Indice dei contenuti per August 2015 in Flying

A BOLD AND INDEPENDENT LOOK AT AVIATION’S BIGGEST ISSUES The great news from AirVenture is that the IFR proficiency center, a hit last year with thousands of pilots, is being reprised, and then some. The new EAA Pilot Proficiency Neighborhood (PPN) will be bigger and better than last year’s impressive center. As you can tell from the new name, EAA has gotten completely behind the idea, committing its considerable resources at AirVenture and including a bigger site, more space inside and a real EAA spin with the addition of a VFR component, which EAA is calling the Stick and Rudder Center. We applaud EAA taking the center under its wing. With EAA’s stewardship, we’re hoping the center becomes a fixture at Oshkosh. There’s even been some talk of EAA taking…

NO-NONSENSE RISK MITIGATION FOR PILOTS LIKE US Tornadoes had caused extensive damage and loss of life in central Kansas — the area from which we had departed in our airplane that very morning. There had been a wild weather rampage all the way from Oklahoma to Nebraska. The video on TV that evening was dramatic. Had I taken an extreme risk to f y home out of that? Let’s see. It was central Kansas in late spring. It was no surprise that thunderstorms were in the Wichita forecast for the morning. Before parting after dinner, I had advised my passengers of my plan. We would meet in the hotel breakfast area by 9 a.m., ready to go to the airport for a tentative 10 a.m. takeoff for San Diego. If…

CUTTING THROUGH THE MYTHS TO GET TO THE FACTS OF FLIGHT I see in The New York Times that rugged- individualist Western farmers are using drones to inspect crops and locate lost cattle, defying FAA regulations that forbid commercial use of the ubiquitous gadgets. “Precision agriculture,” as this kind of eye-in-the-sky farming has come to be called, seems like a pretty harmless thing — a good thing, actually, if you like food. In Japan, thousands of robot helicopters are already being used for crop spraying. However, despite the surging popularity of recreational multicopters, drones have gotten rather bad press in the United States. Their potential for annoying invasions of privacy and for colliding, accidentally or deliberately, with real airplanes has temporarily eclipsed their many beneficial uses. If the present rules…

DO YOU HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION QUESTION? GO TO FLYINGMAG.COM/CS FEEDBACK FROM OUR READERS NEXTGEN CHALLENGES Robert, your article about ADS-B and NextGen in the June Going Direct was right on [“What Is Next-Gen? Why Does It Matter?”]. The signals from ATC radars, both primary and secondary, are far more powerful and less easily corrupted than the very low-powered satellite and other signals necessary for the ADS-B part of Next-Gen. One certainly has to agree with the ability to reduce reliance on ATC radars, at least in times in which there are no threats to the integrity of ADS-B signals. The FAA and military sort of accept this ADS-B vulnerability when they say they would keep some protection by retaining primary radars. But in a corrupted or jammed ADSB situation, one…

ACCIDENT ANALYSIS THAT GOES BEHIND AND BEYOND THE NTSB REPORT An airplane whose CG is significantly far behind the aft limit becomes neutrally stable or even mildly unstable. It can still be flown by a sufficiently alert pilot, but to a pilot who is unprepared for it, the experience is disorienting and can easily lead to overcontrol. Overcontrol in the noseup direction, in turn, can end in loss of control. That, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded, was the cause of the crash of a 1999 Piper Saratoga at North Captiva Island, Florida, in June 2014. The 2,000-hour instrument- rated private pilot, 62, was bringing a load of ceramic tiles from Fort Myers, 20 miles away on the mainland, to be used in a remodel of his house. He had…

TALES OF WHEN FLYING, DISCOVERY AND LIFE CONVERGE I’ve been lucky in life in many regards, but perhaps most of all in that I knew what I wanted to do from a very early age. My mother recently unearthed a first-grade project in which I declared my intention to become an airline pilot, and the subsequent trajectory of my life stayed more or less true to that goal. I developed some vague notions of pursuing law or architecture if the flying thing didn’t work out, but never took it further. It’s probably for the best; knowing how I crave variety and change, I doubt I would have done well in either staid profession. In any case, I’ve never known any career other than aviation. Throughout my teens, I earned flying…

The Piper Super Cub hasn’t been built in any numbers since the early 1980s, but because of its utility and rugged construction, it remains a valuable commodity for forays into the outback; even after they’re wrecked, PA-18s are almost always rebuilt to fly again. Many owners have put a dozen or more mods on their Super Cubs, including engine upgrades, new avionics panels, float installations and tundra tire conversions. Specs shown are for a PA-18-150, the most produced Super Cub. Typical Used Price $60K-$120K Certification Category Part 23 Typical Seating 2, tandem Empty Weight 938 pounds Max Weight 1,750 pounds Useful Load 767 pounds Full Fuel Payload 551 pounds Takeoff Ground Roll 200 feet Landing Ground Roll 350 feet Minimum Speed 43 mph Backcountry Super Cub: Looking to build a…

FLYING THE HEAVY METAL WITH AN AIRLINE CAPTAIN It goes without saying that safety has to be the first priority for any airline, but reliability certainly runs a close second. If an airline is perceived as unreliable, no amount of travel vouchers or complimentary cocktails will restore a negative image. A carrier’s scheduled performance is a direct measure of its product quality. The resources committed to reliability consume a major portion of managerial efforts. The very nature of operating complicated machinery will occasionally present itself with a sick day. Unfortunately, I had to participate in an evening of mechanical f u. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the night had transformed into a 777 epidemic. Not only is it frustrating for our customers, but also it’s frustrating for my…

Throughout the history of aviation there have been many exceptional airplanes designed and built. Whether the designs were successful or not, some of them were simply not built to last for 100 years or more. The Flying team recently created two new galleries featuring cool airplanes that, for one reason or another, have not stood the test of time. The gallery named “10 Cool Airplanes That Will Never Fly Again” features some really interesting one-off designs and others that were built in sizable numbers. What ties them all together is that they will likely never fly again, whether it is for economic reasons, safety reasons or simply because the design is too valuable an artifact to risk taking it to the skies. Similarly, “10 Airplanes You Won’t Believe Are Still…

THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM NTSB REPORTS OF GENERAL AVIATION ACCIDENTS. PIPER PA-46-310P Dawsonville, Georgia INJURIES: 1 Fatal The pilot filed an instrument flight rules flight plan for the flight and was communicating with an air route traffic control center controller en route. The controller verified that the pilot had the local weather information for the intended destination and then he queried the pilot about the airplane’s heading (which was north of the direct heading), and the pilot reported that he was having trouble with the autopilot. He then asked the pilot if he was able to hold the assigned altitude of 8,000 feet mean sea level (msl), and the pilot responded that he could; however, the airplane descended below 8,000 feet msl, and the controller then issued an altitude…

A NO-HOLDS-BARRED LOOK AT PILOTS, PLANES AND LIFE IN THE AIR It was nearly May before spring arrived this year in the Ohio Valley, and then it seemed like forever until the grass strips dried out from weeks of rain and I declared victory in a fierce battle with some miserable bug. But eventually all the stars aligned — the weather, the runways and my snotty nose — and I dragged N3513N, my Cub, out of its “new” T-hangar to go flying. It had been living in one of three large hangars built at Lunken Airport in 1927 for the new Embry-Riddle Co. While I was glad it was under roof, a Cub in a common hangar with people pushing it around is a recipe for disaster; so it was…

Air traffic controller Ray Smid watched the yellow blips slide across his radar screen. The circles moved in silence, but Smid never forgot that they embodied real aircraft. It didn’t matter if the traffic was big or small. Lives were lost if the blips merged. The eraser-shaped images toted “data blocks” displaying flight number, destination, speed and altitude. Aircraft climbed and descended; others were at cruise altitude. Smid’s flat-panel display constantly changed. The traffic never stopped. It was 5:20 a.m. on Sept. 26, 2014, and while Smid couldn’t see the sunrise from the dim control room at the Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), blue sky waited at the end of his shift. Smid had been a controller at the Aurora, Illinois, facility for the past 27 years. Unlike…

FROM THE OPERATING ROOM TO FLIGHT OPS: A SURGEON’S JOURNEY Mark Twain’s fanciful novel featured an industrial age New Englander transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, but this true tale is about an East-Coaster, his family, his airplane and a trip to Carmel, California. The basic plot ingredients feature a 35-year-old Piper Cheyenne I turboprop that they’ve owned for 16 years and a “treat-yourself-once-in-a-lifetime” monthlong vacation on the West Coast. The cast includes Corbett, a 10½-year-old Labrador retriever, his owners (my wife, Cathy, and me) and various friends who had promised to visit our VRBO (vacation rental by owner) cute little cottage. It looked for a while as if the whole caper was not going to get off the ground. As the departure date arrived, several…

A LOOK BACK AT FLYING MAGAZINE 25 AND 50 YEARS AGO 25 YEARS AGO OUR COVER FEATURED THE AEROSPATIALE TB-9 TAMPICO CLUB, A $74,700 TRAINER WITH DOCILE STALL CHARACTERISTICS AND MORE STYLE AND RAMP APPEAL THAN YOUR RUN-OF-THE-MILL STUDENT PLATFORM. WHILE MORE EXPENSIVE THAN ITS LOWWING PIPER COMPETITOR, THE FRENCH OPTION PROVIDED GREAT VISIBILITY AND A DOOR ON EACH SIDE TO BOOT. We offered a range of options to abate that age-old source of conflict between the flying community and some of the general public: airport noise. In addition to making use of the entire runway and considering running the engine at a lower rpm on climb, we suggested pilots leave off unnecessary fuel for local flights to boost performance and reduce noisy departures. Peter Garrison flew the Rutan Triumph,…