Índex per April 2016 a Flying

I think occasional jealousy among pilots is natural. The guy in the Skyhawk casts an envious glance at the Bonanza owner pulling up to the pumps. The Learjet captain secretly wishes he was flying a Gulfstream. The B-17 crew looks longingly at those gleaming P-51 Mustangs off he wingtip and dreams of trading places for just one mission. Even the Wright brothers, I’m sure, harbored a certain amount of jealousy aimed at Glenn Curtiss for succeeding so well with the whole aileron thing. Elsewhere in this issue you’ll read about my experience undergoing transition training in the Cirrus SR22 in Duluth, Minnesota. A perk of visiting the factory was that I also got the chance to fly a 2016 SR22T. It’s a sports car with wings — with a price…

IN DEPTH GEAR TECH PROJECT NOTEBOOK HOW IT WORKS MARK SPENCER Huntsville, Alabama, pilot and software engineer Mark Spencer is an innovator and knows how to push large rocks up big hills because he’s been there before. Back in 1999, Spencer developed Asterisk, an open-source telephone PBX software package that disrupted an established industry to become a successful alternative to existing proprietary telephone multiline office phone systems. Asterisk drew the attention of the entire telecom sector, and now Spencer wants to bring that level of innovation to the world of avionics. Spencer’s new Avilution eXtensible Flight System (XFS) could change the way we think about avionics. Built around redundant but easily attained (read less expensive) hardware and powered by an adaptable “source available” software suite designed to be futureproof, XFS…

IN DEPTH GEAR TECH PROJECT NOTEBOOK HOW IT WORKS Designers at Mooney have been busy. They’ve added a second door and upgrades galore to the fastest civilian piston single. Not only was Mooney able to add the second door to the composite enclosure, the door design is a full 4 inches wider than the previous version. What that means for this singleengine speedster is that access to the rear seats is now significantly better. And, of course, the addition of a door on the left side of the fuselage allows the pilot to step right in the left seat without having to awkwardly squeeze through the entire width of the cabin. Another benefit of the new composite skin is that the doors provide a tighter fit compared with the old…

CHART WISE ILAFFT AFTERMATH EVERYTHING EXPLAINED SKY KINGS TRAINING & TECHNIQUE | FLYING Opinion It was the slightest of rumbles. Both John and I felt it. John, who was at the controls, eased the yoke forward slightly and the rumble stopped. We landed and taxied to the ramp. We had an airplane full of pilots, but no one else had felt the rumble. It was the aerodynamic warning of a stall in our old Falcon 10. With hydraulically assisted, irreversible controls in this airplane, the pilots don’t get feedback. The rumble was the only warning we would receive. Had John reacted differently, the aircraft could well have stalled, and the aviation community would have racked up one more “loss of control” tragedy. We had been on our way to Oshkosh…

Josephine Marie was supposed to be born in mid-May, but she got into an argument with her mother long before then. As January ice-walked into February during a cold Boston winter, the argument grew testy and then became life threatening. Kelly, her mother, reluctantly took to bed and soon thereafter submitted to hospitalization at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, one of the best in the world. Kelly, with a doctorate in neuropsychology, was well aware of the risk to her pregnancy but less able to sense the risk to herself. By the first week of February, Kelly’s liver had begun to fail and her platelets, those little tiny chips in our blood that allow us to clot when injured, were falling to precipitously low levels. Kelly had a syndrome called, appropriately…

Early this year my son, who was screening a series of classic films for friends, put on the 1981 Spielberg pulse-pounder, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which came out in the year he was born and, therefore, stood to him, in terms of the history of film and the decline of taste, as Casablanca does to me. My son, showing that when it comes to sesquipedalianism, the fruit does not fall far from the tree, texted me: “Is the airplane whose prop eviscerates a large bald man in Raiders of the Lost Ark a real plane or is it a contrivance?” No, I replied, it was not real. But it was interesting nonetheless. The airplane was dreamed up by production artist Ron Cobb. Designing a historically plausible and dramatic-looking Nazi…

IN DEPTH GEAR TECH PROJECT NOTEBOOK HOW IT WORKS STAY ALERT If you’ve ever wondered about CO levels in your cockpit, this rugged little device has got you covered. MY GOFLIGHT PLC PRO AND SPORT BAGS Featuring durable, water-resistant sail-cloth material and well-padded shoulder straps and grips, this backpack fits all your essential flight gear, with compartments for headsets, a handheld radio, iPad, pens, flashlights and much more. PLC Pro $179; smaller PLC Sport $129; mygoflight.com TOCSIN 3 COCKPIT MONITOR Specifically designed for use in the cockpit, this digital sensor unit indicates dangerous carbon monoxide levels with flashing lights, horns and vibrations. The backlit screen displays the current CO level in parts per million. Alarms are customizable but preset at 35 and 100 ppm. $169.95; sportys.com…

TRAINING & TECHNIQUE | ACCIDENT ANALYSIS CHART WISE ILAFFT AFTERMATH EVERYTHING EXPLAINED SKY KINGS The following is an edited tran -script of communications between Colorado Springs Approach Control and Tower and the pilot of a Mooney M20E arriving on an IFR flight plan from Rapid City, South Dakota. TIME: 1138:14 869: Springs Approach, Mooney 79869, checking in 10,000 with Sierra. APP: Mooney 79869, Springs Approach, expect an ILS Runway 17L. 869: Expect ILS 17L, 869. APP: Mooney 869, Runway 17L RVR touchdown 1,600, rollout 1,200. Is that gonna be good enough for ya? 869: Mooney 869, affirm. The airport lay under a blanket of freezing fog. The reported weather was 100 and 1/4, while ILS minimums were 200 and 1/2, or at least 1,800 feet RVR. TIME: 1145:55 APP: Mooney…

IN DEPTH GEAR TECH PROJECT NOTEBOOK HOW IT WORKS LIGHTSPEED TANGO Lightspeed’s new Tango headset is the first premium automatic noise reduction (ANR) model to go wireless. It’s Bluetooth compatible, but the communications link is Lightspeed’s own special connection. $899 MSRP; lightspeed.com FINALLY, A WIRELESS ANR AVIATION HEADSET With all the electronic gadgets and accessories pilots fly with these days, climbing into the cockpit can be like stepping into an overgrown forest of cords and wires. That’s what makes Lightspeed’s new Tango wireless ANR headset so appealing. We flew with a pair and can report the sound quality is on par with other top Lightspeed models. The tech at the heart of the Tango headset is called Lightspeed Link. It’s not Bluetooth and it’s not Wi-Fi, but rather Lightspeed’s own…

CHART WISE: UNDERSTANDING RNAV CHART WISE ILAFFT AFTERMATH EVERYTHING EXPLAINED SKY KINGS WAAS LPV This is the type of RNAV GPS approach you should be most excited about. LPV approaches take advantage of the accuracy of WAAS to deliver minimums on par with Cat 1 ILS. LNAV/VNAV LNAV/VNAV is a lower level of service than LPV that provides lateral and vertical guidances similar to an ILS. It can rely on WAAS for guidance or Baro-VNAV, which computes vertical guidance using the altimeter. R LNAV LNAV is a level of service that provides only lateral guidance similar to a localizer-only approach. As such, an LNAV approach is a non-precision procedure with a minimum descent altitude rather than a decision altitude. COURSE INDICATOR The approach procedure and its waypoints are shown in…

After my purgatory in West Chicago and three mostly great years in the Indianapolis FSDO, the FAA offered a transfer to Cincinnati. It was a bittersweet decision, and my boss, Jay Peterson, rather obliquely suggested I might want to stay put. He understood I was anxious to get back home, but he also knew the Cincinnati manager’s reputation for being a hard ass. Jay was a good man and an excellent supervisor, and he was genuinely concerned about me and “Capt. Queeg.” Maybe he was right — I liked Indianapolis, and it liked me. But it had been a long struggle to get home, and I hoped it was because the Cincinnati manager wanted me; in my heart I knew the decision had likely come from the regional office. They…

Having reached the two-year mark, the disappearance of MH370 can certainly be called the greatest mystery since Amelia Earhart. But after talking with colleagues, friends and acquaintnaces, I’ve stumbled on another mystery. Despite scientific evidence that proves otherwise, many of these educated people are emphatic in their belief that a 650,000-pound airplane is hidden in the desert of a terrorist-harboring nation with a “stan” at the end of its name. The airplane will be flown out fully loaded with weapons of mass destruction in true 9/11 style. The search area is being defined by the extensive and complex data analysis of satellite communications company Inmarsat. The calculations for this analysis exceed my pilot math comprehension, but suffice it to say that the clever use of geometry, the Doppler effect, satellite…