Spending a few days on Martha’s Vineyard listening to birds chirp, waves break, golfers golf, and … airplanes flying overhead at all altitudes and in all directions. Quite a contrast from general aviation in Israel, where I did two flights last week in Cessnas. [Snapshots at http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/20030606-g3-israel/.]
Every American pilot ought to fly in Israel, if only to see just how
bad it is likely to get as the U.S. suffers from more terrorist
attacks. Getting into a general aviation airport is very difficult.
You have to explain who you are and why you need to fly. In 2000 and
1992 Israeli security officials lost interest as soon as they figured
out that I was a native-born U.S. citizen. Attacks from Muslims born
in European countries, however, have turned the Israelis into
xenophobes. If my host/pilot hadn’t been friends with the chief of security
for all airports in Israel, I wouldn’t have gotten into the parking
lot much less an airplane.
Once you’re seated in the plane the security remains just as tight.
You make a radio call to request permission to start up the engine.
You make a radio call to activate your previously filed flight plan. Unless you’re coming in on an instrument flight plan from a foreign country, everything happens in Hebrew. It is basically illegal for anyone without an Israeli license to operate an airplane, or even touch the flight controls without an instructor on board, under VFR within Israel. This is partly due to the fact that the controllers aren’t accustomed to working in English but perhaps more due to the complexities of navigation.
Once in the air the entire airspace of Israel is forbidden except for
a handful of designated VFR routes and altitudes, which are not in a
standard GPS’s database. Even though the controllers have very good
radar coverage of the entire country you make regular position
reports. If you deviate more than one mile horizontally from any of
these routes the controllers will chastise you; keep in mind that the
State of Israel is only about 10 miles wide in the middle–if you get
off course you will be straying over the West Bank and the government
is afraid that Arabs will shoot at you. In the good old days you
could fly down the valley of the River Jordan, land at the Jerusalem
airport, fly over Jerusalem, etc. In 2003 all of that is closed off.
With virtually nowhere to go it will presumably be time to land soon.
If an airport closes at 5:00 pm, it is forbidden to land after that
time. There is nothing like the pilot-controlled runway lighting that
is standard in the U.S.
Safety ought to be better in Israel than in the U.S. The weather is
almost always clear. In the U.S. you may depart from New Jersey in a
small airplane and arrive several hours later in Maine to completely
weather that is completely different from what it was in NJ, from what
it was in Maine when you took off and got a weather briefing, and from
what was forecast. By contrast, the whole country of Israel is no
larger than New Jersey and the weather tends to be very similar across
the whole landscape. In any case you take off and land at the same
airport most of the time, usually flying for less than one hour.
Mid-air collisions only constitute a few percent of the accidents in
the U.S. Nonetheless they seem even less likely in Israel because all
airplanes are on designated routes at designated altitudes in radio
contact with and under the control of air traffic controllers.
In the U.S. an airplane operated privately has to be inspected and
recertified airworthy by a merchanic every year. An airplane operated
commercially, either by an airline or a flight school, needs a
mechanic’s inspection every 100 hours. In Israel an airplane has to
be inspected and certified airworthy every morning. A mechanic walks
out onto the flight line and signs off all the machines that are going
to fly that day.
One thing that is very odd about Israeli pilots is that they are not
trained to lean (adjust the fuel-air mixture to compensate for air that is thinner due to heat or high altitude; your car does this automatically but little airplanes generally run on 1930s technology).
They taxi full rich. They take off full rich, even
when it is 40 degrees C (over 100 F) outside. They cruise full rich,
unless they are over 3000′ MSL. They really ought to all have died
from either fuel exhaustion or failure to climb when fully loaded on
very hot days. The performance and range figures in a Pilot’s
Operating Handbook (“P.O.H.”, the owner’s manual that comes with the
airplane) are calculated by American pilots using American procedures,
which include leaning very nearly to peak exhaust gas temperatures.
Most Israeli airplanes are ancient Cessnas that don’t have fuel flow
gauges but it seems safe to estimate that Israelis are using 50
percent more fuel than would be predicted by the P.O.H. Probably what
saves them is that the distances are so tiny; you could fly almost
anywhere in Israel from Tel Aviv using only what an American pilot
would keep as a fuel reserve. For climb-out at a high density
altitude Americans who fly in the West learn to find a peak power
mixture setting on the ground and then richen just a bit for cooling.
Perhaps what keeps Israelis alive is the near sea level elevations of
all the airports here and the fact that the terrain isn’t very
dramatic, i.e., you never have to climb very steeply to clear a hill.
Oh yes, and the hourly rates for all of this are about double that of what it costs in the U.S.