Category: Flying

I hate to be the person who says that government should be smaller except when it comes to spending on his/her/zir/their personal passion. On the other hand, research is an area where Econ 101 says that companies will inevitably underinvest and, therefore, society will underinvest unless government steps in. Any fundamental breakthrough is going to be copied by competitors, which means that the developer of a breakthrough is not going to get the full benefit of the investment.

Much of aviation today is based on research done by NACA, the predecessor to NASA. For example, the airfoil on a typical wing will be a NACA-developed shape. NASA is still in the business of helping the aviation industry, albeit as a pimple on the butt of the womanned space program, as measured by funding.

NASA had its own pavilion at EAA AirVenture. The front neatly illustrates America’s progression from a slender 1960s spacefaring nation to an obese scooter-dependent one:

Unique among exhibitors at Oshkosh, NASA keeps the coronapanic flame alive. #Science says that a simple surgical mask is ample protection against 100,000 daily visitors spewing out aerosol Omicron:

At first glance, NASA is seemingly working on one of my pet ideas: ADS-B should sequence airplanes at nontowered airports? (2018) In talking to the folks at the pavilion, however, I learned that the goals of their Data & Reasoning Fabric and DANTi are far more grand and nebulous. Instead of solving the near-term problem of ADS-B being useless at preventing the mid-air collisions that are actually likely, NASA will solve the problem of a Jetsons-like flight environment in which the number of aircraft is 100X what we have today.

One NASA program that struck me as valuable is Fit2Fly. All of the people making heavy super drones for package delivery, etc., are working on certification and sales. NASA asks “What about maintenance? What happens after a few months when these things start to break and there is no pilot on board to hear and feel an abnormal vibration?”

How about reducing fuel consumption for commercial air travel? NASA promises a more extended timeline than the companies that have been harvesting $billions via SPACs. A hybrid turboprop airliner will fly in about 3 years and will be commercially available… in 2035(!). The electric motor is just for takeoff and climb and the fuel savings come from having smaller dinosaur blood-powered engines that suffice only for cruise. The result, assuming that the next 13 years pan out as hoped, will be a 10% savings in fuel.

NASA is also bringing back the biplane. The airliner wing will be made long and thin, like a glider’s, and then braced with a strut, like a Cessna 172, so that the long/thin wing doesn’t snap off. The strut itself provides some lift. This will cut fuel consumption by 8-10%.

The most substantial fuel reduction that NASA is hoping to achieve is via SUSAN, a single engine turbofan project with electric motors on the wings that will yield a 25% improvement.

If the agency were returned to its NACA roots, NASA could truly revolutionize general aviation by funding open-source medium-cost low-power turbofan engines, fly-by-wire flight control systems, etc. What’s the agency doing instead? A $1 trillion project to put a golden retriever on Mars. Here’s a poster that was being handed out at Oshkosh:

Certified fossil fuel-powered aviation has been notable for the slow pace of innovation. As the world of the consumer has been transformed, the typical aircraft flying is a refined version of what pilots operated during World War II. Through 2019, it would not have been unfair to characterize the pace of innovation as glacial. Coronapanic, however, has slowed the pace to geologic. Garmin, the 500 lb. gorilla of general aviation avionics, had nothing new to show. “All of our engineers have been working on getting certification to use substitute parts in existing designs,” explained a senior sales exec. “Even with the substitutions, we had a 9-month backlog that is now down to 90 days.” Three months to get an 11-year-old nav/com doesn’t seem like a great situation for consumers, but the sales guy said, “It takes 4-6 months to get a slot at any avionics shop, so our lead time doesn’t slow anyone down.” (This does not seem to be true for autopilot installations; Garmin has been shipping partial kits and, if the shop starts work based on Garmin’s forecast delivery dates for the lagging items, the result is that airplanes are grounded for months waiting for the full kit to arrive.)

(The good news is that Garmin bought a container full of displays for the ancient 430/530 nav/coms, so if you like 25-year-old technology they will keep supporting it!)

Small competitors such as Avidyne and Dynon did not have anything new at Oshkosh either.

The electric “super drone” companies don’t have certified products and they do not seem to have been slowed down as much by coronapanic, at least if we measure by hype. Back in 2018, Uber said that customers in Los Angeles would be fleeing the traffic-clogged streets in electric aircraft by 2023 (post). Maybe the electric super drone is always 5 years in the future? Joby came to AirVenture with a sim and no aircraft. They predict Uber using their 5-seater the day after certification in 2024.

The experimental aircraft folks seem to have maintained their work efforts while everyone else pretended to work from home. The RV-15 was conceived in 2019 and flew in 2022:

(There are more than 10,000 Van’s Aircraft kit planes flying today, which exceeds the number that Cirrus has built.)

I am back from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) in the Cirrus SR20. It took only 4 days to get from Wisconsin to South Florida by air, a trip that would have taken 22 hours by minivan. The route as mapped by SkyVector:

With forecast winds, this should be 16 hours of round-trip flight time according to SkyVector. How long did it actually take? 18.3 hours in the air, according to the meter in the plane.

Amazingly, the 2.5-week trip was done entirely VFR and proceeded almost precisely on the originally planned schedule. A student pilot could have flown all of the legs that we did and been challenged only by a 25-knot crosswind landing at Appleton, Wisconsin (simultaneous landings on two intersecting runways for maximum capacity) and a 25-knot crosswind landing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (no runway there is oriented into the wind that we encountered). We delayed our departure from Indianapolis up to Appleton (one airport north of actual Oshkosh (KOSH)) due to a line of thunderstorms, but our friend who came in via Southwest to Chicago was delayed over 3 hours due to the same weather. Our family had a good time at the Indiana State Museum while hoping to avoid a long detour around the cells (we ended up adding about 20 minutes of meandering). Instrument flying skills would have been unhelpful to us, just as they were to Southwest, because flying through a thunderstorm isn’t a practical transportation strategy.

Most of the trip happened between 7,500′ and 11,500′ due to trying to stay over the bumpy cumulus clouds and avoid roasting to death in the unairconditioned Cirrus.

KDNL in Augusta, Georgia is a great stop due to the Morris Museum of Southern art. If you follow Science and are from Massachusetts or California, you’ll like KMWA in Illinois. According to the FBO, the on-field marijuana shop was open every day that the Chicago Public Schools were closed.

I had a 10:30 am brisket breakfast at Rob’s Pit BBQ, which was superb.

The stops that are not self-explanatory are KPDC (Effigy Mounds National Monument; an afternoon hike accessed via the crew car) and KCID (the Amana Colonies; two nights and one full day to tour).

I’ll write more about Indianapolis. There are a lot of great museums, especially for kids. We spent two nights there.

Pilot friends will appreciate that the cheapest fuel purchased was from Signature(!) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where leaded dinosaur blood was dispensed at $6.90 per gallon with the “Oshkosh discount”. On the third hand, though I had reserved a “car” at Cedar Rapids, Hertz delivered a Ford Expedition Max:

What I saved on 100LL I paid out at the local BP station to feed this uncomfortably bumpy monster.

Thanks to all of the jet charter companies having their best years ever (they and their clients all standing under a shower of federal cash), the level of staffing and service at FBOs is high anywhere that a Gulfstream might land. Air Traffic Control was operating smoothly and provided VFR advisories for the entire trip except for the last 40 miles into the Oshkosh area. The rental car crisis seems to have abated as long as you’re willing to pay 100 Bidies per day for a car that used to be $50 per day. Ubers, too, were plentiful (Indianapolis and Chattanooga).

The view out the front approaching our home airport of Stuart, Florida:

Best views on the trip: Mississippi River climbing out of KPDC; crossing the Appalachian Mountains; approaching to land at Chattanooga; the marshes around Amelia Island, Florida (KFHB).

I’ll be writing about EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) over the next few weeks, but today is the last day of the actual gathering. The true spirit of Oshkosh, I think, is best captured by this story from EAA:

Ken Swain, EAA 102241, flew his VariEze, N4ZZ, into Oshkosh for the 45th year in a row this year. From life in the Air Force to flying for United Airlines, and now in retirement, Ken’s aircraft has been a constant.

Ken has proudly owned his VariEze since Burt Rutan first released it, even flying it into Oshkosh just two years after the prototype was shown.

“In 1976, Burt showed up in the homebuilt prototype,” Ken said. “Once, again, he was mobbed. The plans were out there, and a couple of really fast builders showed up in 1977 along with Burt, and in 1978, there were at least 14 … and I was one of them. That was my first time [at Oshkosh].”

“The first three years I stayed [at UW-Oshkosh], and every year since, I’ve stayed in the campground,” Ken said. “I’ve seen the way the campground has evolved …. That’s changed a lot, and yet it hasn’t changed. The society of campers is its own extra convention separate from the daytime convention. It has to be experienced, and not just one or twice, but over a number of years to understand. It’s a whole other vibe.”

This guy hits every note. He built his own airplane from plans. The plane is a Rutan design. He camps with his plane. Let’s just hope that he came in on Sunday rather than a day early. The weather for the event was perfect, sunny with highs around 80 degrees every day. Saturday, July 23 was a different story:

What it looked like in the Garmin Pilot app around 7 pm Central:

I’m not sure when they arrived, but here are a couple of guys who got two tents and two full-size bicycles into an A36 Bonanza:

Also a candidate for the True Spirit of Oshkosh award, a family that rebuilt a 1938 Staggerwing… twice (second rebuild necessitated by a hangar fire):

Captain Sully, the single-pilot hero of the Airbus A320 protagonist of the Miracle on the Hudson, may have to move over because no dog was saved during the river landing. By contrast, in the Miracle on the Quinnipiac, a Bonanza pilot did a beautiful water landing after an engine failure and a Great Dane was able to exit the aircraft onto a sandbar.

From a photo album:

06/30/22 New Haven, CT – A plane flying over the city had to make an emergency landing into the Quinnipiac River near Front and Pine Sts. The plane came to rest about 200 yards from the Waucoma Yacht Club. There were two people onboard as well as a Great Dane. All were able to exit the plane and were rescued by members of the yacht club using their boats. The people and pet were uninjured. The Coast Guard also responded with a boat. New Haven firefighters made a search of the plane and found no other people on board. The plane was submerged half way and had to be refloated and towed to the dock for further investigation. The cause of the crash is being investigated by the NTSB and FAA.

From a Fox TV station:

Late Thursday afternoon, the pilot of a single-engine plane made an emergency landing on the Quinnipiac River in New Haven, which resulted in no injuries, to any of the three occupants aboard, including a Great Dane

The pilot of the Beechcraft Bonanza, whose name was not released, was calm when he realized he wasn’t going to make it to Tweed New Haven Airport for an emergency landing. … . But, while the plane landed on the edge of the channel, on a sandbar, where the water is only a couple of feet deep, the tide was rising quickly.

EAA AirVenture starts today in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. So it is a great time to celebrate the hero of the Miracle on the Quinnipiac!

Almost time for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”), a safe space for pilots of light aircraft where nobody will say “That is a stupid hobby.”

I’m giving two talks:

• introduction to helicopter aerodynamics and operations (targeted at those with some airplane flying experience), at 8:30 am on Wednesday, July 27, Forum Stage 6
• Instrument Flying Ground School, Lesson 1 (using the materials previously offered here) where lessons 2 and 3 will follow as free Zoom classes. Wednesday, July 27, at 10:00 am, Forum Stage 6.

For background on the event, see a lunchtime talk from our MIT ground school class:

The value of little airplanes has soared in the past two years, more like South Florida real estate than inflation in general. Planes that are reasonably good for transportation, e.g., the Cirrus SR22, are up 50-100 percent in value as used aircraft. There have been substantial price increases on the new ones, but it is unclear what they’re worth because they’re impossible to buy without at least a one-year wait.

If a Cirrus, which has no pressurization, no ability to climb over thunderstorms, no kitchen, and no bathroom is “reasonably good for transportation” what is “excellent for transportation”? JetBlue! At a price that is essentially free compared to operating the Cirrus, JetBlue has pressurization, the ability to fly over weather, a kitchen where coffee is brewed, and three bathrooms on every Airbus. In the unlikely event that JetBlue’s plane is broken, there are spares that are rolled out within a few hours.

Commercial airline travel in 2020 was perceived as unsafe. You were informed that SARS-CoV-2 would probably kill you. Commercial airline travel in 2021 was correctly perceived as unpleasant, with constant announcements regarding masks and a constant reasonable fear that a mask dispute would break out on the plane, potentially leading to a diversion and not getting to your destination on time. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to pay $1.2 million for a piston-powered airplane, endure the noise, vibration, and uncertainty about whether one would reach one’s destination (weather, mechanical, fatigue?). And the $10,000 per year hangar bill? A small price to pay to avoid a killer virus. Another $20,000 per year for data subscriptions, maintenance, and insurance? Where do I sign up?

Could a little downward nudge from the stock market decline combine with rediscovery of the pleasantness and practicality of commercial air travel to make people rethink whether they want to elbow their way past 15 other people and be the high bidder for a Cirrus, Bonanza, or turboprop? A friend who owns a jet charter business says, regarding airplane valuations, “they follow the stock market triple leveraged”. The market has already declined quite a bit in 2022 and it is unclear that his formula is in operation yet, but there might be a precedent for a General Aviation Winter caused by the airlines.

The glorious years of mass production for generation aviation were 1960s and 1970s. Upper middle class people thought it was a reasonable idea to buy a Cessna or Piper for family transportation. Gerald Ford began the deregulation process for the airlines and it was completed by Jimmy Carter in 1978 (history). By 1986, fares for leisure travelers had fallen dramatically and Cessna stopped making little planes. Part of the justification for the shutdown was liability, but there was a glut of small planes that lasted until roughly 1996 when Cessna started up again. Piper was similarly afflicted, but never shut down completely. See “Airplane production to resume June 1” (UPI, May 1986):

Floundering Piper Aircraft Corp. will resume production of its entire line of small airplanes June 1, having sold off more than half of its oversupply of new planes, the company said Friday.

Piper, which like other small aircraft makers has suffered from a severe downturn in sales since the 1970s, suspended production of eight of its nine models of small piston-driven planes in February and laid off 630 workers.

The company has laid off several thousand employees as it trimmed operations. It now has 1,800 employees, down from 8,000 a few years ago.

I’m not expecting a mid-1980s-type crash due to the restart of mask-free airline flights, but that’s only because the piston aircraft industry is already so tiny that it can’t shrink much. The question for this post is whether the return of reasonably pleasant $200 airline flights will cause small planes to revert to their historical values, adjusted for Bidenflation.

Related:

• Commercial air travel in the Mizelle Age