Month: August 2018

Shaesta Waiz gave some talks in the Honeywell/BendixKing booth at Oshkosh. While the company has been forcing most of its customers to convert to Garmin, e.g., by making transponders that do ADS-B OUT but not IN and by failing to come up with a replacement for the CRT-based EFIS systems that it sold through about 2008, Honeywell/BendixKing has done some work with Internet connectivity for aircraft and Ms. Waiz used their AeroWave system for her 145-day 22-country 182-hour round-the-world trip in a 2001 Bonanza. She began the flight with 750 hours of flying experience, which included 200 hours of Bonanza time and a lot of instruction by Fred Furgang, a Bonanza expert.

One of Waiz’s themes is that women need to be “empowered” and “inspired” to become pilots (so that they can join men in doing a worse job than the software in a DJI drone?). Her talk, though, suggested that women actually have an easier time accomplishing aviation projects than do men (certainly they can be hired by a U.S. major airline with much less experience; see “The purported airline pilot shortage“). She called up ICAO to tell them about her plan and the international bureaucrats there got national bureaucrats worldwide fired up to help out. Male round-the-world pilots had told Ms. Waiz to expect nightmares in Egypt regarding airspace access, airport access, and 100LL fuel access. When Ms. Waiz showed up, however, the Egyptians had assigned female air traffic controllers to every sector through which she traveled (i.e., without being inspired by Americans, Egyptian women have somehow gotten sufficiently into aviation to be able to work Center, Approach, Tower, and Ground!). When she landed, instead of being greeted by soldiers holding automatic rifles she was greeted by 11 officials from the Egyptian equivalent of the FAA.

How oppressed are women in Afghanistan, from which Waiz’s parents migrated as refugees (then reared six daughters in California, including Ms. Waiz herself)? No insurance company wanted to deal with the risk of a Bonanza in Kabul so Ms. Waiz flew there commercially from Dubai for a 2.5-day break. Cut to next slide: Waiz in a meeting with the President of Afghanistan. Would he have met with a male round-the-world pilot?

Waiz shows up to Christmas Island and finds that there are two residents with pilot certificates… both women. If more men than women are pilots in the U.S. and Europe, is this simply an example of “The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM” (Atlantic)?

Readers: Is airline promotion of more women going into aviation (example from United) a sign of righteous altruism or simply that they would like to pay lower wages as a result of larger labor supply? (like a Silicon Valley employer promoting immigration and #Resisting Trump!)

Some practical tips: Controllers outside of the U.S. and Europe aren’t accustomed to light aircraft having to deviate around weather. “Deviating right” will upset them. “Flying to Fix XYZ” is a better way to explain a decision to abandon a flight plan route. Those crazy long over-water legs are less plagued with bad weather and over-land routes. An exception is the inter-tropical convergence, a reliably horrible place to be flying due to convection (claimed the lives of those aboard Air France 447, for example, though mostly due to primitive flight control software plus pilot error).

Regardless of pilot gender ID, is flying around the world in a single-engine piston airplane a good way to inspire people regarding STEM? The engineers who created the Bonanza (first flight 1945) and its engine likely died at least 25 years ago. It is mechanics who enable continued flights in Bonanzas, not engineers or scientists. Also, isn’t flying long distances over water in a Bonanza actually ignoring what we’ve learned from engineering? Engineers have given us multi-engine and turbine-engine aircraft that render the journey much safer and more comfortable.

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We attended an interesting talk by Craig Barnett of Scheme Designers at Oshkosh and learned more than we thought possible about aircraft paint. (See EAA Webinar version for the images.)

Other than working to develop new designs for manufacturers, why does his job exist? Why wouldn’t people just paint an old plane in the latest factory scheme? Barnett says that if there have been any changes in the airframe design people will look at it and perceive that someone is trying to tart up the old plane with lipstick.

Why paint any design at all? Why not paint the plane white and wrap it with plastic, the way that modern commercial vehicles are done? He said that AircraftWraps will do this for you but that the wraps don’t work as well on planes as they do on cars. Panels come off every year for inspection. Exhaust gets into the vinyl (the “tailpipe” of a plane is not at the tail). Sun exposure is bad, though solid vinyl stripes last longer than printed (Our 2005 Cirrus SR20 is all-white with some vinyl stripes from the factory and it still looks pretty good after a mostly-hangared 13 years.) Barnett’s choice for elaborate designs is to bring in an airbrush artist and put the design into paint. He does caution that any kind of paint scheme that involves a fade will be difficult to touch up if damaged.

Barnett recommended a dark color on the bottom of the plane (a “split base”) for a clean appearance (belly oil won’t show) and also for “more ramp presence” and 60-70 percent of his clients choose this. He is not a fan of the polished spinner: “painted spinners add length to the plane.” What if the whole aircraft is polished? Barnett was a fan of LoPresti Knot Wax as a sealant (I can’t find any source for this).

One of Barnett’s ideas was to consider adding a paint design to the top of the wing “so that you can enjoy it while flying.”

Wherever there is an aircraft owner wealthy enough to purchase a repaint there is a potential family court plaintiff and lawyer standing by. Barnett said “use the wife’s initials in the tail number” to reduce the risk of being sued for divorce. (The talk was in Wisconsin and therefore there was no limit on the profits that could have been earned via a casual sexual encounter during AirVenture. A litigator might want to set up shop at the adjacent BeerVenture, run by a landowner who has thus far rebuffed EAA’s attempts to buy him out; BeerVenture has a big sign promising “Bikini Bartenders”)

When it is smart to have a wild ugly paint scheme? He show ZS-OHK, a flight school’s plane in South Africa. They paint their Cessnas in crazy patterns and park them next to a road where customers are drawn in.

Barnett showed a lot of ugly and “not smart” designs. One bad idea is interrupting stripes to stick in a tail number. The tail number needs to be part of the design. Stripes should follow airflow. The tail has to balance the rest of the plane.

What about coming up with a design for a Cirrus? Barnett explained that the reason newer Cirruses are no longer simply white is that the factory worked with Sherwin-Williams (the “Jet Glo” folks) to develop paints of color (not “colored paints”!) that reflect sufficient light/heat to be used on a composite aircraft. But why are these schemes mostly so ugly? Barnett says that the challenge of designing a scheme for the Cirrus is that the plane is “pregnant” (let’s look to our own waistlines rather than blaming Duluth for this!). So a paint scheme has to distract the viewer’s eye from the fundamental shape of the airplane, unlike with, say, a TBM where the shape is inherently attractive.

Cirrus had brought some “Carbon Exterior” schemes to the show and we liked them better than any of the previous factory schemes. How to adapt this scheme to an older plane? Replace the “CARBON” on the tail with “NOT CARBON”?

Where to get all of this done? We heard good things about KD Aviation in Newburgh, New York, Flying Colors in Benton Harbor, Michigan (not to be confused with Flying Colours Corp., painters of Gulfstreams), and Corrigan in Hondo, Texas (they do Gulfstreams but somehow are also able to paint small planes at a reasonable cost).

Nobody could answer the question of why this labor-intensive craft of sanding down and refinishing airplanes has not migrated to Mexico. In fact, Mexican owners are flying their planes up to Texas for paint! Econ 101 would never have predicted that. Mexicans don’t come up to Colorado to find wood craftsmen to build stuff in their houses. Why can’t this skill be developed and practiced down in Mexico where labor is comparatively inexpensive?

[Based on my visits to U.S. paint shops, every person holding a sander up to a Gulfstream in a 100-degree hangar has identified as a man. So I had to refrain from asking when there would be a social justice movement to get Americans who identify as women into this career.]

My current dream: Strip off all of the factory stripes on the SR20. Buff the white paint. Apply wraps and decals that make the entire plane look like a golden retriever. By the time it reaches the 5-year point that Barnett says is the life of a vinyl-based job, the novelty will have worn off.

Related:

• Barnett EAA Webinar: “Designing the Perfect Paint Scheme”

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I attended the EAA Innovation Forum at Oshkosh. Note the Piper Seminole, certified in 1978 with engines dating to 1955, parked in front of the adjacent “Innovation Showcase”:

Pat Anderson, a professor at Embry-Riddle, pointed out that the early jets were re-engined prop airframes. It took a few years before the wings and fuselage caught up to the new powerplant. Similarly, he thinks that electric propulsion will result in aircraft that bear little resemblance to today’s single-engine piston airplanes.

Mike Sennett, an executive at Boeing, proceeded to talk about how 800,000 new pilots will be needed to staff the 42,700 new airliners predicted for delivery over the next 20 years (the fleet will double from 2017-2037 with huge growth in Asia). Mr. Sennett noted that aviation went from being perceived as high risk in the 1920s and 1930s to being super safe now (40,000 car-related deaths per year in the U.S. versus 0 in a typical year from airliners). [One wag, noting all of the “WomenVenture” T-shirts that had been handed out to pilots identifying as female, said “Now that airline flying is risk-free they want to get women into these jobs.”] Sennett sees a lot of growth opportunity in air freight. Currently only 1 percent of freight goes by air (35 percent by value). Boeing’s big drives are autonomy, AI, and electric propulsion. Maybe those 800,000 new pilots will turn into 1 new computer program?

After the two gray-haired guys got off the stage, a bearded California hipster began speaking. Adam Warmoth, of Uber Elevate, looked to be about 25. He explained that, within 25 years (i.e., by the time he reaches “GA age”), 6 billion people will be living in cities. The result will be that transportation grinds to a halt. People will spend hours in traffic if they want to go somewhere that is not within walking distance. Uber is going to fix all of this, at least for customers that can spend about $100 per trip, with electric aircraft that can make 25-mile trips within monster cities such as Los Angeles. The goal is a 150 mph aircraft that can hold 4 paying customers. Uber is designing common reference models that manufacturers can grab and use. Their goal is to be up and running in LA by 2023(!).

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