Category: Flying

One of my students recently was a 30-year-old who struggled for 14 years before getting an FAA medical certificate. He’d been diagnosed with ADHD as a young teenager (like 13 percent of young people who identify as “boys”), this diagnosis had to be disclosed by law to the FAA Aviation Medical Examiner, and the FAA wasn’t ready to see him serve as a required crewmember.

ADHD diagnoses are up dramatically. Obviously this can’t account for all of the pilot “shortage” (from the perspective of employers; any time salaries have to be raised is an emergency situation), but I wonder if it accounts for at least some of it.

[The ADHD diagnosis rate for girls is not relevant statistically since pilots who identify as “women” are only about 6 percent of the total population. Various explanations for this, but certainly it is not necessary for a woman to work as an airline pilot to have the spending power of an airline pilot. From the Real World Divorce Massachusetts chapter:

“There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. Of course, instead of serving food and beverages, she did have to care for those children.”

Perhaps just as compelling is that a mother who works as an airline pilot may lose custody of what had been her children in the event of a separation from the father(s). A lot of U.S. states award custody based on the “historical primary caregiver” standard and an airline pilot, like a deployed member of the U.S. military, is an almost automatic loser of the war to be seen as “historical primary caregiver”.]

Another area where a lot of potential pilots might be disqualified is drunk driving. The bjs.gov site shows 840,000 arrests of “males” for DUI (278,000 for “females”) in 2014, the most recent year available. A friend of a friend was arrested for DUI after a college party and it was practically impossible for him to get his FAA medical back. He’d actually been in a professional pilot training program. He most certainly was not an alcoholic, but unless he went into all kinds of treatment programs for alcoholics, he was never going to be able to fly. He gave up.

Maybe the DUI problem will sort itself out in a few more years when the glorious age of self-driving is upon us. But ADHD as an effective disqualification for a pilot is worrisome because the condition is vague and subjective and the chance of being diagnosed with ADHD varies by school and state. From “Are Schools Driving ADHD Diagnoses?”:

As the ranks of kids diagnosed with ADHD in this country continue to swell—to 12% of school-age children and as many as 20% of teenage boys, according to the CDC’s latest count—it becomes more and more urgent to look at what forces might be driving this phenomenon. … a child in Kentucky is three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as a child in Nevada. And a child in Louisiana is five times as likely to take medication for ADHD as a child in Nevada. Most of the states with the highest rates of diagnosis and prescriptions for medication are in the South, with some in the Midwest; most of the states with the lowest rates are in the West or Northeast.

Specifically, Drs. Hinshaw and Scheffler’s team found a correlation between the states with the highest rates of ADHD diagnosis and laws that penalize school districts when students fail. … What the team found is that in states that enacted these measures early, within a couple of years rates of ADHD diagnoses started going up, especially for kids near the poverty line.

When I interviewed for a job at a Delta Airlines subsidiary we were given a “cognitive skills” test that measured the ability to multi-task and handle challenges in the face of distraction. Maybe the FAA could authorize some testing centers to bless would-be pilots who had been tarred with the ADHD brush rather than relying on physicians to sound the all clear.

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Check out this comprehensive web site on a pole-to-pole flight in a Twin Commander (turboprop) scheduled to start today. The pilot, Robert DeLaurentis, dead-sticked a Lycoming-powered Piper Malibu Mirage into Kuala Lumpur (newspaper story, short on tech details) during a previous round-the-world trip, which is the subject of Zen Pilot.

The Zen Pilot book explains a fair amount about the Malibu trip and the oil system failure. The reputation of the Malibu Mirage is that the engine does not need any encouragement to fail. However, DeLaurentis had equipped the plane with an aftermarket system for adding oil to the engine from within the pressurized cockpit. Airplane engines that are burning nearly one quart of oil per hour will still fly for 3-4 hours without incident. What if one has planned a 12-hour flight, though? It might be possible to burn through all of the oil. So DeLaurentis had the ability to add a quart at a time. Some part of the aftermarket piping likely came loose or was damaged by the Malaysian mechanics trying to change the oil.

Some excerpts from Zen Pilot, whose author seems to be a true son of California:

By anybody else’s measure, I was living the American Dream. I had grown my real estate business to one hundred units. I had all the material comforts anyone could hope for. Yet, I had hit a wall taller than the highest thunderstorm I would face in my years of flying. I was holding myself back from the life that I wanted, and inside me was an emptiness I yearned to fill. My entelechy was nudging me, telling me that at forty-five years of age, I had less and less time to fulfill my life’s true intentions. One day, as I took my daily walk through Balboa Park, something changed. I had begun not to just notice the sights, sounds, and smells I had experienced on my previous walks, but to feel gratitude for them. I determined at that moment to begin my journey to bring purpose and passion into alignment with a higher power. I knew that if I had an impossibly big dream, the Universe would get behind me and partner with me. The resistance would fall away and things would start to flow, slowly at first and then at a feverish pitch.

In the next four years while completing an advanced degree in spiritual psychology with an emphasis in consciousness, health and healing, …

How does a Californian get rich enough to purchase a Piper Malibu and fly it around the world without a plaintiff coming in and taking 75 of those 100 units away via a California family court lawsuit? The author notes that he was never married and had no children. This enabled him to buy a 1997 Malibu in the 18th year and 1400th hour of its life.

Envy the luxury and elegance of traveling around the world in a private airplane?

The survival gear I carried with me on my trip weighed about forty pounds. During my flight I wore my neoprene survival suit, which I not so affectionately referred to as my “Gumby suit.” It smelled like perspiration and rubber and was designed to cover the entire body from head to toe and form a tight seal around the face. Imagine a red ping pong ball floating on the water getting kicked around by waves for hours on end while taking in an occasional mouthful of saltwater, with God only knows what swimming around you. I also had packed items including a life raft, lighted life preservers, dye packets, fishing gear and a knife and an ax to cut my way out of my seat belts and the plane if necessary. My plane had an onboard satellite locator beacon and I wore another one around my neck. The survival bag had backup handheld marine and aviation radios as well as a satellite phone. Additionally, I was required to carry several million dollars in survival insurance; I had evacuation and medical insurance as well.

A critical part of this kit is the Garmin inReach satellite SOS and text message handheld.

If women are the new children, what happens when a white adult male sets off to conquer the vast oceans with one middle-aged piston engine? No mucho, as they say in San Diego:

My digital marketing PR team had crafted and released an amazing press release the day before my departure. We hoped the sendoff would have reporters from major TV channels, newspapers and radio stations. Surprisingly, the media was nowhere to be seen.

How well does Piper’s notoriously Mickey Mouse landing gear hold up on the round-the-world odyssey? It fails less than one minute into the first leg:

At four hundred feet above the runway my landing gear failed to properly retract. I was dragging my nose wheel. The engine—a 350-hp Lycoming twin turbocharged one—was at full horsepower trying to deal with the extra weight of the ninety gallons and 540 pounds of extra fuel I was carrying.

Maybe a TBM next time!

Like everyone else who isn’t an airline pilot, he has trouble using and interpreting the onboard weather radar.

Our California hero gets some advice from a young MIT hero:

I recall a text response I got from fellow earthrounder named Matt Guthmiller when I inquired what weather site he used. He said that he found most of the weather info worthless once he got into Asia because the different weather reporting services forecast towering cumulous clouds and thunderstorms every day. So you would either park your plane and not fly for the next two months or deal with it. He was right. Flying without reliable weather reporting around the world was a chilling point to consider.

Controllers in foreign countries make the author appreciate FAA-run ATC. Our Malibu pilot gets vectors into weather that might make sense for a heavy jet with hot wings. Foreign airports similarly make the author appreciate even the most rapacious U.S. FBO. Muscat, Oman is a particularly bad stop. The author is left out on the ramp in 110-degree high humidity weather, interrogated and nearly arrested, and delayed for a day before the folks at the airport can be bothered to deliver some 100LL fuel at $20/gallon.

The author has some difficulty in managing the extra fuel tanks. He mistakenly pumps some extra fuel from a ferry tank into one of the main tanks, where it is promptly vented overboard. Not great when you’re paying $20/gallon and hoping to cross an ocean with a decent reserve. He takes advantage of a 23-knot tailwind and slows down to an economy cruise speed.

He is not impressed with what the white man has brought to Samoa:

The four days I stayed on Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa—a cluster of tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific and two thousand nautical miles from any real form of civilization—were frightening for me. It’s hard to describe, but the feel of the island made my skin crawl. Imagine a tribal culture that somehow was rapidly updated with some American infrastructure with cell phones, an airport, McDonald’s and sketchy Internet. But beyond that, it felt like the people were still driven by thousands of years of tribal tradition, like they didn’t really want any of the new lifestyle that had been thrust upon them. And for that matter, they could do without the occasional visitors as well.

Haris Suleman‘s round-the-world Bonanza flight came to a sad end on departure from Pago Pago. The author’s very nearly does as well. He was distracted with some mechanical issues (the engine had possibly burned as many as six quarts of oil in the preceding eight hours!) and did not explicitly ask for the 10,000′ runway. The controller assigned his plane, 10 percent overweight, to the 3,800’ crosswind runway. He accepted the clearance and barely made it over a fence. Good reminder to always have the airport diagram in front of you when taxiing!

Think that pilots are intrepid heroes?

I never told anyone I was afraid, but the truth was that after the engine out in Malaysia I was genuinely terrified every day. It was like I was stepping into a flying coffin.

I had taken enormous risks each and every day of the trip. The people who had begged me not to do the trip were in fact right.

Flying around the world didn’t make me a more confident pilot. If anything, it made me more aware of the risks that were possible. I had become more paranoid, detailed, serious, cautious and just simply afraid. I was questioning what I could really control in my life.

He finds out that veteran ferry pilots are also routinely scared prior to departure. He has conversations with God. (She reassures him that “You are being prepared for something greater than you can even imagine. … You are loved more than you will ever know. You are always with me.” But why wasn’t she with Haris Suleman and his father?)

My summary: Being is a pilot is not about never being afraid. It is about acting rationally even when you are afraid.

Pilots are constantly reminded that training is important:

I thought back to my three years of graduate-level spiritual psychology training. I could not believe that the voices in my head could be true this time.

On the last leg from Hawaii, he writes about how the job can be made easy with proper engineering:

I had been instructed to turn the HF radio on once I was about seventy-five miles out from Honolulu. I was reporting my position every hour. The radio was constantly hissing, popping and shrieking. I could hear the commercial airline pilots reporting their positions as well. I thought about the fact that they were doing this trip with much less stress than I was. No HF radio power supply and heat source mounted one-quarter inch from a fuel tank sitting behind them; no piston engine pounding away at 2,400 rpm trying to blow itself apart; no issues of low manifold pressure; no mystery oil-loss issue but instead two or four giant Rolls-Royce turbofan engines that were each purring away one hundred times more reliably than mine. They had multiple pilots so one could take a nap if he got tired and let’s not forget lots of hot food and flight attendants. I thought, I need a flight attendant. On my next trip I would definitely have one.

He doesn’t have a flight attendant, I don’t think, on this flight, but he does have two turbine engines. Good luck to Robert DeLaurentis.

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In the last two years, the new FAA attitude toward avionics in light aircraft has resulted in what looks to pilots like a revolution (ordinary consumers, though, will say “You mean it couldn’t already do that?”).

Here’s the latest: Garmin Autoland. After the elderly classic GA pilot has a heart attack from reading one Trump tweet too many, the Cirrus Jet will land itself, corrected for any crosswinds, and hit its own brakes:

Well, now, with certification pending for Autoland on the M600 SLS and shortly thereafter on the Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet, the Garmin panel goes to the next step of beginning an automated sequence of events that results in a safe touchdown on a runway, where it rolls the airplane to a stop, shuts down the engine, broadcasts a message on the local frequency that the airport is closed because of a disabled aircraft on the runway, and plays a video on the multifunction display that instructs the passengers how to open the door and get out.

Of course, that is not a requirement because the Autoland system would have already (although not in our demonstration) begun transmitting on the tuned frequency and the emergency frequency of 121.5 MHz a message telling anyone listening that N60HL, in this case, had a possibly incapacitated pilot and that it would be landing at New Century AirCenter in six minutes. It would update and broadcast that message every 30 seconds—listening to make sure that it didn’t transmit over any other radio calls. Once near the Class D airspace of the tower, it would have changed one of the radios to the tower frequency and kept the other on the emergency frequency. The system also would have changed the squawk code to 7700, the emergency code.

During those first few seconds after I hit the Autoland button, the system went through a series of complex calculations and decision-making processes to determine the nearest suitable runway based on runway length, width, and surface; fuel remaining; crosswind component; terrain; obstacles; and general weather information. The system requires an RNAV approach, but beyond that, the runway and weather criteria can be decided by the airframe manufacturer.

Like a chess grandmaster, we certificate holders can now proudly say that we’re able to do what an inexpensive microprocessor can do!

Of course the $2 microprocessor can’t exercise the kind of judgment that an experienced pilot would, right?

The system even forecasts its own weather if the nearest suitable runway is a significant distance away, long enough that the current ADS-B or SiriusXM weather may not be valid. It uses the latest weather trend information, for example, to determine if a thunderstorm might move into the runway environment where it intends to land. It will route the airplane around thunderstorms as well as terrain and obstacles, all of which it gets from its internal databases. If en route to a runway it determines, because of changing weather conditions, that another runway is closer or more suitable, it will change its destination. It can even estimate changing barometric conditions and adjust the altimeter—using algorithms. Garmin engineers say the calculated barometric readings are within 0.01 inches of mercury of actual ambient conditions.

Time for the single pilot plus dog crew! (the dog bites the pilot if he/she/they/ze tries to touch anything)

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From NBAA… “Gulfstream Ups the Ante with New G700 Flagship”:

Gulfstream Aerospace unveiled the G700 as its newest flagship this evening at its NBAA-BACE static display at Las Vegas Henderson Executive Airport. Its latest offering combines the best features of its G650ER and recently certified G500/600, resulting in a $75 million twinjet with an NBAA IFR range of at least 7,500 nm. The G700—available for viewing in cabin mockup form this week at Henderson—has a five-living-area cabin with 20 large, G650-size windows, providing a strong competitive response that industry-watchers were widely expecting.

Though touted as an all-new airplane, the fly-by-wire G700 is actually a 10-foot stretched derivative of the G650, with which it also shares the same nose and wing.

The aft section of the mockup contains a master bedroom with a full-size bed and dresser, in addition to an en suite lavatory with a toilet and vanity opposite from a floor-to-ceiling storage closet.

According to Gulfstream, the G700 will have a maximum takeoff weight of 107,600 pounds and a maximum fuel load of 49,400. Balanced field length at mtow is 6,250 feet, while the landing distance is 2,500 feet at an as-yet-unspecified “typical landing weight.”

One issue with planes that weigh more than 100,000 lbs. (fully loaded) is the requirement that operators put passengers through TSA-style screening. What’s the point of flying private if you have to let TSA workers try on your clothes?

It seems as though the fix might be in, however. From an obscure TSA document from 2017:

Utilizing the regulatory framework allowing the Administrator in 49
CFR 1544.101(f)(2) to establish an alternative program, the TSA should allow airplanes with Maximum Take Off Weight at or below 120,150 pounds to comply with the TFSSP as a means of compliance with the PCSSP in the near term. Long term, the TSA should pursue rulemaking to update the PCSSP weight threshold to 120,150 pounds.

Now we know the weight of the Gulfstream G800!

When will the peasants riot?

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NBAA officially starts tomorrow, but most of the important announcements are today.

“Pilatus Unveils NGX, Its Third-Generation PC-12” is interesting:

In what Pilatus is calling a first for turboprops, the new engine will be able to operate in a low-prop-speed mode, reducing the prop speed from 1,700 rpm to 1,550 rpm and lowering cabin noise.

This is potentially an enormous improvement for the PC-12. For passengers in the cabin it is about as quiet as a turboprop can get, but a similar-size true turbojet is as much as 10 dBA quieter. As noted in my Pilatus PC-12 review, the faster PC-12 NG is actually a little bit noisier than the original comparatively sluggish PC-12/45.

What else is new and exciting?

Additionally, the new engine will have a 5,000 hour time-between-overhaul period with hot section inspections only required on-condition and be able to transmit data on more than 100 engine parameters that are continuously monitored, adjusted, and recorded. “Building on the legacy of the PT6 family, the new engine is a leap forward in engine control and data management systems,” said P&WC president Maria Della Posta.

The old engine was 3,500 hours TBO and, unlike in a piston, that was a requirement for Part 91 operators. Fleet operators often got extensions to 4,500 or 5,000 hours, but this new engine will do it without the paperwork hassles and maybe without as many borescope inspections.

Too busy punching autopilot buttons to adjust the power lever? The new PC-12 will do it for you:

An option in the NGX cockpit is a fully integrated digital autothrottle.

The 15-year-old Honeywell avionics that everyone agreed were powerful, but that nobody loved, get a user interface update with a touch screen.

Related:

• the American competition to these Swiss overachievers is hit with a delay: “Cessna Denali First Flight Delayed To 2020”

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A reporter sent me the NTSB preliminary report on the recent B-17 tragedy at Bradley in Connecticut. Here’s what I wrote back…

This more or less eliminates a popular speculation that the plane was mistakenly fueled with Jet A. Two people were there at the fueling. A good FBO will sample the fuel truck every morning for water, sediment, etc. This particular truck was thoroughly checked as part of the investigation.

The NTSB found no skimping on maintenance. The plane was within its annual inspection and had received progressive inspections at 25-hour intervals. Three of the engines were more or less fresh from overhaul (0 hours in January 2019; 268 hours of operation since then). Based on a quick search, I found that gently operated big radial engines in airline service after World War II were able to go 3,000+ hours between overhauls.

The plane should have been light. Out of a total fuel capacity of 1,700 gallons for a standard B-17, only 160 had been added that morning (to whatever was held in reserve from previous flying).

The report seems to eliminate another possibility, i.e., that the No. 4 engine wouldn’t feather properly, thus creating a huge amount of drag on one wing. (see ASA 2311 and ASA 529, both of wouldn’t have occurred if a prop could have been feathered; multi-engine planes are designed with the ability to twist the prop blades until they’re more or less at a knife edge to the wind, thus minimizing drag and workload for the remaining engine(s)).

The report hints at the No. 3 engine also being feathered. That would be bad. The plane isn’t designed to fly with two engines on one side and none on the other, though it probably would still be controllable at a low power setting consistent with approach and landing, especially at the “no flap” setting that they were using (flaps are essentially for landing on a short runway because they let the plane be flown slower and descend steeply at a slow speed, but they add drag and require extra power, so the pilots were being conservative in not extending them and relying on having a long runway for rolling out from a higher airspeed).

This doesn’t resolve any of the mystery, I don’t think. The failed engine was feathered, so the multi-engine plane should have been flyable just like the book says to fly it. The fuel was good 100LL. The pilots shouldn’t have needed more than a touch of power since they wanted to descend and had no flaps out.

The most surprising part of the report: “the airplane was about 300 ft agl on a midfield right downwind leg for runway 6.” Normal pattern altitude is 1000′ above ground level (AGL). “Right downwind” means they were going in the opposite direction of Runway 6 such that they’d have to turn right and right again to land. If this 300′ AGL altitude is correct, the plane was buzzing buildings on the SE corner of the airport (diagram) and better set up to land on Runway 33.

Still just as sad and still nearly as mysterious.

Related:

• my first post on this subject

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Here’s something that one would have thought would have been built about 15 years ago: a complete glass cockpit that fits into a legacy instrument panel 3″ hole. The uAvionix AV-30: it can be an attitude indicator, an HSI, a G meter, angle-of-attack indicator (“AoA is calculated by comparing the aircraft’s pitch, flight path, and G-loading”), etc. It even has a built-in battery that will run for 2 hours after the aircraft’s electrical system fails. All for about $2,000 for a certified aircraft.

Thought: if the Boeing 737 MAX had used this device, which tries to determine AOA via inference, instead of the (failure-prone) mechanical AOA sensors that it did use, nobody would have been killed by the airplane.

Related:

• the same company has a retrofit wingtip-mounted ADS-B OUT transponder and a new one that will work on the 1090 MHz frequency required for Canada

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