Category: Flying

Stories about flying planes and helicopters, discussions of technique and teaching.

Inflation Inflation (aviation life rafts)

by philg

This year let’s give thanks for not having been killed at any point during the preceding 12 months. And let’s also give thanks to the engineers behind the technologies that make it possible to survive a plane landing in the ocean or a boat sinking in the ocean. The PLB/EPIRB is critical, of course, but even ChatGPT can’t come up with the names of individual engineers whom we should thank. Same story with the latest smartphones, which are capable of sending distress calls to satellites. If rescue doesn’t arrive immediately, it is important to get out of the colder-than-body-temp, possibly-shark-infested water, and that’s where a life raft comes in. ChatGPT credits Horace H. Day for an 1846 “Portable India-rubber boat” (U.S. Patent No. 4356) and “Peter Halkett, a British Royal Navy officer who, in the early 1840s, designed an inflatable boat using Macintosh cloth.” So let’s give Messrs. Day and Halkett a thank-you today!

Aviation life rafts are supposed to be recertified every 1-5 years, depending on model and packaging. The raft gets unfolded, I think, and then a technician checks for leaks and condition before folding it all back up. The manufacturer of our 16-lb. 4-man raft charged $115 for this service in 2018, plus an additional $100 for an every-five-years cylinder overhaul. This month I got a quote for the same service on the same raft… 450 Bidies plus 200 additional Bidies for the cylinder. It’s mostly the same people at the same company in the same SE Florida location, yet the five-year cost for keeping the raft certified (this is an older model so it has a one-year interval) has gone from $675 to $2,450, inflation of over 260%. It will require some creativity to come up with a way to be grateful for this increase, though we are assured by the New York Times that our wages have gone up far more than 260 percent during the Biden-Harris administration.

Here’s what a modern minimum-size/weight raft looks like:

Here’s a video of the gold standard Winslow raft being inspected:

Why not use the gold standard, you might ask? A Winslow 4-man raft is 2X the weight and bulk. Every lb. counts in aviation! A Switlik is even heavier, but has a five-year service interval.

It looks easy in this video…

Related:

  • Coronapanic Consequences: life rafts (2023; everyone was back-ordered): “Switlik is a supplier to the U.S. Coast Guard, which presumably knows water at least as well as Dr. Fauci knows SARS-CoV-2.”
Full post, including comments

Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter

by philg

It’s the 13th of the month so let’s talk about some equipment that you’d have to be unlikely to need…

Cirrus airplanes need new rockets and parachutes every 10 years whether they’ve been living on the ramp in Texas or coddled in a climate-controlled hangar. The typical service center can’t do this work. In the southeast, the conventional choice has been to take the airplane to Atlanta where a couple of highly regarded shops have extensive experience with CAPS replacement (see DLK/Avias and Romanair, for example). This post is about a potentially more convenient/fun option: the Cirrus-owned factory service center in Orlando, Florida (Kissimmee, actually; KISM).

Our SR20-G2 is coming up on its 20th anniversary and, thus, without a new parachute/rocket it would have become illegal to fly starting in January 2025 (maybe all private planes will become illegal to fly in Jan 2025 if my Democrat friends were correct in predicting a dictatorship if Donald Trump were elected; a dictator wouldn’t want people flying around VFR, certainly, with no government tracking).

One advantage for the factory shop is that they may have the inside track on getting the rockets and ‘chutes. Others have reported planes being grounded for 6 months as these parts failed to arrive sooner than 9 months after being ordered. Assuming that Cirrus does eventually sort out its supply chain, a persistent advantage for the Orlando shop is that it is in Orlando. A Cirrus owner can load up his/her/zir/their family and arrive in Kissimmee on Monday, visit Disney, Universal, the cathedral, etc., and fly away on Friday (I arrived on Monday at noon and the plane was completed on Thursday).

Note that Cirrus offers a ferry pilot service if you want the plane picked up or dropped off, but they have very few pilots who are qualified to fly the old Avidyne planes.

The factory service center is mostly there for Vision Jet owners, I think, and it is tough to get an estimate and make a reservation (there is a “concierge” who never seems to be available), but once organized and confirmed everything is jet-smooth. Enterprise rental car is there on the field at Signature so it is easy to do a one-way car rental if you’re based elsewhere within Florida and don’t need a week of Orlando.

What about the price? It seems to be roughly the same as having the work done at an independent service center with CAPS authorization, i.e., about $20,000 (it was $12,000 ten years ago). Speaking of our inflation-free economy, when the Cirrus maintenance manager mentioned proudly that the company was spending $15 million on an under-construction facility at the airport, I responded “That sounds great, but $15 million might soon be the price of a Diet Coke.”

I enjoyed spending Christmas (on November 9, 2024) at Disney Springs as part of my Cirrus retrieval experience:

Kissimmee itself is famous for understatement and elegance:

(See also Kissimmee’s Monument of States)

Full post, including comments

Stuart Air Show 2024

by philg

In honor of Veterans Day, a few snapshots from this year’s Stuart (Florida) Air Show…

First, let’s see what can be done with the latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max. The “5X” lens (120mm-equivalent) works out reasonably well for very large aircraft and for formation/smoke displays:

Things quickly get pixelated with cropping:

How about using the Canon 800/11 lens profiled previously here for air show work? Here’s the heritage flight:

Maybe one of the positive things that will come out of the Election 2024 Nakba is that Donald Trump will bring back the A-10 Warthog:

Mike Goulian (yellow) and his former protégé Rob Holland (red/Black) were there. The 800mm lens is actually too short for these tiny planes unless one gets (white?) privileged access to a press stand. Heavily cropped:

Every glider needs two jet engines, according to Bob Carlton (the “Foxjet” pilot):

Getting back to the machines that impress everyone except the Houthis… the F-22 (see this lecture about F-22 fly-by-wire from our MIT class).

How about a show version of the F-16?

(If Greta Thunberg hadn’t been busy with a Queers for Palestine rally she would have no doubt objected both to the gratuitous waste of Jet A fuel and the fact that the F-16 is the workhorse of Israel’s air force.)

How about some relics of the old days when the objective in war was to actually win? P-51, T-28, and MiG 17:

Let’s finish with Nathan Hammond, whose night airshow performance is always the highlight of Oshkosh, and Bill Stein:

The Stuart airport (KSUA) is about to get a huge boost from the Trump Dictatorship v2.0. Any time that Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago the PBI airport will become painful to use. The (fuel-selling) FBOs at PBI will be as angry on January 20, 2025 as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Separately, seeing all of this military hardware makes me wonder what our military is for. If our borders our open then any enemy can order its troops to walk across our southern border and then attack the U.S. from the inside. That said, I am impressed with the bravery of every veteran who has flown a military aircraft, in which there are usually plenty of ways to get killed without enemy involvement.

Full post, including comments

You need a 275 knot airplane if you’re based in South Florida

by philg

A recent email to a friend in the aviation world:

Florida isn’t the greatest for 150-knot GA. If you fly for two hours you end up in a place that looks almost exactly like the place where you live (flat, palm trees, a beach nearby, etc.). It’s not like going from BED to MVY, BTV, or BHB where the differences are dramatic after a short flight. If you assume that passengers can’t tolerate more than about 2 hours in a light plane you probably need to be going at least 275 knots so that you can make it to Chattanooga and the beginning of the mountains within 2 hours. I guess that means a Piper Meridian is the minimum if you want to get a family of non-pilots interested in a trip?

[The airports listed above are Bedford, Maskachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard, Burlington, Vermont, and Bar Harbor, Maine. That reminds me to wonder the status of the lawsuits about the cruel and unusual punishment suffered by the asylum-seekers in being flown for free from Texas to MVY. “A federal judge says migrants can sue the company that flew them to Martha’s Vineyard” (state-sponsored NPR, April 2024). State-sponsored NPR did an article in 2023 about an MVY migrant living in a free apartment and receiving cash “under the table”. What are the migrant’s damages? He can’t demand reimbursement for the high housing costs in Maskachusetts because he’s not paying anything for housing. He can’t demand reimbursement of income tax being charged by Maskachusetts that he wouldn’t have had to pay in tax-free Texas because he isn’t pay any tax in MA.]

The map below shows the distance to the nearest mountains. Another reason why the Florida lifestyle isn’t cheap!

Full post, including comments

NASA at Oshkosh (saving our planet with plastic bags)

by philg

From nasa.gov:

The NASA pavilion at EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) 2024:

(These are the plastic bags that are good for the environment?)

What else was going on? NASA arranged to have a Boeing Starliner parked in front:

The NISAR mission was featured. This was supposed to be launched in January 2022 and will supposedly be able to measure displacements of parts of Earth’s surface as small as 3.5 mm. I’m not sure if this includes vertical displacement, e.g., to see whether sea levels are indeed rising to the point that owners of multi-$billion lower Manhattan and Boston real estate portfolios need to be bailed out by taxpayers in the Midwest. The satellite will supposedly be able to watch glaciers and ice sheets moving. I don’t think that it can measure sea level directly because the Science Users’ Handbook says “Provide observations of relative sea level rise from melting land ice and land subsidence.” How many migrants could have been housed for the cost of this mission? “NISAR launch slips to 2025” (July 29, 2024) says “with NASA alone spending more than $1 billion in formulation and development of the mission”. Taxpayers spend about $200,000 per year per migrant family welcomed in New York ($140k/year for food and housing and then let’s assume another $60,000/year for health care and other benefits). So if we hadn’t spent money on NISAR we could have supported 1,000 additional migrant families for five years.

NASA was also featuring the X-66, a collaboration with Boeing on an airliner that could possibly cut fuel burn by 30 percent, mostly via high aspect ratio wings (as you might see on a glider). We’re in a “climate crisis” according to our ablest minds, e.g., Kamala Harris, and “communities of color are often the hardest hit”. When will communities of color see some relief from the X-66? NASA says that if everything goes perfect the X-66 might get into the air as soon as 2028 and then, in the year 2050, we’ll be in a net-zero phase for aviation. The United Nations forecasts that world population will grow to approximately 10 billion by 2050. So we’ll have more people taking more trips, mostly in planes that were built to current designs, and the result will be much less environmental impact.

Full post, including comments

More Newport Beach coast helicopter flight photos (and some masketology)

by philg

A few more photos of how the folks who say that they want to end economic inequality are living, from a Robinson R44 flight out of KSNA (Orange County Airport) up to Long Beach and then back down the coast to Dana Point before returning to refuel and then land (with a certain amount of fear and terror) on a rooftop adjacent to the airport.

I’d love to know what drugs the architect of the roof in the last photo was on!

If we ignore the water shortages, California does seem like a great place for golf. It doesn’t matter how cold the water is if the plan is to use the water only for decoration while trying to hit some balls:

Here are some folks who’ve probably figured out a way to avoid whatever new taxes Gavin Newsom might cook up (183 days/year in the Jackson, Wyoming house, for example?):

Unfortunate (termite treatment tent) and fortunate (personal oceanfront golf course?):

A lawn bowling court for communities of color?

Some hotels that could be turned into migrant shelters if Californians were willing to deliver on what they say are human rights:

Housing is a human right, but it’s also a human right to have a beach house and a yacht, which is why tax rates on California’s wealthy elites can’t be raised to pay for the housing that is supposedly a human right:

As in the previous post, the equipment used for the above photos is simple: Robinson R44, left front door removed, iPhone 14 Pro Max.

Let’s also have a look at some other photos from the trip. I saw three CyberTrucks in various parking lots in a 12-hour period:

For Californians to save the planet with these enormous vehicles will require the output of three continuously running steel mills.

The most expensive space in the mostly-empty office building where I was working is rented by a divorce litigator:

CVS in Irvine has to keep the deodorant locked up:

At SNA on the way back to Florida, I found a Follower of Science wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, an always-delightful scene, albeit contrary to the 3M instructions:

Full post, including comments

Diversity goes to space (but can’t get back home)

by philg

“NASA Decides to Bring [$4.3 billion Boeing] Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew” (nasa.gov):

NASA will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft, the agency announced Saturday. The uncrewed return allows NASA and Boeing to continue gathering testing data on Starliner during its upcoming flight home, while also not accepting more risk than necessary for its crew.

This isn’t unconditionally great news for the astronauts. From The Sky Below (book by an astronaut):

my multiple spaceflights and spacewalks mean the likelihood of spinal trouble is almost as inevitable as an overloaded, rickety Jenga tower toppling over into a ragged heap. In space, the spine straightens and the intervertebral discs swell when not being compressed by gravity,

(the author spent about 8 weeks total in space)

Let’s check in with Boeing…

Each member of our global team brings something uniquely valuable to Boeing, and we grow stronger when everyone has an opportunity to contribute. Boeing remains committed to creating a culture of inclusion that attracts and retains the world’s top talent, and inspires every teammate to do their best work and grow their careers.

It turns out, though, that not all members of the global team are equally valuable. Black team members are apparently more valuable than non-Black ones. Boeing’s “Aspirations and Progress” section sets out “Increase the Black representation rate in the U.S. by 20%.” as the number one goal to achieve by 2025. Lower down on the page: “Fair360, a world leader in using data to assess companies’ commitment to inclusion, ranked Boeing 9th out of more than 160 companies reviewed.”

The “2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report”:

We value diverse perspectives and continue to see more women and U.S. racial and ethnic minorities represented at nearly every level of the company compared with a year ago.

The company’s “Allies spreading awareness” page:

Their stories are part of a series celebrating the perspectives and accomplishments from LGBTQIA+ employees and allies across Boeing.

When her oldest child, Asher, recently came out as non-binary and embraced they/them/their pronouns, the family’s main priority was to be supportive and learn as much as they could about gender identity.

Elizabeth also looked into health insurance benefits and was able to connect Asher with Boeing’s Gender Affirmation Team, which provided information and resources to help Asher and family navigate through the transition process.

For Maggie Duckworth, advocacy for the transgender community is also a key component of her life. … The software engineer met her partner more than 20 years ago at an anime convention. The two bonded over the animated art where gender fluid characters were commonly a part of storylines. Later, Maggie’s partner, Ryn, came out as non-binary and now uses the pronouns they/them/theirs. “For a long time they were struggling with defining who they were,” Maggie said. “Then Ryn realized that they were (gender) neutral and we both felt relieved because we had found a definition.”

“I want to be an example for women in aerospace”:

One of [Chantel’s] main objectives in this role is to increase the representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers—a goal of personal significance.

If a person who identifies as a “woman” works at Boeing, one of the biggest tasks for which she is paid by Boeing shareholders is getting more “women” to go into STEM careers, regardless of whether those careers are at Boeing?

The most exciting part:

For the first time in her 8-year career, Chantel, a woman of color, reports to a director who is also a woman of color. Chantel believes she can support continued progress by ensuring other women in STEM see fulfilling career paths for themselves.

Her efforts help support our equity, diversity and inclusion commitment. In 2021, women’s representation at Boeing increased to 23.2% in the United States and 24.6% internationally. And representation for women of color at Boeing has increased at executive levels and throughout the company.

So the news isn’t all bad with Boeing. Diversity is up substantially year-over-year both right now and that was also true back in 2021.

The company’s most recent “feature stories” about the product:

Related:

Full post, including comments

Favorite air show acts at Oshkosh 2024 (Canadians and drones)

by philg

Me, in 2018:

Least favorite airshow act: a synchronized drone array. These stayed pretty far from the crowd so it was essentially a bunch of lights that could have been replicated with a big TV (it is possible to project 3D onto 2D!). Unless the drones are all around a crowd I don’t understand why a 3D array of drones is more compelling to watch than a big TV (or your phone held up close to your eyes).

This year, however, the drones were integrated with the fireworks show and added a lot. The crowd for the Wednesday night air show was insane. Get there early with a group of friends and stake out a space near show center (Boeing Plaza) if you don’t want to stand through the entire show or view it from an angle (if you arrive at 7:30 or 8 pm for the 8 pm show the only spaces left will be to the north or south). There was a “Peace the Old-fashioned Way” opening with the Avro Lancaster (one of two airworthy examples worldwide; lock up your dams if you see one) and both of the world’s airworthy B-29s. Nate Hammond shooting fireworks out of the DHC-1 Chipmunk closed the show.

A few pictures of the Lancaster and B-29s while parked:

(It is unclear if Japanese visitors appreciate the cartoon character on a machine that was extremely destructive even before the atomic bomb, e.g., during a March 9, 1945 raid on Tokyo.)

One interesting act this year was the Canadian demonstration CF-18 team. “I’ve never seen an F-18 do anything like that,” said a friend who is an accomplished aerobatic pilot. Caleb “Tango” Robert mostly flew slowly and tumbled the aircraft in maneuvers that one is more accustomed to seeing from Extra and Gamebird pilots. Where the U.S. Navy flies the same type of plane as fast and loud as possible, the Royal Canadian Air Force, celebrating its 100th birthday this year, takes a more subtle approach.

The Snowbirds also showed up and played Elton John while doing gentle aerobatics in the 1966 Tutors (9!). Why not Celine Dion?

The Wisconsin National Guard put on a show that was the opposite of the Canadians’ mostly peaceful displays. They brought Blackhawk helicopters packed with troops, howitzers on the ground (“Let’s hope that Alec Baldwin isn’t behind one of those 155mm guns,” I said), and an F-22 and F-35 flying overhead in formation with a tanker. Much drama for the kids (we’re informed that kids are gentle peaceful creatures, but if kids were allowed to run governments I think that nearly all disputes would be settled via strategic bombing).

Bill Stein tossed around his Edge 540 and Mike Goulian tumbled in his Extra 330SC.

Here’s a video of relative newcomer Philipp Steinbach in the Gamebird:

I skipped the show on the one day that the Italian Tricolori team was flying. Here’s a video:

Full post, including comments

S.C. Johnson Frank Lloyd Wright tour

by philg

Another installment in the series “Stuff to do on the way to or from Oshkosh.”

Racine, Wisconsin is not just a center of arts and crafts. It’s corporate headquarters for S.C. Johnson, a family-run company that commissioned some of the largest Frank Lloyd Wright projects ever built. As part of the company’s commitment to the community, they’ve been running free public tours since the FLW HQ opened in 1939 (best to go on a weekend because more of the spaces are open; photography isn’t permitted indoors).

Visitors are welcome in a transplanted 1964 World’s Fair pavilion:

The pavilion showed To Be Alive!, which won an Academy Award for short documentary (one of the three screens can be seen on YouTube) and today also shows Carnaúba: A Son’s Memoir, which chronicles a 1998 recreation of a 1935 trip in a Sikorsky S-38 amphib.

After checking in at the pavilion, you walk by a couple of statues of Elizabeth Warren’s family before entering the main building.

You then enter the Research Tower, a 150-foot-high monument to architectural incompetence:

Every part of the Research Tower felt cramped (FLW was short and loved to make tall people uncomfortable) and a single narrow staircase provides the only form of emergency egress. S.C. Johnson limited the usage of the building almost immediately due to concerns about fire risk and the local fire marshal in the 1980s issued an order making the building illegal to occupy. Fortunately, real estate in Racine, Wisconsin is not so valuable that it is imperative to tear down this white (red brick) elephant.

S.C. Johnson apparently wasn’t soured on starchitecture and chose the UK’s Norman Foster to design an employee cafeteria/gym/museum/etc. The replica Sikorsky S-38 hangs in the lobby. In this building you learn more about the company’s five CEOs, all from within the family and all with technical experience or training (the current CEO has a PhD in physics). One inspiring quote from Sam Johnson, CEO N-1, was engraved into the 2010 Norman Foster building and says that every person has a “spirit of adventure”. Fair to say that coronapanic proved that the typical human in his/her/zir/their 20s is precisely adventurous enough to cower indoors for a year or two, leaving his/her/zir/their apartment only to get whatever injections the local public health officials have dreamed up?

The Johnson family loved to fly. Sam, for example, seems to have had a Cessna Citation Jet and was also a big supporter of EAA. Flying down to South America and setting up an American-style research lab in the jungle worked about as well for S.C. Johnson in 1935 as it did for Ford in 1928 (see Book review: Fordlandia). Here’s the current CEO’s pilot certificate from the FAA’s web site:

(Having a Private certificate with a jet type rating is truly the mark of a rich person!)

In the film about the 1998 trip in the Sikorsky replica, Sam Johnson is candid about his struggles with alcoholism. Folks who believe in the power of genetics won’t be surprised to learn that his mother was an alcoholic. The typical alcoholic is soon the target of a divorce lawsuit: “The incidence of marital dissolution from W1 to W2 was 15.5% for those with a past-12-month [alcohol use disorder; “AUD”] at W1, compared to 4.8% among those with no AUD” (source). Either for love of Sam or love of the family fortune that could be accessed only via continued marriage, Sam’s wife got him into treatment at the Mayo Clinic rather than following the well-worn path to the local family court.

Jet pilots should be grateful to S.C. Johnson for all of the cans of Pledge that have been used to clean windows. New Englanders who enjoy the woods should be grateful for all of the cans of OFF! that are required during the mosquito-infested summer and tick-infested fall and spring. Our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who shave their beards should be grateful for S.C. Johnson’s invention of Edge shaving cream (something the Followers of Science apparently reject, since they are often seen wearing an N95 mask over a full beard, contrary to the instructions that 3M includes with the mask). All of us can be grateful for Windex!

Full post, including comments

Vuichard no bueno for escaping vortex ring state

by philg

Less that two years ago, I wrote about how Robinson Helicopter was promoting the Vuichard technique for escaping from vortex ring state (see R.I.P. Frank Robinson (and a few notes from the safety course that he loved)). While doing recurrent training in Irvine, California at Helistream, I learned that Robinson has reverted to the previously standard technique.

What’s less than ideal about Vuichard, which results in recovery with remarkably little altitude loss? “Every other helicopter emergency procedure involves lowering collective,” responded my instructor, “so the Vuichard technique becomes an exception that is going to be tough to execute in a real-world emergency where you’re startled. Also, what if you’re settling with power because you don’t have enough power and you misidentify a vortex ring state? Then adding collective via Vuichard will immediately lead to blade stall.”

He explained that there have been at least a couple of fatal accidents during training in which the necessary counterintuitive heroism wasn’t summoned for the Vuichard technique. Thus, the new school is back to the old school.

(I have never personally gotten into vortex ring state (sometimes called “settling with power”) other than during my work as a flight instructor or while a student myself. It can be avoided by being careful during steep approaches, especially with respect to not doing a downwind steep approach.)

In addition to practicing emergencies, we managed to get in some flying up and down the coast. Here are a few snapshots.

An Nvidia branch office receptionist’s new weekend boat:

An oil platform off Long Beach cleverly disguised, when viewed from the water, as an island encircled by palm trees:

Where your tax dollars went to die (a U.S. Navy littoral combat ship)

A Tesla charging facility:

The Balboa Pier:

What your (3rd or 4th) house might look like if you and all of your friends and neighbors xpressed a passionate commitment to reducing economic inequality:

(All of the above photos were taken with an iPhone 14 Pro Max after removing the left front door of the helicopter.)

Full post, including comments