Tabla de contenidos para October 2020 en Flying

The ability to focus on the task at hand, to deal with an abnormal situation and determine the correct remedy without freezing in place—that’s the type of resilience pilots strive for. Another form of resilience: surviving the ups and downs of a cyclical industry by keeping a pragmatic yet positive attitude throughout. Such resilience leaves a pilot, or a company, poised to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself. An aircraft can show resilience in the marketplace as well, and one must in order to stay in production for decades. Change inevitably drives new requirements for such things as performance, avionics and creature comforts, called for by its pilots and operators—and smart companies stay abreast of these needs. Take the Beechcraft King Air. More than 56 years ago…

Does it help an airplane climb if you deflect the flaps a little bit? “In a word, no. Intuitively, people think that climbing involves “more lift” and so a flap, which seems to increase lift, might improve climb rate. Actually, flight lift of one G is always roughly equal to weight; excess power makes an airplane climb, not excess lift. Because flap deflection usually opens a gap in the wing and creates a discontinuous trailing edge, it slightly increases drag, and drag tends to reduce the climb rate. The main effect of a small flap deflection is to slightly lower the stall speed. This has no bearing on climbing because the speed for best rate of climb is quite far from the stall speed. However, the speed for the best…

Some accidents are preceded by warning signs. The takeoff into the teeth of an impending thunderstorm, the pilots smelling of alcohol, the stuffing of the last bag into an airplane already almost tipping over onto its tail—onlookers shake their heads or hold their breath. But some accidents arrive entirely without warning, and it is hard to know what or whom to blame. A doctor, 67 years old, and a friend flew in a club Cessna 182E Skylane from Clemson, South Carolina, to Orlando, Florida, to pick up a crankshaft. The weather was fine and the flight apparently uneventful. After completing their errand at Orlando Executive, they took off for a 35-mile hop to Massey Ranch in Edgewater, possibly to get fuel there for the return trip. The price of fuel…

1999 – Began with the Cessna Conquest I. Blackhawk has upgraded 60 aircraft, 30 percent of the fleet. 2002 – Upgraded 18 percent of the King Air 90-series fleet, a little more than 300 aircraft. 2006 – Upgraded 18 percent of the King Air 200 fleet, some 335 aircraft. Forty received the XP42 upgrade, 160 received the XP61, and 135 received the XP52. 2007 – Completed 50 of the XP135A upgrades on the Piper Cheyenne series. 2012 – Made 60 XP42A upgrades for the Cessna Caravan/Grand Caravan C208/C208B. Fifty additional C208s/C208Bs received the XP140 upgrade for a grand total of 110 aircraft representing 5 percent of the total Caravan fleet. 2018 – Converted 40 King Air 350s (4 percent of the fleet), which received the XP67A upgrade. 2019 – Completed…

I am different when someone is flying with me for the first time. Even more so if that person shows an interest in or fear of aviation. I feel responsible for my passenger’s continued fascination or for assuaging their anxiety. I do this by exhibiting a high level of proficiency from preflight through tie-down. I might as well have four stripes on my shoulders and travel everywhere with a small black roller case. With a witness in the left seat, I take on the role of a teacher with an inherent obligation to pass on the knowledge I’ve acquired. The by-product is useful to both pilot and passenger: By going over the rules for others, it fortifies them in my mind and—ideally—prevents future transgressions. This is in stark contrast to…

Three-quarters of the globe behind them, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, now had only the Pacific Ocean left to cross. They took off midmorning from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on July 1, 1937, bound for Howland Island, an 8,200-foot-long, paramecium-shaped speck halfway to Honolulu. A runway had been carved out on the uninhabited island for their use. Fuel awaited them, and the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca stood by with radio-direction-finding equipment. Earhart would navigate by pilotage and dead reckoning until nightfall; they would then rely on Noonan’s celestial navigation until the sun rose an hour before their anticipated arrival. Thereafter, Earhart would dead-reckon again. They reached the vicinity of Howland Island and then disappeared. The belief that they still had several hours’ worth of fuel as they…

Not Pass or Fail I enjoyed reading [Rob Mark’s] article on training, [“Regulation or Inspiration?”] in the September issue. It was a good recap of industry efforts to lower the accident rate. I wish I could agree that the [General Aviation Joint Steering Committee] has been as successful as the [Commercial Aviation Safety Team], but it hasn’t. The GA fatal-accident rate has been flat for 20 years. I would also point out that on Page 44, you seriously misquoted me regarding the flight review. I would never have termed the flight review a pass-fail event. Under FAA guidelines [see the latest edition of AC 61-98], a pilot cannot fail a flight review. If the instructor determines that the pilot does not meet the airman certification standards for his grade, category…

He was a good friend. A ski-resort developer, a leader in his community, someone we highly admired. He took off in his Cessna Cardinal at night from his ski resort during a snowstorm on a short trip he flew almost every weekend. He was not instrument-rated. He knew the route well, but obviously not well enough to fly it VFR in IMC. Every case is individual, but there are countless like his. Recently a low-time, non-instrument-rated buyer of a piston twin was trying to get it home to California from the East Coast in one day. He met a lonely death late at night in remote Colorado mountains. Then there was the high-time helicopter pilot attempting to fly visually through a pass in low ceilings and fog in Southern California.…

Imagine this scenario: You jump in your family airplane and depart into a clear blue sky. You’d have to stay aloft for 4.25 years to match the 37,200 hours in flight instructor Field Morey’s logbook. And you’d have to seek out the worst weather along the way to experience what Field has flown through in the almost six decades he’s been teaching his fortunate students to fly on instruments. Field comes from one of aviation’s well-known families. His father, Howard Morey, was born in 1903, the same year the Wright brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Howard took his first airplane ride in 1918, and not long after, he began teaching others to fly in a war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jenny. In 1927, the elder Morey even flew with…

It was a beautiful day this week when my sister, Mary, and I met at the hangar for a $100—no, $200—hamburger flight. Seems like yesterday that we two very young gals were driving down Airport Road in a green Volkswagen Beetle and flying Ercoupes, Piper Colts, Cessna 120s, 140s and Cubs from right here, on the south line at Lunken Airport. It was the early 1960s, and I remember we’d giggle at the thought that, in 50 years, we two old ladies would probably still be driving down Airport Road to the south line, still climbing into airplanes. Outrageous, but here we are. Mary’s arthritis makes turning her head to the right painful, so she adjusts the right seat in the Cessna 180 way back, which actually helps to spot…

A The clean user interface makes navigation straightforward for multiple users. A selection of user profiles can be attached to pilots with differing statuses within the app. B A digital archive of aircraft logs is possible with a custom application, making ownership an easy transition when it’s time to sell the aircraft. C Different views and a wide range of colors available provide users with an intuitive and customizable layout for the scheduling page on the app. D Push notifications through the app keep you advised of changes to the schedule and indicate when maintenance, equipment updates and other currency items come due. Sharing an airplane is a great way to both combine the expenses of aircraft ownership and ensure that the airplane flies enough to stay healthy. Yes, it’s…

The key aspect of any standard instrument departure is the word “standard.” SIDs were created to reduce the required radio traffic between air traffic controllers and pilots, as aircraft transition from the terminal to the en route airspace in busy environments such as the one surrounding Van Nuys, California. This past year, KVNY locally handled more than 212,000 takeoffs and landings, making it one of the busiest general aviation airports in the United States. Adding to the local complexity is KVNY’s proximity to Hollywood Burbank Airport (KBUR) to the east and its location beneath the busy Los Angeles Class B airspace. A Terrain and Climb Requirements The takeoff obstacle notes found on the right side of the SID plate provide required climb gradients per nautical mile. These ensure the aircraft…

So you got the computer and the sim software, and you’ve customized the aircraft panel and performance to match what you typically fly. But you have to do more than just buzz around the sky, drawing hearts with your “breadcrumb trails” on the low-altitude en route chart depicting your position. Approaches and holding patterns are all excellent to practice, but once you have your ILS vertical and horizontal bars locked on the center with consistency, take a moment and try scenario-based training. Here are three ways that work: 1) Use an online service to hone your mastery of a complex flight from preflight to post-flight debrief. The free videos at the FAA’s faasafety.gov site, Sporty’s airfactsjournal.com or the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association’s Air Safety Institute are great places to…

It is 9 a.m. on a gray Tuesday. I am standing on our dock at City Island in the Bronx, New York, surveying my handiwork, sipping hot coffee to assuage the gnawing tension. I have just finished preparing my sturdy boat and home, Windbird, to ride out a hurricane on a 40-year-old dock in an exposed marina. The storm is not to arrive for a few hours yet, but a freshening salty breeze and foreboding smudge on the southern horizon foretell its coming. I check and double-check the braided dock lines, which are fitted with rubber snubbers and anti-chafe gear, spider-webbed between strong points on the boat and various dock cleats of admittedly questionable integrity. Fenders are arrayed on the leeward side of the hull. I’ve removed our dodger and…

There are a few days in a pilot’s life that you remember forever. I am not talking about your first solo or the day you got (or will get) your private certificate. These events are always well-preserved somewhere in your brain’s hippocampus. I’m talking about those days when you really learned something you didn’t know—something that might just save your life. Like an asymptotic curve, a pilot never reaches perfection, but each one of these experiences gets you closer. And if you really care, that pursuit of perfection becomes a satisfaction of its own. A few of my own “awareness days” were occasioned by way of bad judgment. A close encounter with a thunderstorm in an underequipped Beechcraft Musketeer, piloted by a vastly underequipped young instrument pilot, left a mark.…