Table of contents for March 2015 in Flying

A BOLD AND INDEPENDENT LOOK AT AVIATION’S BIGGEST ISSUES I just got back from Duluth, Minnesota, home to Cirrus Aircraft, manufacturer of the SR-series of light planes. The SR22 had a great sales year in 2014, with the most sales of any Part 23 airplane, but as hot as this five-seat speedster is, the buzz up along the shores of Lake Superior sounds more like a whir than a grrr, as the company gears up to certify and begin deliveries of the single-engine SF50 Vision jet. The jet, which has a high cruise speed of around 300 knots, will begin life with a 28,000-foot ceiling, with a possible bump up into RVSM territory in the future. A lot of pilots wonder if a turboprop would make more sense in the…

NO-NONSENSE RISK MITIGATION FOR PILOTS LIKE US It was a growing cumulus cloud, cauliflower-shaped with distinct edges. Our IFR route was taking us right through it. “You’re not going to fly through that, are you? That’s a thunderstorm,” said Martha, clearly alarmed. “Well, yeah. But that’s not a thunderstorm. It’s not tall enough. We’re only at 17,000 feet. Besides, it’s right in our way,” I said with supreme confidence. Martha wasn’t ready to give up. “It’s really going to be rough. Look at those distinct edges. I don’t know whether it’s a thunderstorm or not, but it’s really going to be rough.” “I don’t think it will be that rough.” With that we entered the cloud. I had never experienced such intense vibration and shaking in an airplane. Our arms…

A NO-HOLDS-BARRED LOOK AT PILOTS, PLANES AND LIFE IN THE AIR I was introduced to the art of buying and selling flying machines on a spring afternoon in 1965, standing next to an airplane salesman who’d just closed a deal on an AT-6 at Lunken Airport. The sound from that round engine as the buyer departed Runway 21R was glorious, but when it passed almost directly overhead the throaty roar abruptly changed to a sputter and then a cough. And I distinctly remember the distressed expression on the dealer’s face as he muttered, “Damn, I knew I should have gotten a cashier’s check.” The pilot probably got his head out of his butt and switched tanks because the engine smoothed out, the airplane arrived in Elkhart, Indiana — and the…

DO YOU HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION QUESTION? GO TO FLYINGMAG.COM/CS. TIGER SPEED The article by Robert Goyer on the Grumman Tiger [“Aftermarket Stars: Part II,” January 2015] brought back fond memories of my years as owner of N28786, a 1978 Grumman Tiger. The controls were very responsive and the visibility outside the cockpit in normal cruise, slight nose-down pitch, was such that I could often imagine I was simply “out there” amongst the clouds rather than in a flying machine. Mr. Goyer was correct in stating that it is a great cross-country airplane. Fred Coon and I set the transcontinental speed records for single-engine piston powered aircraft weighing less than 1,000 kilograms in his Grumman Cheetah (west to east) in 2003 and in my Tiger (east to west) in 2004. The…

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has taken Air Methods to task for firing an employee who refused to fly a helicopter that had a faulty ELT. The fight was scheduled at night over mountainous terrain. OSHA ordered Air Methods to put the pilot back on its payroll and remove all disciplinary information from the pilot’s record after it found that he was let go in retaliation for his decision not to fly. OSHA’s investigation concluded that the company’s action was a violation of a federal whistle-blower law. “Pilots should never have to choose between the safety of themselves and their passengers, and their job,” said Nick Walters, the OSHA regional administrator in Chicago. “Whistleblower protections are critical to keeping workplaces safe. Disciplining an employee…

ACCIDENT ANALYSIS THAT GOES BEHIND AND BEYOND THE OFFICIAL REPORT Just after noon on a June day in 2012, a Pilatus PC-12 took off from Fort Pierce, in the middle of Florida’s Atlantic coast, bound for Junction City, Kansas. The pilot, his wife and their four young children were aboard, returning from a vacation in the Bahamas. Less than a minute later, the pilot engaged the autopilot and asked the Miami Center controller the identifier for Lakeland, the first fix along his route. The first controller handed the fight off to a second, who cleared the airplane to climb to FL 230 and advised of an area of heavy rain ahead and slightly to the right. The pilot acknowledged and then, after a delay of several seconds, asked, “Do we…

TALES OF WHEN FLYING, DISCOVERY AND LIFE CONVERGE I’ve been an airplane nut and have longed to have one of my very own for nearly as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I have also been an inveterate cheapskate since childhood. Aviation is a f ne vocation for a tightwad; if not quite a job requirement to begin with, frugality is at least one of very few ways in which a piloting career might improve a young man’s moral character. An aviation hobby, on the other hand, requires a certain willingness to throw one’s money down the rathole with little regard to efficacy. Most aircraft owners will readily admit that sole ownership is an expensive way to f y. From a purely fiunancial standpoint, relatively few airplanes are f own…

FROM THE OPERATING ROOM TO FLIGHT OPS: A SURGEON’S JOURNEY “I’m going to ask for 380 and another shortcut,” says Greg, sitting to my right and pointing to the CJ3’s MFD, which shows an arrival time of 16:19 Zulu. We are about three-quarters of the way down the East Coast en route from White Plains, New York, to Boca Raton, Florida, and we have a numbers problem. Greg thinks a 16:00Z arrival will solve our problem, but I don’t see how we can manage that. He reasons that descending from Flight Level 450 to 380 will improve our groundspeed because our true airspeed (and fuel burn) is greater at the lower altitude. We descend and beg for a more direct routing. Soon our arrival time is showing 16:10. Our numbers…

I awoke to the faded pastel orange of a rising sun. The sun’s glow was making a feeble attempt at blending into a dominant gray winter’s overcast. Only seconds into the transition from sleep to reality, my eyes began to track a pair of pinpoint amber lights. The lights moved at a rapid pace from left to right. I bolted up from bed, jumped to the floor and then moved quickly up against the glass of our sliders. I attempted to process the scene. No distinguishing characteristics of a winged aircraft were visible, just the appearance of two separate baseballsize amber lights slicing through the air. I judged the altitude to be only 200 feet agl. I heard no sound. And in a matter of seconds, the objects disappeared from…

As it does each year, the National Transportation Safety Board released its Most Wanted List in January, highlighting the most common safety hazards in the transportation industry. At the top of the list for general aviation airplanes this year is loss of control. Between 2001 and 2011, more than 40 percent of fatal accidents involving fixed-wing, general aviation airplanes resulted from loss of control, and most of those accidents occurred during the climb, maneuvering or approach-to-landing phases of fight. The Safety Board pointed to less stringent proficiency requirements as one reason why loss of control is much more prevalent in general aviation compared with the commercial airline industry. The NTSB has suggested that the installation of safety equipment, such as an angle-of-attack indicator, is a step in the right direction.…

THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM NTSB REPORTS OF GENERAL AVIATION ACCIDENTS. CESSNA P337H San Luis Obispo, California/INJURIES: 1 Fatal The pilot/owner had recently purchased the multiengine, high-performance, complex airplane. He had obtained his private pilot certificate 15 years before the accident and had limited fight experience, having amassed a total of about 118 hours of flight time. He had obtained his multiengine rating 5 weeks before the accident, and his total fight experience in multiengine airplanes was about 40 hours. Of that time, 18 hours were logged in the accident airplane of which 3 hours were while acting as pilot-in-command. On previous fights, the airplane’s rear engine had been “stuttering” as the throttle was advanced. The pilot was able to forestall the problem by advancing the throttle slowly; however, the…

The airplane repo agent has been tracking this prey for weeks. Sitting on the ramp is his prize — a pristine, late-model Piper Malibu with a gorgeous paint job and perfect leather interior. A loan payment hasn’t been made in months, and the bank wants this asset back now. It should fetch a premium price on the open market. The airplane’s owner has already lost his boat to foreclosure and is in danger of having the bank take his house. With the Malibu finally located, the paperwork in order and a thorough examination of the logbooks completed, the repo man is about to take his airplane too. All that’s left is to climb aboard and fly off into the sunset. As the bank-appointed agent begins the long walk across the…

CUTTING THROUGH THE MYTHS TO GET TO THE FACTS OF FLIGHT I am writing this on Dec. 31, 2014. On this day some people prepare resolutions. I catalog regrets. At this time a year ago I was racking my brain over an apparent rise in oil temperature in my homebuilt, which has an updraft-cooled Continental TSIO-360 engine. This is an airplane I designed and built and that I spend a few hours each week coaxing toward perfection, not that it’s in any danger of getting there. Several years ago I had a long struggle with elevated oil temperature. I eventually concluded that air going to the oil cooler was stopping for a chat with the exhaust pipes, and possibly even with the turbocharger, on the way. By the time it…

A LOOK BACK AT FLYING MAGAZINE 25 AND 50 YEARS AGO 25 YEARS AGO OUR COVER FEATURED AN MBB BK 117 FLYING OVER NEW YORK CITY. THANKS TO ITS NEWLY RECEIVED SINGLE-PILOT IFR CERTIFICATION AND ITS REVAMPED, ULTRA-QUIET CABIN, THE RUGGED BK 117 HAD THE FEATURES NEEDED TO ATTRACT LUXURY SEEKERS IN THE EXECUTIVE MARKET. In “Safety in Numbers” we delved into the singleversus-twin debate to try and find out once and for all if two engines really are better than one. The answer? You’re more likely to crash in a single-engine airplane after an engine failure, but your odds of surviving that crash are greater than those during an engine-out accident in a twin. We flew the Pilatus PC-9, a contender in the U.S. Air Force’s and Navy’s search…