Aviation loves acronyms, abbreviations, and deviously coded information, like the pair of hourly METARs pasted above.

Without even deciphering very much of the above coded weather report from today, for our nearest reporting station at the community of Lutsel K’e NWT, a pilot could just zero in on the “1SM FU” at 10 a.m., preceded by the “1/2SM FU” at 9 a.m., and, well, go ahead and make some others plans for the day. A walk, maybe, or a nap.

The reference to a thousand miles in the title is a drastic underestimate, but “a thousand miles” always has a nice ring to it. In this wildfire summer we are all working our way through, the tally of smoky miles logged by countless pilots across Canada must be in the hundreds of millions by now. Maybe more. It’s getting wearisome and it ain’t over yet.

What’s with the “foo,” you ask? As I said, aviation is all about abbreviations, acronyms, and terse codes. Sometimes these are easy to decipher, for example “CLD” for cloud and “OVC” for overcast. For years, though, I was puzzled by “Fu” for smoke and “Br” for mist. Answer is, the French factor. Flying machines have historic roots in both the francophone and anglophone worlds, and the lexicon of flying shorthand draws from both. Fumée = Smoke, and Brume = Mist.

Thus “Fu,” which a few days ago I started calling Foo — sometimes uttered with an adjective also beginning with F.

Wildfire smoke is strange stuff to fly through. 30 and 40 years ago, I labored under the false notion that smoke could only ever get so bad. That is, it could hamper VFR flying and be a pain in the keester, but it could not ground me. How wrong I was! Smoke is essentially different from cloud. It is more like a thin, surrounding ooze that mile by mile lulls a pilot into complacency. No sharp edges, no real definition. You can still see the ground below you, even from many thousands of feet above, but looking forward you have nothing. Foo can form layers, like cloud, but more often it is just a diaphonous maddening veil or blob, sometimes thick, sometimes not so thick — up, down, and all around. Yuck.

It is August tomorrow. A little darkness has come back to the nights of the North. I have yet to see my first star, but I will be cheering when I do.

Last week I set off to get a routine maintenance inspection on one of our floatplanes, 500 miles away in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. After a four-and-a-half hour flight that saw me under smoke at 300 feet AGL (above ground level) , almost above the smoke at 11,000 feet MSL (mean sea level) and in and around and through it everywhere else, I got word that the best option was to land the floatplane at the airport on the grass of the infield, as we do in the autumn at season’s end. There was so little water in the floatplane lake that taking off from there after the inspection was not going to be a sure bet. Another adventure. Another foo-filled flight getting back to home, followed by more days of some of the worst smoke we have seen here in years. Visibility down to half a mile or less at times. No one was even tempted to fly, which is actually a good thing because it removes the second-guessing.

Right across the country pilots of every stripe are just rolling with the punches, cursing the FU, and trying to finish out this smoky summer safe and sound. Props boring holes through the smoke, the mist, the VFR, becoming IFR, becoming stay-put, with our FT planted firmly on the GRND.