Table of contents for January 2016 in Flying

Based on the iconic Navitimer 01, Breitling’s 2015 Honor Flight Navitimer 01 is more than just a commemorative timepiece. The company has partnered with jeweler Westime to recognize veterans for their service, with the proceeds of Breitling’s limited-edition watch being donated to Honor Flight Network, which offers World War II veterans the chance to visit the memorials in Washington, D.C., that honor their service. To date, Breitling has helped fly more than 400 vets through the nonprofit organization. With most World War II veterans aged well into their 90s, about 860 die each day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Time is running out for many of these veterans, and we are fortunate to work with Honor Flight Network to give them ‘one last mission’ and honor them as…

FLYING READERS SHARE LASTING LESSONS FROM CLOSE CALLS AND NEAR DISASTERS. TO SEE MORE OF BARRY ROSS’ AVIATION ART, GO TO BARRYROSSART.COM. As on all major holidays, July 4, 2015, was a day to take my beloved Grumman Yankee out to stretch her legs and keep my flying skills proficient. Never did I expect that this would be a day of reckoning and facing up to my first inflight mechanical failure in more than 36 years of flying. When I took that flight, I had not been flying recently. Two frustrating months had gone by post annual when business trips had taken me out of town. I was eager to spend a good couple of hours flying around scenic Southern California. I took my sweet, leisurely time that beautiful Independence…

NO-NONSENSE RISK MITIGATION FOR PILOTS LIKE US “It’s that lake right ... there,” he said. When he removed his finger from the chart, all I could see was a mass of hundreds of lakes. It was to be our briefing for the flying adventure of a lifetime, but it was occurring in a restaurant bar, and it was clear that by the time we got there our briefers were ahead of us on having a good time. We were to land a Cessna 185 on floats on a little lake on the North Slope of Alaska to retrieve a couple who had been camping and fishing. Our briefers were full of warnings: “Watch out for that lake. It’s just barely long enough.” “Be careful of that submerged rock. There have…

Whether your airplane is approved for flight in known icing conditions or not, heed these strategies to minimize your risks of ice-related hazards. Never take off with any amount of ice, snow or frost on your airplane. If you do, you’re a test pilot flying an aerodynamically unproven aircraft. Determine where the freezing level is and try to stay several thousand feet below or above it, or clear of clouds. At the first sign of ice, do something. Climbing is often your best bet since you might not be able to regain altitude if you descend. Better yet is to make a gentle 180-degree turn and retreat. If you must climb or descend through icing levels, do it as quickly as possible. Consider delaying your descent into icing conditions until…

The Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI), a joint industry-government partnership that has been tasked with testing and approving avgas alternatives suitable for the existing piston fleet, will develop new ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) specifications within the next three years for refining and delivering safe and aff ordable unleaded fuel to your airplane. The move to replace 100LL avgas began in 2006 when the environmental group Friends of the Earth filed a petition with the EPA that sought an outright ban on leaded aviation gasoline. PAFI emerged at the 2010 Air-Venture Oshkosh airshow as a coalition of aircraft and engine manufacturers, and aviation groups, including the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the Experimental Aircraft Association, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association and others, which realized the EPA was serious…

As you probably know, the movie The Martian concerns an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and contrives to survive there until rescuers can come to get him. It has a kind of “Potemkin village” verisimilitude: a facade of scientific-sounding talk concealing ramshackle structures of crossed fingers and nonsense. Screenwriters are not under oath, but unfortunately a lot of kids probably get their ideas about physics from pseudoscientific movies like this one. The setup for the plot is a huge and violent dust storm that blows the hero, Mark Watney, off his feet, impales him with a piece of flying metal, and obliges the other crew members to blast off, leaving Watney for dead, to prevent their tall rocket from being knocked over by the mighty wind. Now, there’s a…

DO YOU HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION QUESTION? GO TO FLYINGMAG.COM/CS. SPACESHIPTWO CRASH While I agree with Peter Garrison’s contention that bureaucratic measures would not have prevented the SpaceShipTwo accident [“Single Point of Failure,” Technicalities, November 2015], I differ with his perspective on what might have. As a retired safety professional, the first thing that struck me was the lack of engineering controls to prevent a simple error from leading to such a catastrophic consequence. In the fields of system safety and human performance, it’s recognized that humans inevitably make mistakes and that interventions addressing latent organizational and system deficiencies are more effective than training and administrative controls relying on people, though the latter have an important role as lines of defense. John Graham Santa Fe, New Mexico IT ALL COMES BACK…

After an exciting Red Bull Air Race World Championship weekend at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway this past fall, British race veteran Paul Bonhomme took home the trophy, concluding the 2015 season. But his title was at threat until the final race day. Bonhomme’s Edge 540 was damaged in a rain downpour in the round of 14, but his ground crew was able to repair the airplane in time for the matchup with Austrian Hannes Arch — a crucial win that put Bonhomme in a position to earn the points needed to stand at the top of the podium. “The conditions were shocking,” says Matt Hall, who took home the win for the final race and came in second place for the season. “There was a lot of pressure on…

ACCIDENT ANALYSIS THAT GOES BEHIND AND BEYOND THE NTSB REPORT The airport at Los Alamos, New Mexico, lies on a mesa with ravines on three sides and rising terrain to the west. The 6,000-foot runway, 7,200 feet above sea level, is oriented east-west, with a slight upslope to the west. Because of the noise sensitivities of a community just beyond the departure end of Runway 27, all takeoffs are required to the east and all landings to the west, regardless of wind. A restricted area, R-5101, abuts the airport’s south edge and is continuously active up to 12,000 feet. On a Sunday morning in December 2013, there was a thin layer of powdery snow on the runway, but the airport was VFR. At 7:35 a.m., a New Mexico Airlines Caravan…

TALES OF WHEN FLYING, DISCOVERY AND LIFE CONVERGE Dear me, I must be a glutton for punishment. Hot on the heels of declaring that “Taildraggers Suck” (not everyone got the tongue-in-cheek humor behind the column’s title or necessarily read any further), I’m about to reach out and grab the third rail of aviation opinion: warbirds. As I recall, Martha Lunken took some serious heat from the warbird community a few years ago after she made some pithy comments at its expense, and former EAA President Rod Hightower stirred up a hornet’s nest in the other direction when he used one of his first columns in Sport Aviation to sing the praises of Nomex. Forget Oshkosh chalets or an autocratic management style, I maintain that Hightower’s downfall began right then and…

They were a big Irish family in Hamilton, Ohio. I’m not sure if Bernie or Joe was the oldest, but Art and Bill came along about 10 years later with another brother and three sisters somewhere in between. In 1929, after a neighboring farmer, “Pop” Muhlburger, taught the two oldest boys to fly in his Waco 10, the Hogan family bought both Muhlburger’s farm and the Waco. By the early 1930s, Art and Bill were flying and their sisters were helping run what had now become an airport. To paraphrase Gill Robb Wilson’s poem, the springing turf of that green meadow became a catapult from which, 86 years later, men are still leaping. The Hogans certainly weren’t the only guys to create an airport out of farmland in the 1930s,…

I’m not superstitious. I’ll brave an elevator that stops on the 13th floor. I won’t deem the day a potential catastrophe when a black cat crosses my path. But after a round trip to São Paulo, Brazil, during a total lunar eclipse, I had to wonder. This particular eclipse also qualified as a blood moon, which is a relatively rare astrological phenomenon. And apparently, the blood moon was part of a tetrad, a series of four eclipses occurring in close succession. In some circles, a tetrad is the sign that the Apocalypse is about to begin or that an event of similar magnitude involving frogs and locusts will be arriving in short order. Unaware of this harbinger of doom, I boarded the employee bus at JFK and exchanged greetings with…

MOONEY M20L San Diego/INJURIES: 1 Fatal, 1 Serious THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM NTSB REPORTS OF GENERAL AVIATION ACCIDENTS. The pilot stated that after the airplane bounced on landing, she aborted the landing by adding full power and confirmed that the flaps were in the takeoff position. She further stated that when she realized that the airplane was not climbing normally and that the engine did not seem to be providing full power, she prepared for an emergency landing in a parking lot between two large retail buildings. The airplane impacted a rooftop air-conditioning unit on one of the buildings, collided with the roof’s perimeter cinder-block barrier, and then fell to the ground. A witness, who was a pilot, reported that he observed the airplane flying low over the runway…

LAST SUMMER, A BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITY DESIGN TEAM SMASHED WORLD SPEED RECORDS. WHAT CAN THE REST OF AVIATION LEARN FROM AN AIRPLANE THAT LOOKS LIKE A SHARK? The mako shark may not be the biggest, but it is the fastest and one of the most ferocious of all the shark species. Capable of traveling as fast as 60 mph over sustained distances, the mako has been known to spring surprise attacks on humans, though it doesn’t prefer human flesh. Its favorite food is tuna, and its body has evolved to surpass the speed of its prey. Its tail is similar to the tuna’s, and its musculature is buried near the spine, unlike other sharks with muscles that run alongside the outer surface of the body. The result of this evolutionary refinement…

We know that 100LL avgas contains low levels of lead — because it says so right in the name — but what exactly does that mean? You might be surprised to learn that the amount of lead in your airplane’s fuel tanks isn’t so low after all. 100 low-lead aviation gasoline contains 2.12 grams of tetraethyl lead per gallon. That’s about half the amount in previous 100/130 avgas (at 4.24 grams per gallon) but nearly identical to automotive leaded gasoline (2.2 grams per gallon), which was used from the 1920s until being completed banned by the Clean Air Act in the mid-1990s. Unlike many other poisons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “no safe blood lead level has ever been identified.” Lead is a toxic metal that…

My wife doesn’t like to fly. I hate to expose this about her, but there you have it. She is a fearful flyer. I love to fly. I love to fly as much as I love anything. There, I’ve said it. Perhaps you had guessed this about me but not known it about her and might conclude that this imbalance is not a favorable marital recipe. You might be surprised. Cathy is a perfectly matched mate to me in almost all respects, except that we view flying very differently. She even took a fear-of-flying course complete with an airplane ride from Tampa to Orlando and back on a US Airways (she thinks) jet before we met. That she consented to marry me, given how deeply rooted her anxiety about flying…

A LOOK BACK AT FLYING MAGAZINE 25 AND 50 YEARS AGO 25 YEARS GO OUR COVER FEATURED A COLLINS FD-109 FLIGHT DIRECTOR ON A RAW-DATA APPROACH AS PART OF OUR REPORTING ON COMMON CHALLENGES PILOTS FACE WHILE FLYING IN THE SOUP. OUR EXPERTS WEIGHED IN ON A NUMBER OF KEY INSTRUMENT-FLYING TOPICS. Columnist Gordon Baxter followed the veterans who serviced and flew the atomic B-29s during World War II to a reunion at what was once Wendover Air Force Base. Enola Gay pilot and mission commander Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets said he chose the remote desert location 45 years earlier because it was “the end of the world.” Peter Garrison tackled the age-old problem of turnbacks by looking at the theoretical outcomes of heading back to the runway after an…