price, but their pumps are a pain in the ass to find at night. They’re surrounded with construction-flasher barricades that make the area look off-limits; the flashers are almost tall enough to scrape low wings, with no room to taxi clear of them; and the area is completely unlit, so bring a flashlight (which you should have anyway, tsk tsk) and try not to lose your keys.

The rest of the trip was marginal VFR, and none of the 500-1,000 foot ceilings stuck around for our arrival, which is fine. 500 feet is well above ILS minima, but I’d rather get my practice without a passenger.

It’s nice to be home, and the 30-40 knot tailwinds certainly helped, but I’m ready for bed.

Today I had my eyelids held open forcibly and the skin scraped off my eyes, following which my corneas were attacked with intense, damaging beams of light. I had to pay for this privilege and make an appointment well in advance.

I’d worn glasses for 21 years, but the ultimate annoyance that truly frosted the suffering-cake was the scuba diving. None of the solutions for diving are really ideal, and combined with all of the other ways that -4.5 diopters of nearsightedness inconvenience my life, the time for action was now upon us, suddenly, like a velociraptor.

I am a man of action, it is often said.

To give you a sense of scale, the Snellen scale, 20/200 is around -2.5 diopters. Opinions seem to differ about whether the giant E at the top of the eye chart is 20/200 or 20/400, but I can’t see it anyway. They call this “moderate”.

I chose PRK (over the more well-known LASIK, not to be confused with LASEK) for a few reasons, but chief among them:

• The LASIK flap does not fully heal at all layers; fundamentally, at the end of the day, you will have had a flap cut in your eye. I don’t want that to be an issue when I want a newfangled bionic cornea in 25 years.
• Although serious complications of either procedure are very rare, not having a flap further eliminates a significant category. Flap-related complications have been known to arise even years after the procedure, particularly when head trauma is involved. What if I want to start kickboxing?
• At night, the pupil can expand to wider than the area covered by the flap, which means light can enter your eye outside of the treated area — this is why nighttime halos are more commonly reported by LASIK patients.

In exchange, I suffer a couple days of moderate pain after having the skin removed from my eyes, and my final corrected vision takes longer to come in (as that skin re-grows).

The lasers used in the procedures are the same, it’s just the mode of ingress that differs.

Some of my friends don’t like when I use words like ingress to describe something that happens to eyes.

The process was fairly simple. In each eye they put a drop of extremely effective local anesthetic. The entire procedure was totally painless.

After affixing an adhesive sterile drape to the area and installing a device that held my eyelids open, they put a bunch of other drops in. I couldn’t keep track of what all they were for. Ask an eye surgeon.

Then something that looked very much like a rotating electric toothbrush, but was presumably sterile, was used to remove the epithelium that normally coats my eyes. This felt like light pressure on my eye, and would presumably have been the most horrifically traumatic torture imaginable if it weren’t for those great eye-drops.

The surgeon did some further prep, which wasn’t really clear to me. It looked from below like she was painting my eye with something, or perhaps removing any last traces of epithelium.

The meat of the procedure came when I was told to stare at a blinking orange light, and the laser zapped my cornea hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. There was a somewhat unpleasant smell, but not as bad as at the dentist.

cornea smoke; don’t breathe this!

Instead of applying a uniform correction across the entire treated area, these new lasers apparently make tiny corrections to all of the different places where the cornea fails to resemble a well-focusing lens, working from a 3D map that was made beforehand and adjusted by the doctor.

Computers track the eye’s involuntary movements. I hope it tracks them well, because I found it very difficult to stare at the flashing orange light. I feel like a solid light would have been much easier.

The lasering itself took about 60, maybe 90 seconds. It was hard to judge precisely, because I wasn’t thinking about anything except not moving.

Right after the anesthetic wore off there was mild pain, 3-4 out of 10. Shona was nice enough to pick me up and take me home, which I did almost entirely with my eyes closed, perhaps 6 out of 10.

They gave me a very effective pain management regime, of which I deployed PAINCON 3 shortly thereafter. I took a nap and now feel quite a bit better, with only Tylenol (PAINCON 4) in my system.

I feel like I’m at around 20/40 now already, but that will likely deteriorate as the eye-skin regrows. Tomorrow is supposed to be the worst day for pain.

Reading text is very difficult. You guys will have to proofread this for me.

I made Zuni’s roast chicken tonight and Brette said that it was “the best chicken [she's] ever eaten.” This is not a lie, this is the truth.

I’ll write an update about my eyes tomorrow. Go Tribe.

Oct 5 - day 1

The pain is real, but not extreme. 6 out of 10 in the right eye, 3-4 in the left.

At my followup, the doctor anesthetized the right eye which brought that right down. No sign of infection — that’s the most critical potential complication.

I tested at 20/30 in both eyes, which we are both very happy with.

The pain returned, as expected, so I took the military to PAINCON 3 and slept through most of the day. I redeployed that arsenal to watch the baseball game — probably overdid it a bit — then went back to sleep.

I woke at 02:30 this morning with an intense pain in my left eye. I almost paged the cornea fellow-on-call, but after working my way up to PAINCON 1, I managed to bring it under control long enough to fall back asleep. When I woke up later, it wasn’t so bad.

I fully intended to overdo it again tonight watching Ohio State with Joe, so today was spent almost entirely in bed. I got up every 4 hours for my antibiotic and anti-inflammatory drops, ate a bowl of cereal, took another shot of painkiller, and did my best to crash again. I can sleep like a champ, don’t worry about me.

I was able to limit myself to just Tylenol today, though my eyes ached all day. Maybe 3-4 out of 10, occasionally 5-6, and very sensitive to light.

You know what’s surreal? Catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror taking a bath wearing sunglasses. I can’t shower until day four.

Woke up feeling pretty good.

Still pretty sensitive to light, but my vision has improved somewhat. Reading small text on my far monitor is now possible, though quickly tiring.

Apart from light sensitivity, they felt good enough that I drove to Jacob’s
house today without incident.

It feels almost like I didn’t have surgery at all! Light sensitivity has diminished enough that I don’t have to wear sunglasses around the house all day.

No problems watching the baseball game, and smaller halos at night.

Still no discomfort. I think my vision is best right after I wake up, and then it diminishes as the day goes on, as my eyes get tired. Still about 20/30; a little better in the morning, a little worse at night.

Today was the appointment to remove the bandage contact lenses, and my vision immediately suffered greatly. She said that the epithelia that had regrown over my eye were all squished down by the contacts, and are now free to reorganize themselves and will be blurry until they fully heal.

She also says that it regrows from the outside in. All of these areas of regrowth are meeting haphazardly in the middle of my eye, which is why my central vision — the only part that’s ever sharp — is so poor.

My understanding is that it could take a good 4-6 weeks to be really sharp, but that I should be functional again soon.

Today I am definitely not functional. My vision is so bad that it’s almost indistinguishable from my atrocious vision pre-surgery.

It’s improving a little bit each day. By now it’s far, far better than the afternoon that the bandage lenses were removed, but still not back to where it was that morning.

When I wake up, I think my vision may be close to 20/20, and this lasts about twenty minutes. For the rest of the day, more like 20/40. I have no problem driving, but I can’t read street name signs particularly well from any significant distance.

I stopped using the antibiotic drops on day 7. I’ll be using the anti-inflammatory/steroidal drops for several more weeks yet, and they’ll slowly taper them off. I gather that they’re helping the cornea heal, and preventing the epithelium from becoming hazy, which is the only significant potential complication that PRK has and LASIK doesn’t.

This is why UV-blocking glasses are mandatory while outdoors for the next twelve months.

Another followup appointment; she thinks everything is going swimmingly.

I was pleased to hear that she can still see a pronounced ridge of healing cells in the middle of my eye, which explains why it’s still blurry — it would have been concerning if my vision were still sub-par and it’s smooth and healed.

She also said that there were some dry areas, even though it doesn’t feel like it, and even though I lubricate hourly. I gather that proper moisture is a big deal for the healing eye.

So we went ahead and inserted silicone plugs in the lower drainage ducts in both eyes. They’re permanent in theory, but I guess they’re easy to remove if they end up bothering me, or we see that they’re no longer needed after my eyes are healed.

They more or less do what they sound like — they block one of the eye’s two drainage ducts, in an effort to keep more of the moisture in my eye.

They were pretty painless to install, a bit of a pinch, and it feels like there’s a grain of sand in the lower inside corner of each eye. I can feel it when the eye is pointed at my nose. I hope my eyes gets used to that, because that will drive me crazy.

I tested at 20/30 in the left eye, 20/40 in the right, so my estimates were pretty accurate. She says this is totally normal, the expected multi-week healing time of this procedure.

I also got some really rad, very viscous eye lube, since my eyes do feel dry when I wake up. I’ve been using drops that are the same consistency as normal tears, and these are basically a gel, so they should stick around longer.

A few people asked about flying after corrective surgery, and the short answer is that it is a shockingly straightforward process for a federal bureaucracy.

As a non-commercial pilot I have a third-class medical certificate, which among other things requires at least 20/40 vision (corrected or uncorrected) in both eyes, at a distance and at 16 inches. My medical currently reads “MUST WEAR CORRECTIVE LENSES” for both near and distant vision. Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1996 that the FAA relaxed old requirements and began permitting poor uncorrected vision in commercial pilots.

According to the FAA, once my vision is stable, my doctor merely needs to complete a long but straightforward form detailing the new particulars of my eyes.

Strangely, the flying community appears not to agree about whether I need to submit this form to the FAA, but the FAA’s own web site makes it fairly clear that I should. In any case, I am formally cleared to resume flying under my old medical the moment my doctor gives the OK. I don’t need any additional permission from the FAA.

After learning that I was back to at least 20/40 in both eyes, I went ahead and resumed helicopter lessons yesterday and today. I could have done so sooner, but I’ll be ready to solo before I get my medical back anyway, so there was no great rush.

There wasn’t much rust after three weeks, so we practiced some trickier hovering proficiency maneuvers, and then started ploughing new ground.

Landing and taking off from a slope are interesting. You can’t cheat, the way I learned to land when I wasn’t as proficient at hovering. You have to really fly the helicopter all the way down to the ground.

You approach parallel to the slope, set the upslope skid down on the ground, and then slowly lower the downslope skid. As you reduce collective and the body of the ship stops being level, you end up holding more and more cyclic into the slope so that the rotor remains level (and the lift vector remains vertical). After the full weight of the helicopter is firmly on the ground, then you can neutralize the cyclic. Taking off is pretty much the same, in reverse.

The biggest concern during slope operations is the potential for dynamic rollover, which is as bad as it sounds. You avoid this by paying careful attention to attitude, and neutralizing any rolling tendency before it has a chance to build.

Next, I did my first straight-in autorotation, in which you simulate an engine failure and glide the ship into something that theoretically resembles a normal landing. As I mentioned before, you have to hold a seriously nose-low attitude to maintain airspeed, and hold it almost all the way down, flaring at the last minute to kill your forward and sinking speed.

We finished up with some hover autorotations, simulating an engine failure from a four- or five-foot hover. From that height, it’s pretty much a matter of just neutralizing the yawing and drifting tendencies while the helicopter settles to the ground. There is a lot of yawing tendency when the rotor is suddenly not producing all that power, so you need a lot of right pedal to compensate.

Because you were hovering to begin with, collective pitch is already pretty high; but once you start to sink you can pull it the rest of the way to trade blade inertia for a reduction in sink rate. If you pull it too soon, you’ll actually balloon a little bit — not only are you now higher in the air, but you also just threw away all of your blade inertia, so it’s going to be a “firm” landing.

I could certainly use more practice, but I didn’t bend the ship, which is my chief measure of success at this stage.

At this point it sounds like I’ve demonstrated to my instructor that I fly safely enough not to kill myself, which is the basic standard of care before he signs me off to start flying solo. Before he can do that, however, I need to accumulate 20 hours of R44 time — and get my medical back.

Flying time: 1.6 and 1.4 hours (14.3 total)

The weather was great today, and we took advantage of it by doing a great many autorotations.

We did one straight-in, a couple turning, one best-glide, one minimum-sink, and a few from the hover.

My instructor also demonstrated a running takeoff — gathering speed while your skids scrape along the ground, until you have enough airspeed to lift off — which isn’t part of the practical test standard, or ever a good idea.

You’d only need to do it if you’re so overloaded for the conditions that you can’t maintain a hover, and thus require the added lift generated by airspeed before you can lift off. That would be criminally stupid, but he wanted to show me what to expect when we start practicing running landings (which are part of the practical test standard).

We’ve done everything he wants to cover before I start flying solo, but I’m still four hours and one third-class medical short of the minimum requirements. He keeps forgetting how little time I have, and that I won’t get my medical back until (probably) next week.

Flying time: 1.9 hours (16.2 total)

Boston opened the world series at home last night (sigh), so there were four F-16s parked on the military ramp at Hanscom. Judging from the “Jaws” callsign, my guess is they were from the 134th fighter squadron based in Burlington, VT.

They happened to be departing just as we were spinning up, and requested an unrestricted climb to 10,000 feet. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Theirs were pretty standard takeoff rolls apart from the noise, then a sharp 90-degree pitch up to a direct vertical climb. Maybe it was for noise abatement, but I think they were showing off, and it worked.

“Caution wake turbulence for departing F-16s. Cleared to land runway 5.”

An F-16 can climb at fifty thousand feet per minute. In a Warrior, I am pleased to climb at seven hundred FPM, but my plane also has a lawnmower engine.

After that excitement was behind us, we flew out to the New Hampshire border to learn another new skill that I’d never do in an airplane: approach to land on a pinnacle.

Normally you can get good information about your speed by detecting the ground rushing by in your peripheral vision — but when it’s way below you (because you’re approaching a pinnacle) then you really don’t learn anything. You have to look at your airspeed gauge more often. That’s about the only difference between a pinnacle and any other off-airport approach.

Since we were out that direction, we did a few autorotations at Fitchburg (KFIT), and practiced flying with a simulated hydraulic system failure. It’s not just annoying, like driving a car without power steering; it’s a lot of work just keeping the ship steady. You have to constantly pull on the collective to keep it from lowering on its own, and it’s hard to make subtle cyclic changes.

Still not enough time to get signed off yet. We’ll do the dual cross-country tomorrow.

Flying time: 1.5 hours (17.7 total)

I haven’t planned a VFR cross-country flight without any navigational aids since my ab initio training. We have a handheld GPS (which I opted not to use), but the helicopter doesn’t have a VOR, or even an ADF.

I wanted to make sure I can still follow roads and power lines and other visual waypoints without cheating; turns out I can. It’s just harder in a helicopter, because you never have both hands free. If you take your hand off the cyclic, you won’t have very long to regret it.

Cross-country flights for the purpose of getting a helicopter rating don’t need to be as long as for an airplane, so we just went to Portsmouth, congratulated ourselves on a job well done, then landed at Petey’s for lunch.

My first off-airport landing was uneventful. Sure draws a crowd, though.

After lunch — next time I will try the supposedly best sea scallops on the coast — we did a touch-and-go at Plum Island to meet the third-airport requirement, then back to Bedford.

I’m an idiot, so I only have the after-lunch GPS track.

Flying time: 1.8 hours (19.5 total)

I met Chris and Shona at the Orpheum Theatre for our third group evening with the internationally sweaty Gordon Downie and his Tragically Hip.

Gord wasn’t quite his usual self. He was less homeless man in the subway crazy, more Rutger Hauer dying at the end of Blade Runner crazy. He also destroyed four microphone stands trying to do tricks with them. That was endearing, actually.

It was a good show — they always are — but not as good as the ones I’ve seen before. They played all of the better songs from their latest album, and plenty of old favourites with many rearranged vocals.

Maybe it’s just my inherent dislike of change, but the new vocals are not an improvement. They no longer match the rhythm or harmonize well with the music, or indeed even with the backing vocals. It sounds like he just got tired of singing those songs the same way and wanted to mix it up, but it’s unfortunate. You could hear it starting to happen already in some of the songs on their That Night in Toronto dvd.

More unbelievably for a band like the Hip, the opening band, The Joel Plaskett Emergency, were abysmal. The lead guy was a technically proficient guitar player, but I’ll go no further. The songwriting was terrible. I figured these guys must be Gord’s nephews or something, because there’s no way The Hip should have taste that bad.

And now it turns out this guy won an East Coast Music Award for songwriter of the year? Those big Halifax award shows are dead to me.

I only needed 0.5 hours, but we stayed up for 0.6. Reminds me of my last instrument training session, 0.3 in the simulator to get me to 40.1 instrument hours three days before my checkride.

It wasn’t wasted time, however; it was very windy, so we practiced hovering maneuvers and traffic patterns in wind that was stronger and gustier than I’d want to tackle by myself. It was fun.

I have somehow reverted to being consistently too steep again on my approaches. It happens even with a strong wind helping me out, so I must be getting the angle all wrong. I’ll have to practice my patterns when I get back to Boston and start flying solo.

Hopefully I’ll get my medical back tomorrow, as planned.

Flying time: 0.6 hours (20.1 total)

I did indeed get my medical back yesterday. As I thought, I’ve improved to better than 20/20 in the left, 20/30 in the right, and that difference is still clearly noticeable. I hope it starts to narrow!

According to my doctor, the plugs are working wonders on the dry areas she saw. I don’t really notice them any more, and they gross people out, so I guess they can stay.

iPhone developed a weird speaker problem that I thought was software-related, but in fact turned out to be pocket lint. I’m glad I figured that out before I re-locked it and took it back to the Apple store with some song and dance about why I didn’t have any SIM card in it…

Slightly more than half the Mac Heads opt for Firefox over Safari, which begs the question why?

I’ll tell you why: Adblock.