Category: Flying

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

Florida aircraft sales tax avoidance talk at Sun ‘n Fun

by philg

Happy Tax Day for those who celebrate (i.e., Americans who aren’t smart enough to have joined Mitt Romney’s Club 47).

David Brennan and Jackie Mustian, attorneys at Moffa, Sutton, & Donnini, gave a talk at Sun ‘n Fun about how people avoid owing a 6 percent sales tax when buying an aircraft that will ultimately be based in Florida. (Imagine the potential liability for an elite buying a $100 million Gulfstream!)

First, it seems unlikely that Florida is getting any real benefit from imposing this tax. The true beneficiaries are attorneys and accountants who set up schemes to avoid it. Perhaps because of that, there is no urgency among legislators to eliminate the tax, as Maskachusetts did back in 2001. Under the assumption that the tax, and the army of professionals whose job it is to avoid it, are with us forever, here’s what we learned…

A nonresident who owns a new-to-him/her/zir/them aircraft has to be careful about visiting Florida for reasons other than maintenance or flight training. If the aircraft is here for 21 days within the first six months of ownership, Florida sales tax is owed. A flight that lands at 11:55 pm and departs 10 minutes later at 12:05 am is considered to have spent two days in Florida out of the allowable 20.

A Florida resident cannot take advantage of the above exemption. If the Florida resident is the sole owner of a Maskachusetts, Delaware, or Montana LLC that owns the aircraft, the 20-day exemption might apply, but an auditor might also try to look through the LLC shell to the real owner. The Floridian ideally would keep the aircraft out of state entirely for six months and also not display an obvious intent to bring it into the state on Day 183 (maybe the Floridian is a super douche and also is looking at buying a house in Nantucket and has written to the airport there about getting on the hangar waitlist).

Where the tax advisors seem to make money is in setting up an LLC that is in the business of owning an aircraft and reselling it or its use to others. Prior to the aircraft purchase, the LLC is registered with the State of Florida to collect sales and use tax. The “real owner” then dry leases time with the aircraft from the LLC and the LLC collects and remits sales tax on the dry lease payments, e.g., $75/hour, but only for those hours flown within the State of Florida. In the speakers’ opinion, the State of Florida doesn’t have a legal basis for challenging the reasonableness of the lease rate. The state is entitled to collect tax only on the money that is actually changing hands. That said, a $10/hour dry lease rate for a $1 million aircraft could seem ridiculous. (Other states where this kind of scheme is employed have some rules about the minimum cost for the dry lease based on prevailing interest rates.)

It’s too bad that DeSantis and the Legislature haven’t cleaned this up. In my opinion, the efficient way to tax aviation is a fuel tax and if the state wants more money from aircraft owners it should simply raise the existing aviation fuel tax (FL 206.9825):

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FAA Medical talk at Sun ‘n Fun: get BasicMed even if you have a conventional medical

by philg

Most of the lectures at Sun ‘n Fun happen in a modern air-conditioned building that belongs to Central Florida Aerospace Academy, a public high school. Fittingly for today’s topic, one enters the building via a door that features a coronapanic sign:

(See When will we feel safe enough to remove our coronapanic signs? (2024))

The presenter was Dr. Daniel Monlux, the kind of physician that noble aid recipients in the Middle East, accustomed to free food, education, health care, etc., probably wouldn’t ask to see twice (he was in the F/A-18 in the U.S. Navy). Dr. Monlux is a founder of Wingman Med, a consulting firm that helps pilots maintain their medicals.

The most important take-away from the talk is that every pilot should get certified under BasicMed even if he/she/ze/they also holds a conventional medical certificate. That way, if there is a hiccup in the medical renewal process, the pilot can still fly his/her/zir/their family around in a Cessna or Cirrus. There is no obstacle to dual medical certification.

What can go wrong in the medical renewal process? If the pilot discloses a new condition of some sort (the FAA doesn’t normally have access to a pilot’s medical records other than self-disclosure, according to Dr. Monlux) and that new condition isn’t on the “CACI list” or the pilot doesn’t have the right documentation for the AME (Aviation Medical Examiner) to issue a medical under CACI then there will be a deferral.

First, how can the pilot avoid a deferral? One way is to look at the CACI list web pages and figure out what the AME will need to see. Typically it is a report from a physician (not a nurse-practitioner or PA) within 90 days of the aviation medical exam.

Suppose that there is a deferral? Then the pilot is plunged into a hellish holding pattern. Mostly this is not due to the low-paid doctors employed by the FAA in Oklahoma City wanting to torture pilots, but rather because the FAA is required by regulation to use only USPS and hardcopy letters for communicating with pilots. It takes 2-3 months for a hardcopy mail exchange to occur. If the pilot hasn’t given the FAA exactly the information requested in the format that is requested, there will be at least another 2-3 months of delay. (no need for a DOGE reengineering here!)

Pilots often make things worse during this process. They will submit more information that the FAA requests, e.g., a full medical record from a provider that happens to have a medication list and a condition list. Invariably, these lists at medical institutions are out of date and contain conditions and medications that are no longer relevant, but once the FAA sees any of them they will need an explanation (from a physician within the past 90 days) about why the condition no longer exists and the medication is no longer being taken.

These processes can drag on for years and there is a plan for the FAA to start denying medical applications, rather than simply continuing the deferral farce, if the pilot can’t get organized to supply everything that the FAA needs (could be challenging in a country where it can take 3-4 months to get an appointment with a specialist). If the FAA actually denies a medical certificate then the pilot can’t continue to fly under BasicMed.

As noted above, most problems in this domain are self-inflicted. However, in the event of a complaint by a copilot, for example, the FAA does have access to prescription drug databases and might be able to see, for example, that a pilot was prescribed opioids (America’s favorite pastime) or anti-psychotic drugs.

Let me close with a trendy new topic: What if you’re a massive beefcake and decide to slim down via Ozempic or similar? Make sure that it is prescribed for weight loss, not diabetes! Diabetes is a matter of serious concern to the FAA because, among other things, it can affect vision.

Readers: Who has been on Ozempic or a competitive GLP-1 inhibitor? I have a few friends on them and everyone seems happy in their new thin guise. Is Elon Musk right that everyone should be on them? I would have to lose 20 lbs. to get into what the government says is an ideal weight range. As long as our house is within 15 minutes of Costco, I don’t see that happening absent Ozempic and, at the same time, I hate the idea of giving myself injections almost as much as I hate the idea of grueling exercise.

Speaking of Ozempic, here’s where I got lunch:

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Sun ‘n Fun 2025 report

by philg

I’ll write up a couple of in-depth items separately, but here’s an overview of my day at Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida).

Previous visits to Sun ‘n Fun have been via (1) commercial flight from Boston and rental car from Tampa (advantage: Bern’s Steakhouse, back when you didn’t need to reserve months in advance), (2) Cirrus landing in the morning (complicated NOTAM, but not as busy as Oshkosh) and then potentially long-ish wait to depart between end of air show and 7 pm curfew, (3) minivan from our home in Jupiter, with stop at nearby Legoland. This year, I decided on a night-before flight to Bartow, Florida, a former P-51 training base (KBOW) that is 30 minutes from Lakeland, rent a car from Avis, and stay in a hotel (Florida has so much hotel capacity that prices don’t get to the insane levels that they do in Oshkosh). The mechanics of this worked out pretty well, but it is a mistake to try to leave Sun ‘n Fun by car within the first hour after the end of the air show.

For those who want to build their own planes, Sun ‘n Fun has a full slate of skills-building classes. Not sure that I would want to fly in a plane that contained my very first welds:

The airshow was loud, louder, and loudest with, admittedly, some finesse from superstar Mike Goulian. There were demonstrations of the F-35 (A and C models), the E/A-18G Growler, the F-16, and the Blue Angels (back to an all-male pilot team now that the Amazon Prime movie cameras aren’t rolling). With a smartphone, I think that the breakups are the best pictures that one can take of the Blue Angels, e.g.,

Here’s a photo taken from the control tower by a Bartow Airport employee (95B Photography on Flickr) that proves the ancient advice, “f/8 and be there”:

If you want to be a hero among progressives, you can volunteer with this Illinois-based organization (the representative was wearing an N95 mask, of course!) to exfiltrate a 15-year-old from benighted Florida to a state where his/her/zir/their genitals can be safely removed as part of gender-affirming care (abortion care is also part of the mission and the org says “hosted our very first drag show” in the 2024 annual report):

I’m not sure that the message of Elevated Access resonated with everyone at Sun ‘n Fun. There were some downright Deplorable people and planes (a couple of veterans, below):

As bad as it is to be a teenager in need of gender-affirming care stuck in Florida, the status of certified avionics is even worse. Situation summary: grim and expensive. Systems are old and clunky, e.g., the 2009 Garmin package touted in the latest -G7 Cirruses, and super expensive. There is still no reasonable upgrade path for the 4000 Avidyne-equipped -G2 Cirruses. A broker estimated that about 5 percent of these have been converted to the latest Garmin gear ($150,000 in an airframe that, pre-Biden, was only worth about $150,000) and that nobody should invest this kind of money. Considering that brokers make a commission on the total price of the plane, the advice not to do the Garmin upgrade means that it must be a stunningly terrible value. (Contrast to realtors, who always advise homeowners to do a huge amount of work prior to selling!) The Avidyne Vantage system is not certified yet. Dynon has nothing for the -G2 Cirrus.

Cirrus runs a great operation for owners at Sun ‘n Fun, including a perfect viewing location as well as air conditioning and cold drinks/snacks. I had my checkbook out to purchase a -G7, but the company refused my demand to add Blue Steel and Magnum to the color chart:

The latest and greatest Cirruses typically come with built-in oxygen for maintaining mental sharpness at high altitude. I’m wondering if this is being done all wrong. There’s a bottle built into the plane that is expensive to service and recertify. FBOs are getting into the habit of charging a fortune to top up these bottles with oxygen because their costs of labor and insurance are so high (the typical oxygen customer is a jet owner). There are some portable systems (example) that supposedly can concentrate enough oxygen up to 18,000′ to keep one pilot mentally sharp. It is rare to have more than two people on an oxygen-required flight and also fairly rare to go above 18,000′ (the limit for nasal cannulas). Maybe it would make more sense to put two of these these concentrators into the typical unpressurized airplane than a bottle-based system. I guess have a bottle supplement for those rare super high altitude flights.

V1 Hats is working on the problem of baseball cap-headset interference by thinning out the material near the ear:

I wish that it were possible to get custom designs and logos! Godzilla, at a minimum.

Here are some imports from China that made it in just under the tariff wire:

Towards the campground:

Flying out of Bartow, some ideas for decorating one’s living room ceiling and a nice museum devoted to the military’s time here:

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Tailboom chop in the New York City tour helicopter crash

by philg

Friends have been asking for an explanation of the horrific recent NYC tour helicopter crash, in which the machine was seen falling without its empennage (i.e., the tail had been chopped off by the main rotor system). Here are the passengers just before departure:

The weather seems to have been pretty good. The crash was at 3:15 pm, 15:15 Eastern or 19:15Z. Here’s the nearby (LaGuardia and Newark) weather at 1851Z:

KLGA 101851Z 16017G22KT 10SM FEW040 BKN100 BKN140 OVC250 08/M04
KEWR 111851Z 04011KT 7SM -RA BKN010 BKN017 OVC032 08/05

LGA had winds gusting 22 knots, which can generate some turbulence near buildings. Newark had steady winds of 11 knots with light rain and a low ceiling of 1000′ (not a problem for a helicopter that will operate at 500′). If turbulence leads to a low-G condition and the pilot doesn’t react properly, the result can be mast bumping (inner portion of the blades hit the shaft holding up the rotor system), but that common initial speculation seems unlikely in this particular case because the winds weren’t that heavy and a tourist flight isn’t usually the time for intentional rollercoaster-style maneuvers.

“Pilot in Hudson River helicopter crash called about needing fuel before fatal accident, CEO says” (Fox):

“The pilot of the doomed aircraft reportedly radioed about needing to refuel minutes before the helicopter crashed into the chilly waters, according to New York Helicopter Tour CEO Michael Roth, whose company operated the helicopter.”

This points to a more likely scenario (albeit still complete speculation until further data are available): engine stoppage due to running out of fuel followed by a failure to initiate an autorotation. The Robinson R44 has a similar two-blade rotor system to the Bell 206L4 (N216MH) that crashed. Here are some excerpts from the pilot’s operating handbook for the R44 that lay out the accident sequence:

  1. fuel exhaustion causes the engine to quit
  2. the engine quitting causes the rotor system to slow down
  3. the pilot, startled by the engine quitting, does not immediately (within 2-4 seconds) enter an autorotation, a lowering of the collective pitch control that flattens the blades and allows them to maintain speed while windmilling
  4. the retreating blade stalls, partly due to the high angle of attack caused by the relative wind beginning to come from below the helicopter as the helicopter falls, and the rotor system “blows back” due to the lost of lift (explaining this in full requires some understanding of the physics of gyroscopic precession)
  5. the severely tilted rotor contacts and chops off the tailboom

If this is indeed what happened, what can we learn? First, it is a lot easier to do the right thing in a training environment when simulated emergencies (e.g., an instructor rolling the throttle to idle) are expected. Second, being 100 percent vigilant 100 percent of the time is a perfect job for a computer whose job can be to shove the collective down and enter the autorotation even if the human pilot is still startled and frozen. A system like this has been designed, but is not widely available. See “HeliTrak launches R22/R44 Collective Pull Down” (2018), for example.

You might ask how it is possible for an experienced pilot to run an aircraft out of fuel. I was providing some recurrent training to two Brazilian helicopter pilots. Brazil is a huge market for helicopter taxi service due to horrific traffic and high levels of crime (they could use an El Salvador-style clean-up!). We were in the R44 at a quiet uncontrolled airport (6B6) in Maskachusetts doing some pattern work (take off, fly around in a circle, land). I stressed the importance of checking fuel levels and temperatures/pressures on downwind (flying at 500′ above the ground parallel to the runway) and before lifting up or taking off. I did the standard Robinson flight instructor trick of pulling the “gages” circuit breaker (aeronautical engineers can’t spell?). This causes the analog gauges to show 0 fuel, 0 oil pressure, and 0 oil temperature. The pilot flew 3 or 4 patterns without noticing anything amiss (i.e., missed at least checks of the gauges). His pilot friend in the back seat also didn’t notice anything. I asked them what they thought the most common cause of aircraft engine stoppage was. “Cylinder heat temperature too high?” was the answer (supposedly it is fuel exhaustion). I reminded them to make sure to do the pre-take-off and downwind checks. We fly at least 4 additional patterns without anyone noticing a problem. I asked the flying pilot to set the helicopter down on the runway and explicitly asked “How do the gauges look?” He responded, “fine”. His friend in the back seat agreed that nothing was amiss. Nervous myself about the fuel situation, I pushed the breaker back in, but not before noting that 0 fuel wasn’t a great way to fly. (In retrospect, I didn’t have to be nervous because Robinson’s orthographically-challenged engineers wisely put the low fuel light (10 minutes) on a separate circuit.)

Update: I’ve now seen some video, thanks to reader comments, in which the rotor system, still attached to part of the transmission, is also separated from both the tail and the fuselage. That casts some doubt on the above theory, but I will leave it in place as a reminder of how wrong I usually am.

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Meet at Sun ‘n Fun tomorrow?

by philg

Who wants to meet at Sun ‘n Fun tomorrow? I’m flying into Bartow tonight (I have some commitments here in Palm Beach County and wasn’t sure that I could make the 7 pm cutoff for Lakeland) and will ignominiously approach the event in an Avis Toyota Camry. Fly the mighty Cirrus back out on Saturday after a stop at Bok Tower Gardens, the polar opposite of Sun n’ Fun (photo from March 2022):

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When can we get a DOGE for aviation?

by philg

We had a 0-time Continental factory rebuilt engine dropped into a 2005 Cirrus SR20 back in 2019. The steel oil filler cap was new at the time. After 5.5 years of operation, in which combustion generated water vapor as a byproduct, the cap rusted out to the point that it is missing one of the teeth that engages spring tension to keep it in place.

Some pilots remove the cap after every flight for some period of time to let the steam out, though quite a few of these heroes of diligence also report having suffered from rusted oil filler caps. You might reasonably ask why anyone should care about the lifetime of this part. Why not buy a new cap every 5 years? An impervious-to-rust (plastic) ACDelco GM oil filler cap is $11 (presumably this is because people sometimes lose the caps, not because the cap won’t outlast the engine in ordinary circumstances). How much more could an aviation cap cost? (Answer: $386-$11)

I talked to some aviation mechanics about this and none thought that there would be any problem in Continental or Lycoming catching up on 70+ years of improvements in plastic or taking a class titled “Here are some things that Ford, Toyota, and GM were doing in 1985”. The best explanation that anyone had of why this expensive and rust-prone part would be used is that the engine family was certified like this back in the 1930s and it is too much effort to get the FAA to sign off on a change.

Maybe general aviation will be saved by eVTOLs that are designed and built with a completely different philosophy. If not, though, I wonder if we could get a DOGE going between the manufacturers of legacy piston engines/aircraft and the FAA to ask and answer questions of the form “Why wouldn’t you use a plastic cap in a rust-prone environment?”

3D printing nerds: have we advanced to the point that it is possible to toss a metal cap into a scanner and print a dimensionally identical plastic replacement that can handle the temps at the top of the engine (the oil temperature redline is 240F so maybe you want a plastic that is good to 400F)?

For reference, here is the perfect-condition oil filler cap, never previously touched or used by anyone other than the dealer, in our 4.3-year-old Honda Odyssey:

It’s available for $13.49, including shipping, from a Honda dealer via Amazon. If we assume that shipping is bundled into the price, this is a $10 part at most. Why did people replace it? Here are a couple of Amazon review reasons:

  • The original cap began to leak around its base after 8 years and 60K miles.
  • Don’t know what happened to my oil filler cap?

Searching for incidents across all cars where an oil filler cap was replaced, and ignoring those where the cap serves an engine venting or emissions function, it seem as though loss is the most common reason and typically due to a service shop forgetting to put it back on.

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Progress in aviation as measured by the Robinson R88

by philg

Robinson has figured out that the big money in helicopters is government and medevac (also government, since Medicare and Medicaid pay). Consequently, they’ve released the R88, a machine big enough to serve as an air ambulance (government pays) or firefighter (government pays) or police (government, obviously, and oftentimes air taxi for bureaucrats). Here’s what it looks like:

The turbine powerplant is made in an Islamic country and generates 950 hp. Rumor has it that the new helicopter will cost $3.3 million so let’s call that $4 million in today’s dollars by the time it goes out the door with useful equipment.

My summary to a pilot group:

Never in the history of humanity has there been a single-engine helicopter that could carry two pilots and 8 passengers underneath a two-blade rotor system.

Let’s have a look at the Bell UH-1 (“Huey”), which first flew in 1956 and of which more than 16,000 were built. The Huey had…

  • two pilots
  • seats for 11 passengers
  • a single engine (700 hp in the prototype; 1100 hp by 1960)
  • a two-blade rotor system

What did the first Hueys cost? $250,000 (source). Adjusted from 1960 into today’s mini-dollars… that’s $2.7 million.

The Robinson R88 is surely an improvement over the Bell in many respects. There are LCD screens in front and a modern autopilot to “pitch in” (so to speak). It may also be more reliable and cheaper to maintain (I hope!). But it’s kind of interesting that there hasn’t been more of an improvement in specs or cost after nearly 70 years.

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Robinson goes to war

by philg

Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive from Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee. An R44 would probably make better economic sense, but the idea of a piston-powered aircraft is apparently too terrifying for America’s bravest heroes.

See “Crew Training International and Helicopter Institute awarded U.S.Army FAA Part 141 Helicopter Flight School Pilot Program” (March 6, 2025)

Related:

the airspace (Marianna at the top center; note the magenta color for the airport, which indicates that there is no control tower):

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A closer look at the DEI landing of a CRJ in Toronto

by philg

This is a follow-up to Landing a CRJ in Toronto. Much has been written about Endeavor’s passion for diversity, inclusion, and equity (consistent with parent company Delta’s passion for DEI) so it seems fair to say that any landing by Endeavor is a “DEI landing”.

Viewed in isolation, a video of the DEI CRJ-900 landing that resulted in a crash/fire/flip doesn’t look that bad.

The approach angle and descent rate doesn’t seem alarming, though maybe there is some vertical acceleration at the very end. If viewed next to a video of an ordinary nothing-bent CRJ-900 landing, though, the abnormality jumps out. A normal landing has a dramatically longer flare and float, with corresponding much lower vertical speed on touching the runway.

Pilots transitioning from little pistons to airliners are admonished to “fly it on” and not try to hold the plane off the runway for as long as they did in their Cessna/Piper/Cirrus days. The ground spoilers on a jet don’t pop up until “weight on wheels” sensors on both main legs are positive. Therefore, a long float and butter-smooth landing chews up a lot more runway than an, um, “positive” landing in which the ground spoilers pop up right at the 1000′ markers. The DEI-enriched Endeavor crew apparently took the “fly it on” mantra too literally.

One other aspect of landing a jet of this size that might not be familiar to pilots with piston experience: the always-present-in-a-piston option to go around by adding power and climbing out doesn’t exist below about 50′. Once the thrust levers are pulled back, there is no procedure for adding power back in and trying to take off again. It might be doable, despite the long spool-up time for the heavy engines, but there is no training in this method. Maybe an airline crew would try this if a fire truck or another aircraft suddenly began to block the runway. Other than that, thrust levers back means a commitment to the landing and it might not be obvious how to fix a co-pilot’s mistakes (though a failure to flare, on the other hand, could be obvious and could be fixed with aft pressure on the yoke while saying “I have the controls”).

Related:

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Landing a CRJ in Toronto

by philg

I wrote about my experience landing a Canadair Regional Jet in Toronto (July 2013):

On week after I completed IOE I was assigned to fly with a young recently upgraded captain to Toronto. I had about 75 hours of experience at this point during one month of flying the CRJ. The Tower cleared us to land on runway 33R. I had the plane set up perfectly. We were 3-4 miles from the runway and descending in a stable configuration. Then the Tower controller changed his mind: “Cancel landing clearance. You’re now cleared to land Runway 33L.” This is a shorter runway that starts about 2000′ farther away than 33R and also requires a horizontal sidestep of about 3500′. I would have to add some power and maneuver the airplane to line up with the other runway.

A good CRJ pilot would have added exactly the right amount of thrust so that it wouldn’t be necessary to touch the levers again until 50′ above the ground when it was time to pull them back to idle. How did I handle the situation? I added too much power. Then I took some back out. Then I had to add some back in. Then I finally got us stabilized close to the 500′ above-the-ground minimum altitude that our company rules called for (if not stable at 500′ in visual conditions, go around; if not stable at 1000′ in instrument conditions, go around). After we’d pulled off the runway and cleaned up the plane I said “That was so embarrassing. I feel like I should mail my ATP certificate back to the FAA.” The captain replied with one of the wisest and kindest things that anyone has ever said to me: “Nobody was born knowing how to fly a 53,000 lb. jet.”

Conditions were more challenging today, I’m sure, and the results were worse than even my weak effort (ABC):

Friends have been asking me how this could have happened. flightradar24 has some good info, especially the weather report (METAR):

CYYZ 171900Z 27028G35KT 6SM R24L/3000VP6000FT/U BLSN BKN034 M09/M14 A2993 RMK CU6 SLP149

The same article says that the plane was landing on runway 23 (magnetic heading 237, which is about 227 degrees true heading in that part of the world). The METAR says that the wind was from 270 (true), a 40-degree cross-wind (works out to nearly 20 knots of crosswind). The wind was blowing at 28 knots gusting 35 knots, which is a recipe for bumps. The visibility is said to be 6 statute miles, which is inconsistent with the “runway visual range” (RVR) of only 3000-6000 ft (1/2-1 mile) in blowing snow (BLSN). Maybe the explanation is that the visibility was quite good except near the surface where the strong wind was blowing accumulated snow around. Temperature was -9C. The clouds didn’t begin until 3400′ above the runway and, therefore, instrument flying didn’t play a role in this unfortunate event.

Various American media outlets have been highlighted on X for blaming Donald Trump, which seems far-fetched given that it was a Canadian-built airplane landing at a Canadian airport.

How could the plane flip over? It can’t be wake turbulence from another aircraft because a strong wind will blow the wake turbulence clear of the final approach course and runways.

Based on the detachment of both wings, my guess at this point is that the plane began to slide sideways on the runway, caught on a pavement imperfection, and flipped over as a car might. Maintaining directional control on the runway at higher speeds is done primarily with the rudder (operated by the same pedals that operate the nosewheel steering). In other words, steering is accomplished via an aerodynamic mechanism even if the wheels are rolling on the runway. Beginner pilots are prone to forgot to keep steering with rudder after the wheels touch. They think that the flight is over and now it is time to relax, even though their Cessna or Cirrus is still going more than 60 knots, possibly with a strong tendency to head for a side edge of the runway. Airline crews, of course, will be much less prone to this human frailty, but the CRJ900 lands at around 130 knots and that makes directional control more challenging. Poor visibility from blowing snow certainly wouldn’t help. The only thing that the CRJ has going for it compared to the trainer aircraft in this situation is that a 20-knot crosswind (see above) is a smaller percentage of a 130-knot forward speed than it is of a 60-knot forward speed.

[Update: video has emerged of a hard landing, maybe hard enough to snap off one of the main (under-wing) landing gears, which would certainly start the plane in a sideways direction. Why would the plane come down rapidly? Gusty winds could be a factor. If a strong headwind suddenly shifts to a tailwind, for example, the plane loses a lot of airspeed instantly and, below a certain speed, the aircraft becomes less efficient as it gets slower. (Below the stall speed, the aircraft mostly stops flying and, therefore, will sink like a rock.) Given a long runway, pilots can usually deal with this possibility by choosing to fly at a higher-than-standard approach speed (add half the gust factor is the conventional formula) and, also, the standard approach speed provides a significant margin over stall.]

The flight attendants are today’s heroes, certainly, for getting everyone out!

Our wind limitations from a smaller earlier version of the CRJ:

(It would have been a 27-knot crosswind limitation, I think, given the runway conditions being reported by the control tower. Below the chart there is a note saying that reported gusts are to be ignored in determining whether a limitation will be exceeded.)

Here are some flashcards for the CRJ900 from Endeavor:

Technically, this may have been a “dry” runway and, therefore, the reported crosswind was less than the 32-knot limit. On the other hand, reports might not have matched the reality for directional control.

(One confusing element of our life with the CRJ was that wet runways were actually considered “dry” so long as the runway was grooved.)

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