Cross Canada Flight

Why?

Good question. It was expensive, at times quite stressful, and with a strong element of risk. The weather was not always kind to us, and we often ended the day exhausted – and I didn’t get a cappuccino for three weeks!

The main reason is that I’ve always wanted to travel right across Canada in a way that would enable me to ‘feel’ how big Canada is. Driving would have done it, but I prefer flying my own plane. Flying across Canada has been an ambition of mine ever since I started flying a small plane.

Second, I wanted to stretch my flying experience. I am a fair weather flyer normally, and avoid flying in anything that might be challenging, in terms of weather. However, pilots should know how to deal with bad weather.

Even with the most careful planning, you can run into unexpectedly bad weather. On a trip like this, you have to make difficult judgements and decisions. I took advantage of flying with a group of more experienced pilots, and especially had Ernie to learn from. I feel I’m now in a much better position to judge when it’s safe to fly, and when it isn’t, without waiting for the weather always to be perfect. And we certainly had weather on this trip.

Third, I wanted to see friends along the way. It was great to see Maxim and Lise, Diane Janes, and Jean Watters and Renee Bourbeau. Other friends were away at the time, so I couldn’t see everyone I wanted to, but then we had a schedule to fly.

Lastly, there was John Lovelace’s Cross Canada Century Flight, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first powered flight in Canada. This alone would have made the trip worthwhile. It provided a timeline and structure, and most importantly, ensured ground and air support from local flying clubs, airports and NavCanada flight services.

So in brief, the trip enabled me to personally experience Canadian geography, culture and history, while indulging my passion for flying.

Facts

Distance travelled: NM 6,791 = 12,577 kilometres (approximately)

No. of provinces visited: 9 (BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI).

No. of different airports visited: 27 (only Sudbury and Kamloops twice). No. of take-offs and landings: 29

Flight time (from engine start-up to shut-off): 82.8 hrs (Tony: 47.1; Ernie: 35.7) over 14 days

Time in air (from take-off to landing): 70.2 hours

Total time (with breaks): 22 days

Average air speed: 96.7 knots = 179 kilometres per hour

Total fuel consumption: 2,127 liters = 5.9 kilometres per litre, or 17 litres per 100 kilometres

Beers drunk: not recorded (or remembered).

What did I learn?

1. The privilege and community of flying

I put this first, because it was the biggest learning curve for me. In the past, I paid for lessons, bought a plane, paid for the maintenance, tried to follow the rules and procedures as best I can. I took the rest for granted.

What I began to really appreciate along the way are all the services provided to make flying possible and safe. Private pilots like myself are not running a commercial or public service (such as firefighting). We fly primarily for fun. Yet we have access to excellent flight services from NavCanada. These provide, usually 24 hours a day, access to the latest weather forecasts, notification of  areas where flying will be difficult or restricted, and advice and guidance, both on the ground and in the air. They are invariable helpful and cheerful.

Air traffic control manages the airways, mainly around busy airports, and helps separate aircraft and keep them safe. We have access to exactly the same services as the commercial flights. Air traffic controllers quite rightly reprimand us when we make mistakes, but most of the time, they are courteous and exceedingly helpful, going above and beyond their minimal duties. For instance, they would often track us by radar when outside their zone but in other areas of busy traffic, and warn us of potential conflict with other traffic.

The flying clubs and airport staff all along the route, without exception, were hospitable and helpful. For the Century Flight, even the smallest airport had local volunteers who provided free refreshments and often free shuttle buses to local hotels.

I want to mention particularly the staff at Shell aero service stations. Often there are computers and telephones in these centres for pilots to help with flight planning, and free coffee, and the staff were always willing to provide advice on restaurants and hotels, even in some cases getting us preferred rates at local hotels. At Timmins, one of their staff (Gabe) came out on his day off to help get the plane started when our battery drained over night.

I realised at last that I was part of a very special community – the Canadian flying community. It is a privilege to fly almost anywhere I want in Canada, and to know I will be supported and helped along the way.

2. The importance of a good co-pilot

Even without a co-pilot, I would probably have tried to make this trip. I doubt though whether I would have been successful without Ernie.

No matter how experienced a pilot you are, you can always learn from another experienced pilot. When you are flying eight hour legs, you need two pilots, because of fatigue. The longest leg I flew was five hours, and I was exhausted that day (weather was bad, we couldn’t get into an airport and had to return, etc.). Ernie also was rated for over the top flying and I wasn’t, and it was necessary several times, or we would have been stuck for days.

Also, when you are spending six to eight hours every day in a tiny cockpit with someone else, no to mention travelling everywhere together for three weeks, it is really important that you get on. I had never met or been in touch with Ernie six weeks before the flight – he answered my e-mail request for a co-pilot sent through the Aero Club of BC. He is much more experienced than I am, since he has been flying since 1969. We are very different personalities and we also fly very differently. Nevertheless it worked extremely well. I am exceedingly grateful for Ernie’s patience, painstaking planning, and his mastery of flying with a GPS.

3. The majesty of Canada

I had travelled to many parts of Canada before making this trip, but either to extreme wilderness (the Yukon, northern BC) or mainly the larger cities (Montreal, Calgary, Toronto, Halifax, etc.). This trip was mainly about small town Canada – Swift Current, Brandon, Dryden, Morden, Sydney, Matane, etc. – divided by huge tracts of largely uninhabited land.

Everywhere we went, people were friendly and hospitable. I like to travel by public transport whenever possible and I had a couple of interesting bus trips, one in Brandon and one in Regina (interesting, because I didn’t know the route, and wasn’t sure I’d get to where I was intending to g0). This is where you will find both the old and the new Canadians – aboriginals, teenagers, new immigrants and temporary workers – in small town Canada. Since many new immigrants, teenagers and temporary workers often are not qualified to drive in Canada – or cannot afford to run a car – public transit for them is essential.

Even though they were the closest to home, the highlight of the trip, both going out and coming back, were the Rockies. Both times we had superb weather through the Rockies (distinguishing the actual Rockies from the six other mountain ranges in the west). Flying through the Rockies is a truly unique experience. The only time I have ever had vertigo is flying in the Rockies. Looking down, the mountain sides sometimes drop almost vertically for 10,000 feet.

The Rockies are stunningly beautiful, especially the high valleys, which are unseen from the road.

Other areas I found particularly beautiful are Prince Edward Island, the north shore of Nova Scotia, and Cape Breton. But then, I am an islander, and I love the sea.

In the end, I still think I fly in one of the best places in the world. In BC we have sea, high mountains, deep valleys, isolated islands, a wonderful shore line, the Okanagan, and the wilderness in the north.

Yes, Canada IS big. There are vast areas right across the country that are still isolated and remote, with very few people living there. And we saw only the most southerly 10 per cent of the country. The vastness of Canada’s boreal forests must be an exceedingly important component of a balanced climate and environment.

Lake of the Woods: a climate generator

Their loss, whether from over-logging, mining, oil and gas extraction, or death by pine beetle, would be truly catastrophic. Wherever we went we saw evidence of mining, forestry and dams.

Mine tailings near Ashcroft, BC

Canada has done well with preserving large tracts through national and provincial parks, but more needs to be done if we are to prevent an environmental disaster. Which brings me to my last point.

4. Flying and the environment

I have been struggling with this for some time. When I fly, I often see the yellow smog hovering over Abbotsford and the Fraser Valley, blown down the valley from the road traffic in Vancouver. Flying my plane burns a lot of gas – about the same as a General Motors Yukon truck (14-20 litres/100 kilometre) (although I think that says more about GM than it does about my plane).

My plane uses almost twice as much gas per kilometre as my own car. A modern commercial airline plane now gets about 3.5 litres/100 passenger kilometres (with two pilots, we were getting about 8.5  litres per 100 passenger kilometres). Unfortunately, there is no green alternative – no electric planes. I try to keep it well maintained, to reduce gas and oil consumption, but I can’t get away from it, it is not an environmentally friendly past-time, especially if I add the driving to and from the airport.

I don’t have an easy answer to this conflict. I could give up flying altogether, but someone else would buy the plane and presumably fly it. Now I have done the cross-Canada trip, I need to look carefully at when and why I fly. On the other hand, I do have to fly regularly, otherwise it becomes unsafe. So the choice really seems to be between giving it up altogether, or continuing with a carefully controlled rationale for only flying when necessary.

5. The value of a GPS

I have a Global Positioning System, but rarely use it for flying, preferring to use the more traditional method of plotting routes and navigating by charts. Since most of the flying I do is on routes with which I am familiar, and for fairly short legs of no more than two hours, this works pretty well for me.

However, on this trip, we were flying through completely unknown territory, often for long distances. The plane does have a compass and a heading indicator, but they are only accurate to within five degrees or so. When flying on the same heading for more than two hours, just a couple of degrees can take you a long way from your destination. Also, unlike flying in BC, where mountains, lakes, islands, roads, rivers and the coast line provide very clear and recognisable visual references, we were often flying over terrain with no easily distinguishable features. Believe me, in muskeg, one lake looks very much like another, the land is often flat and visibility may not be good. Especially when flying over the top, sometimes we had no clear visual references at all.

Fortunately, Ernie was very experienced in using the GPS. Indeed, from take-off to landing, he depended on it, even down to lining up on the runway for landing. He also used it for all his flight planning. It proved to be invaluable on this trip, and I will make much more use of my GPS in the future as a result. I was impressed above all with its accuracy, operating most times within 30 metres or so in terms of accurate positioning. I just wish the Lowrence GPS that both Ernie and I use had a better graphical user interface – it really needs a keyboard.

However, I won’t give up on tracking my flight path on the map, and constantly checking the visual references with the map – it makes flying more interesting.

Sometimes, I would rather have flown within the valleys in the mountains or along a winding river, rather than straight over the top. But then we did not really have time on this trip to meander and dilly-dally, and the GPS kept us on track.

6. My plane is terrific

C-GHNC (Charlie I call it) is a workhorse. It was built in 1974, and has done over 15,500 hours of flying. That is an average of 1.2 hours every day for 35 years. For some periods, according to the log, it has been flying for over eight hours a day for several days a week. I don’t fly it that much these days, but it certainly got a good work-out on this trip. It has been used mainly for pilot training so has seen its share of bumpy landings. Flying schools in particular are closely inspected and have to maintain their planes properly, or they lose their license. Since buying the plane from a flying school (Altair Aviation), I have continued to maintain the plane to the same standard, through Nivens Aviation.

On this trip, I had only one problem, with the alternator, and I should have known this might happen, as I had the brushes replaced six months earlier. Generally, it’s probably best not to just replace the brushes but put in a new alternator, if the alternator is several years old, since a large part of the cost is the labour of removing and replacing the alternator (if you want to know how to change the brushes in an alternator, go to: http://www.ehow.com/video_4936007_replace-worn-alternator-brushes.html).

On this trip, I flew for the first time above 10,000 feet, which requires climbing at full throttle for several minutes. Charlie handled this superbly, and was able to fly for very long periods (five hours or more) without any problems. The long-range tanks were useful. The plane will probably fly for seven hours on a full tank, which is more than my bladder will last. We never pushed it to the limit, as you always need spare fuel in case you need to divert to another airport, or, as we had to do three times, return to the airport from where we started. The longest leg flown without landing was just over five hours, when we left Geraldton and couldn’t get into Sudbury and had to go back to Timmins. The long range tanks give you confidence though on such a trip – there is always spare capacity.

Now if I could just get a car that is as reliable!

Was it worth it?

Definitely – I’m really glad I did it. I’m a better pilot by far as a result, and I saw a great deal of this wonderful country and its great people in a very short period of time. I have much more confidence in my plane now – I know it will fly high, long and safely, as long as I look after it properly.

Will I do it again?

Probably not. Partly for environmental reasons, and partly because I don’t want to fly across western Ontario again – just too hazardous in bad weather. It would be better to fly commercially, then rent a plane locally when I arrive.

Any regrets?

I didn’t get to Newfoundland, and I didn’t get to see friends in Southern Ontario.

Conclusions

The main item is now off the bucket list (I gave up hope of playing soccer for England a couple of years ago, although I still fancy my chance as manager). I now have to work out what else I really must do before I die, but that can wait for a while…