Category: Flying

We’ve hit mid-December, historically a time when a lot of flight students in Maskachusetts would give up, at least until the spring. They wouldn’t schedule lessons due to Christmas parties, Christmas shopping, holiday trips, etc. And then it would be January and the idea of being out on the ramp was not appealing. Perhaps things will be better this year due to coronapanic. There are fewer in-person parties. People who travel internationally risk getting stuck due to a false or true positive COVID-19 test.

Here’s some inspiration for sticking to those flight lessons, whether you’re in a frigid slave state or a sunny free state…

Let’s back up to a flight that I did in the Cirrus with a helicopter student and her boyfriend, a non-pilot business manager. At the end of the day, which I thought would have impressed him with (a) the awesomeness of the Cirrus, (b) the awesomeness of his girlfriend as a fixed-wing pilot, and (c) the awesomeness of me as an instructor (sage advice from the right seat, checklist discipline, etc.), he said “It seems like the goal is to do everything like a robot. If that’s the goal, why not just get a robot to do it all?”

“I taught two dogs to fly a plane” (Guardian):

I have been a pet behaviourist for more than 25 years and have also worked for the film industry, helping animals to “perform” on camera. I have trained a 190kg boar to pretend to attack an actor, a cat to plunge shoulder-deep into water as if catching a fish and a cockatoo to winch up a bucket, take out a coin and drop it into a piggy bank. But when a TV company asked if I could teach a dog to fly a plane, I faced the toughest challenge of my career.

Initially I was hesitant about the project, which involved taking 12 carefully selected rescue dogs through a training regime that would ultimately allow three of them to take the controls of a Cessna light aircraft. I wondered if the idea was in the animals’ best interests, but was won over by the programme’s aim: to prove that an abandoned dog, given enough love and attention, is capable of far more than people might expect.

We had only six weeks to turn the three finalists into pilots. The Civil Aviation Authority had issued guidelines: the dogs had to be secured while in flight, and we couldn’t make any alterations to the aircraft. I had a simple rig built to mimic the plane’s seat and controls. After making sure the dogs could be seated comfortably, we used a broom handle and a cutout piece of plywood to represent the plane’s steering yoke.

During the flight, they would be sitting in the pilot’s seat, facing forward with their trainers behind them, so we had to come up with a way to give them steering directions. I designed a second rig, which could be placed in front of the dogs and included an arrangement of lights – red to veer right, blue for left and white for straight ahead. Each light also made a distinctive sound. We operated this system from the back seat via a controller.

After six weeks, I was delighted at how far the dogs had come. Their final test was to perform a figure of eight in an airborne Cessna, making banking turns while controlling their altitude. We needed a human co-pilot to take them to 3,000ft before giving control to the dogs (as diligent as our pupils had been, they weren’t able to take off and land safely). [see also “Other instructors who worked with Hazmi and Mihdhar remember them as poor students who focused on learning to control the aircraft in flight but took no interest in takeoffs or landings.”]

All three of them performed admirably, flying the plane for minutes at a time, but it was Shadow who ultimately got the bit between his teeth and successfully completed the final figure of eight.

If the dog could do it, maybe there is hope for us humans!

Separately, ground school is ON for January 3-7. It’s an MIT course, but on Zoom for 2022 as it was in 2021. No need to wear a mask or try to survive Boston winter weather!

From August 27: 130-hour pilot takes off for a round-the-world flight in a light airplane

It looks as though the 19-year-old pilot had some maintenance and perhaps weather delays in Alaska, but as of October 24, 2021 was forecasting arrival at the Shark factory in Slovakia today:

We can check FlyZolo to see how light aircraft reality matched up to light aircraft plans! (It may be fair to say that the worse the match, the better the pilot and/or dispatcher/planner!)

Related:

• “Teenage Aviator Aims to Be Youngest Woman to Circle the Globe Solo” (NYT): Zara Rutherford, 19, left Belgium last week and plans to complete her journey by early November. … If she does, she would overtake Shaesta Waiz to become the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe solo in a single-engine aircraft. (Travis Ludlow, an aviator from Britain, did so in July at the age of 18.) … “Such a great example for women, to see that we are capable of so much more than we sometimes think, believe or dream!” Ms. Rutherford wrote on Facebook. [How does the NYT know that Travis Ludlow does not identify as a woman? Isn’t it possible that Ludlow is already the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe solo?]

Google Calendar informs me, via its “Holidays in United States” calendar, that today is both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day. So… to all readers who celebrate incompetence and the rejection of #Science (regarding the size of the earth that we’ve used science and science-inspired engineering to nearly destroy), Happy Columbus Day! (And for the rest of us, Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day (enjoy our stolen land for 364/365 days per year; reflect on our theft 1 day per year while… taking the day off (government workers) and enjoying our stolen land that we refuse to return).)

Today would be the perfect exchange date for an aircraft in a 50/50 partnership between a Florida resident and someone in the Northeast or Chicago.

One thing that I’ve figured out after a couple of months living in Florida is that a simple aircraft is kind of useless here in the summer in the same way that a four-seater is useless in the Northeast in the winter. Based in Boston, a four-seater can’t get through icing conditions in the winter. On the days where icing isn’t a concern, the plane doesn’t have enough range to get anywhere that you’d probably enjoy going. Do you want to be at the beach in Provincetown or Martha’s Vineyard in February? Maybe you’d want to go to NYC for a business meeting, but the U.S. seems slated for permanent coronapanic (i.e., the meeting will be on Zoom) and, in any case, it can be complicated getting a piston aircraft properly preheated as a transient (the engine will be damaged if started when temps are below freezing). (Avid skier? Mountainous terrain is suboptimal for building airports. It will probably be just as fast to drive to the ski resort as it would be to drive, preflight, fly, stow plane, and transfer into a rental car (if the U.S. ever has rental cars again).)

None of the above factors apply to Florida, right? Well… there seem to be afternoon thunderstorms here all summer and they can last until 10 pm or even later. Unless the family is extremely flexible and doesn’t mind spending a lot of time waiting out weather in FBOs, it is probably not possible to plan an out-and-back day trip in a simple airplane. So the T-storms are kind of the Florida equivalent of icing in Maskachusetts. What if it isn’t raining, but there’s a layer of cumulus clouds under which the air is bumpy and unpleasantly warm? In the Northeast, you’d be above the clouds and bumps at the simple airplane’s optimum cruising altitudes of 6,500 and 7,500′. In Florida, you might need to go well over 10,000′, where both airplane and humans will be gasping for breath, to get into reasonably smooth air.

Suppose that there is a rare dry day. Now you’re free to go anywhere that is within comfortable reach of a C172, Piper Warrior, or SR20 (i.e., 150-300 miles). Why would you want to? If you want to bake in 90-degree heat and 90-percent humidity you can do that at home. It is the same issue as the rare beautiful February day in New England. The airplane will take you from bitter cold to ever bitterer cold or, sometimes, to slightly less bitter cold.

As folks in the Northeast have to find excuses to fly in the winter and keep the airplane’s engine from corroding, folks in Florida will have to do summer breakfast flights and get back to the hangar by 11.

What about a partnership where the aircraft lives in Chicago, Boston, Maine, New Hampshire (the “semi free state”), Vermont, or wherever starting around April 10, i.e., just after Sun n Fun. Then, in celebration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the plane is ferried to Florida through the beautiful lands that were some of the first parcels that white people stole from the Native Americans. (We could also call this “Benefits of Immigration from the Perspective of Natives Day”)

The arrangement could be tweaked with a feature whereby a partner can come visit the plane a few times during his/her/zir/their “off season” and fly it a bit, e.g., a Bahamas trip from Florida in the winter (just need to arrange 8 COVID-19 tests for a family of 4) or a summer trip around Maine and Canada.

This will have all of the financial benefits of aircraft partnership. Most fixed costs (capital, depreciation, insurance) will be cut in half. Hangar has become super expensive almost everywhere in the inflation-free United States, but perhaps the vacant months wouldn’t be too punishing due to the potential for subletting. (Or, for an older plane, just do tie-down at both ends.) It has the added benefit that the plane gets repositioned to a great place for the partner to fly in his/her/zir/their off season..

(Note that the above arrangement does not make sense for pressurized turboprop or turbine-powered aircraft, which can airlift a family in mask-free comfort from Hartford, CT to the golf course in Pinehurst, NC (KSOP). This proposal is about airplanes that cost $1.2 million (Cirrus!) new and that depreciate down to $40,000 used (older Cessna 172 or Piper Warrior prior to the recent price doubling that cannot be described as “inflation”). And it’s not a proposal for those rich/flexible enough to spend 6 months in the north and 6 months (plus 1 day for all of my friends who are Democrats and say that they support higher taxes and bigger government) in Florida. The 183-dayers can take their airplanes back and forth themselves. The above proposal is more for families that have kids in school and/or adults at work and are mostly stuck in their respective home locations.)

The plane can visit Disney World and Key West in the winter:

And Bar Harbor, Maine and Quebec City in the summer:

Readers: Modified Passover question… Why is this idea stupid like all of my other ideas?

Related:

• ShareMyAircraft.com (currently designed to help people based at the same airport all year share)

“Pilot Attempting Around-the-World Flight Crosses Atlantic” (Flying):

Zara Rutherford wants to be the youngest woman to fly around the world solo, as FlyZolo. She has completed the Atlantic crossing, the first major hurdle along the way.

The 19-year-old Belgian pilot is flying a Shark Ultralight single-engine airplane approved in the rough European equivalent of the light sport category, with a maximum takeoff weight of 600 kg, retractable gear and a variable-pitch propeller.

Rutherford comes from a family of pilots, and she had more than 130 solo hours logged prior to departing on the flight.

On her FlyZolo site, she says “I want to reduce the gender gap in aviation as well as in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).” Yet a career in STEM is the opposite of flying around the world. Lots of sitting at a desk! (And, at least in a lot of U.S. states, a woman who wants to have the spending power of a man working in STEM can simply have sex with one or two men working in STEM. So there is no economic motivation for a woman to stick her nose into a stack of textbooks for 10-20 years.)

As a child of the Equality Feminism movement of the 1960s and 1970s, I’m not surprised that someone who identifies as “female” can fly. But I am surprised and impressed that someone would do this trip without an instrument rating (impossible to obtain at 130 hours, I think)!

Let’s check back in a month or two and see how this effort has unfolded?

Related:

• Around the world in 1964 (Jerrie Mock did it without a GPS)

Given the $billions pouring into electric aircraft via SPACs, etc., I expected to see huge progress compared to 2019. Instead, the airshow featured a functional Volocopter quietly doing maneuvers that fellow German Hanna Reitsch did indoors in the 1930s and a California Opener Blackfly (never let an engineer name the product!) that failed after 1 out of 3 planned flights (ignominiously towed away).

The kids’ favorite vertical lift innovation? A DART bike rack for the AStar (note how the black helicopter fooled the normally brilliant iPhone camera software):

If certified electric aircraft are going to be available Real Soon Now, it is tough to understand why there aren’t a lot of practical experimental electric aircraft.

Related;

• Transitioning to electric flight (lectures at Oshkosh) from 2018, in which Uber said that they planned to launch (so to speak) in 2023

After nearly 15 years of ignoring 4000 Cirrus customers with the Avidyne Entegra glass panel (primary flight display (PFD)/multi-function display (MFD)), Avidyne announced a retrofit at Oshkosh this year. For consumers with 8K TVs from Costco (7,680 x 4,320 pixels), what does two decades of progress and $25,000 (plus installation) buy? The screens go from 10-inch 800×600 (best tech of 2003ish?) to 12-inch 1024×768 (compare to Garmin G500 TXi, a 10-inch 1280×768). This is, unfortunately, not enough resolution for clearly displaying an approach plate. The new screens have a touch panel so the number of hardware soft keys around the bezel has been reduced, as has the size of the bezel.

The menu structure of the Avidynes is not nearly as deep as what Garmin inflicts on pilots and therefore the system should be more efficient to use in flight.

Unfortunately, the $25,000 price is closer to $60,000 if you have a stock -G2 Cirrus. The Garmin 430s must be replaced with Avidyne plug-compatible IFD nav/coms. The rate-based STEC autopilot must be replaced with an Avidyne autopilot (a much better unit and, with these new retrofit screens, it will have redundant AHRS feeding it, unlike when hooked up to the legacy Avidyne Entegra). Add installation and this could easily be a $75,000 project on airframes that, pre-Biden, were worth $100-150,000. An owner who can afford to throw $75,000 at a beloved older airframe can perhaps scratch up $90,000 to implement a full Garmin solution, including the Garmin GFC 500 autopilot, which offers envelope protection even when nominally turned off (the autopilot servos will fight against a pilot who is trying to stall the airplane, overspeed it, or overbank it). Garmin is clunkier, but the investment in learning the Garmin interface can be transferred to the vast number of Garmin-equipped general aviation aircraft flying.

Here’s how the new Avidyne system looked in Hangar C:

The hoped-for certification and on-sale date is “first half 2022”.

Is there any possibility of a cheaper solution? The Dynon displays, originally developed for the experimental market, are the same resolution, work with the legacy Garmin 430W nav/coms, and cost less than $5,000 each. They’re not currently certified for composite aircraft, however. Here’s one at Oshkosh:

Note that it has been configured to display a round airspeed dial, which gives the pilot a lot more information/context than the speed tape uncritically lifted from airliners.

Finally, remember that the military has abandoned the idea that the task of piloting is fundamentally a head-down stare-at-tv-screens activity. A poster inside a Luftwaffe Airbus military cargo plane:

Note that the “Primary Flight Displays” are the heads-up displays and everything else is deprecated as a “head-down display.” (See also The latest glass cockpits are obsolete? regarding what’s in a T-6 Texan II trainer.)