Tuesday 23 June 2009
It's midnight at Gander, Newfoundland,
and I've just lifted off Runway 13 in a new Cessna 172S and climbed into utter darkness. For a few minutes I could see three or four lights on the ground, but now I've passed through a stratus deck, and, with another layer overhead, I'm suspended in the night. Progress—even motion itself—is an abstraction, represented only by numbers on the instrument panel. It's almost as if I were isolated in a separate world, displaced along a dimension beyond space and time from the familiar and homely world of trees and roads and houses and other people. But it's a familiar feeling: I've been here before, and with no weather to speak of until halfway across the ocean, I'm content to wait for daylight to come in its own time.
It won't be long. The sun will rise well before I reach my second waypoint at 52°N 45°W, and I'll land in Scotland before sunset, so I'll have full daylight to deal with a weak frontal system south of Iceland, covering the second half of my route.
Meanwhile, it's time to let out my HF antenna. I check the wingtip strobes to see if they're reflecting precipitation. I use a traiing-wire antenna, 200 feet (60 meters) of high-quality (and expensive!) 14-gauge insulated wire stored on a wooden kite reel, and until I get it out and hooked up to my equipment, it's grounded through my body. It's no fun at all to be on the receiving end of the voltages induced in that wire by dragging it at a hundred knots through clouds or rain or (ouch! ouch!) snow. But my strobes tell me I'm flying in clear air, so I ease open the side window and let my "fish"—the funnel attached to the end of the wire to keep it from whipping—out into the breeze. At first there's not much pull on the wire, while the fish is in the boundary layer next to the fuselage, and I feed the wire out a yard at a time. But once the fish has passed safely under the tail and is feeling the full effects of the relative wind, I let the reel spin up, holding it in my right hand well clear of anything it might hit, and controlling the speed of the wire with my left. When the antenna has fully deployed I take a firm grip on it, unhook it from the reel, position it so only a few inches are inside the airplane, and close the window on it. Then I connect it to my solid-state antenna tuner which I hang on the hook of the window latch, and I'm in business. I've been assigned 2899 kilohertz, with a back-up frequency of 8891. I call Gander Radio for a communications check, and learn he's receiving me "three by three", that is, strength 3, readability 3, on a scale of 1 to 5. That's okay. I'm still in the groundwave, too close to his transmitter to receive the skywave signal bent back from the ionosphere. He'll hear me better later on. I settle back and continue climbing into the night.
About the glossary: Aviation has its own terminology, with plenty of acronyms and abbreviations. If (when) you come across an unfamiliar term, try running your mouse pointer over it. If it turns green, you can click on it and a glossary page will open with that word's definition at the top. Your browser's "back" button will return you to the post you were reading.
If the word doesn't turn green, you still might find it manually in the Glossary. Look for that under CATEGORIES, above. And if the word's not there, please let me know, and I'll add it.
In writing these definitions, I find they contain words which themselves need to be defined, as do the definitions of those words in an endlessly branching series. I seem to spend as much time working on the glossary as I do writing the posts. So where I've found ready-made definitions on the web that fulfill my purposes, I'll link to them instead of writing a new one; and then get back to the story.
I've identified the definitions both by their acronym and by the spelled-out term. I've listed the acronym first, but I've alphabetized the glossary by the long forms. I'm not at all sure that's the best way of doing things, and I welcome feedback.
