Category: Flying

One interesting panel at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) this year was regarding civilian supersonic aircraft (see the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube).

As with most innovations in aviation, the big enabler is an innovation in engine technology. GE Aviation, currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, has a new engine that is mostly based on the latest subsonic civilian technology and three of these will drive a the Aerion AS2 plane forward at Mach 1.4 while burning roughly 2X the fuel per passenger-mile as a Gulfstream G650. The second enabler is cash and the Bass brothers are supposedly kicking in $4 billion.

So far so good if the goal is 4,200 nm over water (Gulfstream G650 range is closer to 7,000 nm).

What about going over land? After a five-year regulatory process, the U.S. effectively banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. The ban relates to speed, not to noise over the ground. An aircraft whose sonic boom was quieter than a Honda Accord driving by on the street would be banned, for example.

In a rare example of a NASA project that might have an effect on someone’s day-to-day life, NASA is currently hoping to test fly an X-59 “quiet supersonic” plane in 2021. This will supplement testing done in 2018 with a a modified F/A 18. The shape of the plane is designed to prevent shockwaves from different parts of the aircraft meeting and reinforcing each other. This may reduce the boom by 30 dBA and produce a sound like distant thunder.

NASA is currently planning do to 2-3 years of testing to gather civilian reaction and then turn numbers over to the FAA for the beginning of a regulatory process whose result will presumably be a decibel-time limit. If the regulatory process takes the same 5 years that it did from 1968-1973, that will be 7-8 years after 2021 before manufacturers such as Aerion can have any idea whether what they’re designing will be legal to operate from NY to LA (and thus ready for climate change activist Leonardo DiCaprio!). In other words, it will take longer than World War II and all of the innovation that happened in aviation during those 6 years!

(Two nights earlier, Burt Rutan had given a crusty old guy’s talk about how pathetic young Americans were with their anemic pace of innovation. The government, including today’s NASA was singled out as particularly sluggish and unambitious, thus leading to “some homebuilders in the Mojave Desert” running Americans’ only space flights with humans on board.)

One interesting thing is that an airplane can potentially fly at Mach 1.2 at 60,000′ without a sonic boom ever reaching the ground. The speed of sound is slower where the air is colder and apparently the wave will dissipate as it goes through warmer air (but what if Hillary Clinton and DiCaprio are at FL510 in a Gulfstream G650 just below? Will their Champagne glasses be rattled?)

Aerion is planning to be in service in 2026 and to meet all Stage 5 takeoff and landing noise restrictions. To keep the rabble from rioting, the company is claiming to be “carbon neutral”. Yes they will spend $4 billion (enough to plant 400 million trees?) and burn 2X the fuel of the biggest Gulfstream per seat-mile. But the fuel burned can be 100 percent biofuel (i.e., corn!).

More: watch the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube.

An aviation medical examiner recently contacted me regarding a college student interested in learning to fly, but who lacked the use of his legs. I responded with what I thought was the standard advice for this situation: train in a classic Ercoupe, which didn’t have any rudder pedals.

The August 2019 issue of Flying Magazine (print edition) carries what might be an interesting update. Grant Korgan, subject of the recent Netflix movie The Push (to the South Pole), recently earned a Private certificate in a Cirrus SR20 that he adapted for use with only his hands (i.e., the rudder and brakes had to be operated without feet/legs).

Sidenote: Despite having lost the use of his legs in a snowmobiling accident, Korgan was able to earn a Class 1 medical certificate (required to be captain of an airliner).

An inspiring story for those of us who fly older Cirruses and complain about the lack of A/C…

From Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture 2019):

For years, especially during night flights, I have been wondering “Why can’t a Robinson R44 have a ballistic parachute like in the Cirrus, stuck on top like the pod for the Apache.”

Now it has been done! Zefhir from an Italian aerospace parts manufacturer, Curti. And it is turbine-powered! (via an APU engine, as per usual for jet-powered aircraft of this weight)

Experimental for now. Certified one day?

(An Apache crew visited Oshkosh…

)

Oshkosh is winding up today and that means a bunch of young people have been inspired to pursue aviation careers, which generally means airline flying. Americans generally assume that anyone who wants to fly airliners must sacrifice home life to become a hotel-based nomad for 10-22 days per month.

[And, like military personnel stationed overseas, be guaranteed losers in any state that comes a winner-take-all custody and child support system and awarding winner status to the parent who can claim to be the “historical primary caregiver.” See Real World Divorce for how this works.]

This is not how it works for everyone!

While in Ireland, I met a Ryanair captain who’d been with the airline for 8 years. He had spent only 2 nights in hotels during that time period. How is that possible? “All trips return to the home base in the evening,” he said. “You might have two out-and-backs or one long flight and a long return.” This is not to say that one can stay in one’s original city. There are Ryanair bases all over Europe and it is the pilot’s responsibility to move to the new base city, rent an apartment, pay for the apartment, etc. This guy had been moved to Rome at one point.

How does maintenance work if the planes are this dispersed? “They have three Learjets and if there is a tech problem the mechanics rush in to wherever the plane is.”

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/06/08/flight-school-and-airline-careers-starting-in-ireland/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/01/17/wall-street-journal-on-airline-labor-costs/

AirVenture is almost over and one thing that I haven’t seen is one of my old wishlist items; integrated cameras in new aircraft, e.g., built-in mounts for GoPro cameras (a long-lived mechanical standard, right?) with power supply from the ship. The buyer of a $1 million Cirrus should be able to share the scenic/fun/cool parts of his or her experience with the plane with minimal effort. Maybe this would draw more people into flying light aircraft too, e.g., if there were a “press a button to share an auto-generated video of this flight to Facebook” option.

(It shouldn’t be tough to make a watchable flying video automatically. Speed up taxi by 10X. Cut any portions where the aircraft is on the ground and not moving for more than 5 seconds. Do takeoff at 1X, gradually increasing to 10X as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude, then slowing back down to 1X for landing. A one-hour start-to-shutdown trip to the beach thus turns into a 7-minute video.)

Related:

• Tesla lets drivers save clips from the car’s forward-facing camera (but won’t automatically produce a “my sanctimonious and scenic drive” video to share)

… and that was just a test flight for a trip over both the South and North Poles in a four-seat piston-engine airplane.

One of the most interesting talks at Oshkosh this year was by Bill Harrelson, who flew around the world in Dec 2014/Jan 2015. The 28.3-day trip was in a Lancair IV, loaded to 1.5X its design gross weight. An AOPA story about the trip notes that he was 64 years old at the time. (Best story about the trip seems to be in Harrelson’s hometown paper.)

Harrelson noted that any airplane can carry more fuel. The problem is typically that the center of gravity (CG) will go too far aft and too high, both of which are bad for stability. Regulators such as the FAA typically limit transoceanic flights to 30 percent over the max gross weight. “The manufacturer sets max gross and max aft CG,” noted Harrelson. “Since I was the manufacturer, I could never be illegal, only stupid.”

The best that could be hoped for was five hours of hand flying at the start of each full fuel leg. After that, the autopilot was generally powerful enough to take over the still-somewhat-unstable airplane. However, during the flight to the South Pole, an autopilot servo suffered a mechanical failure right at the Pole, necessitating 12 hours of hand flying back to South America.

After learning about these epic trips in a four-seat plane that had been turned into a one-seater with 8 extra bladder tanks occupying three seats, can we reasonably complain about a 7-hour trip back from Europe in economy? Where we can get up, walk around, and use the restroom at any time?

At the other end of the pilot age spectrum here at Oshkosh is Riley Speidel, a 14-year-old from Maine trained to fly gliders and motor gliders by her airline pilot/CFI father. She made it across the U.S. as pilot in command of a Pipistrel Sinus (story in Oshkosh Northwestern). It is something of a loophole that 14-year-olds can get certificates to solo gliders at 14 whereas 16 is the age minimum for soloing a single-engine land airplane (e.g., Piper, Cessna, or Cirrus) that has a similar configuration to a motor glider. Ms. Speidel will have to wait until her 16th birthday to get a Private certificate and carry passengers, 17th birthday for adding a single-engine land or helicopter rating.

The Speidels did not violate what might be described as the spirit of the regulation. Gliders are ordinarily flown locally so the FAA presumably did not expect soloing 14-year-olds to make weather-related decisions as a plane progressed across multiple states. Riley’s father Jake flew behind her and was thus able to monitor his soloing student/daughter continuously. It was a 9-day trip for Riley Speidel, with no weather delays (compare to a typical 4.5-day journey coast-to-coast in a Robinson R44 helicopter).

Since there has been so little progress in piston and turboprop engines, the latest aircraft off the assembly lines are often not very different from those of 15 or 30 years ago. However, the manufacturers of aircraft aren’t passionate about helping owners upgrade older airplanes to the latest avionics. Why sell someone a $50,000 avionics replacement when you can sell them a $1 million airplane replacement?

Garmin to the rescue!

The company recently announced the availability of Pratt & Whitney PT6A (first run: 1960) engine data on their modern retrofit glass cockpit equipment.

How about the 4,000 Cirrus SR20 and SR22 aircraft out there with now-long-in-the-tooth Avidyne Entegra PFD/MFDs? Garmin is not-so-secretly working on a retrofit G500 TXi panel for these planes (current stumbling block: certifying a 10.6″ display as an MFD). The software for the TXi panels is from the old UPS/Apollo group in Oregon that Garmin acquired, i.e., not from the deep-menu-loving folks in Kansas who built the 430/530 and then G1000 systems that no ordinary humans ever become proficient with.

Between the above systems, the Garmin G5, and the new autopilots (that could make unforgiving airplanes safe), I think it is fair to say that Garmin is doing more to keep personal flying safe and affordable than any other company.

Now if they would only build a drop-in replacement panel for the Robinson R44, complete with GFC 600H autopilot…

If you’re here in Oshkosh, a press release from June, “Theater in the Woods to Celebrate Female Pilots”:

Notable women in aviation will be featured in a special program at Theater in the Woods on Wednesday, July 24, during EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2019. The theme is Celebrating Powerful Pilots, and it will cap off a day centered around EAA WomenVenture activities. … Wednesday’s Theater in the Woods programming will celebrate powerful female pilots from all walks of life, including military, airline, and civilian backgrounds, and continues a long EAA tradition of highlighting women in aviation.

The event will be moderated by retired Lt. Col. Olga Custodio, a former T-38 instructor who was the first female Hispanic military pilot in the U.S. Air Force and is now retired from American Airlines. Custodio is back for her second year as the moderator of the event.

Gen. Maryanne Miller, commander of Air Mobility Command and the first four-star general in the Air Force Reserve, will be a speaker during the evening’s programming. Miller, who also spoke at Theater in the Woods last summer, is the first reservist to lead Air Mobility Command.

Also speaking during Wednesday evening’s programming will be:

• Dr. Eileen Bjorkman, the U.S. Air Force deputy director of Test and Evaluation and author of Propeller Under the Bed.
• Col. Kim Campbell, a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy and former A-10 pilot who survived an incident over Iraq in 2003 and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
• Capt. Bebe O’Neil, a USAF Academy grad and United Airlines system chief pilot.
• Capt. Lorraine Morris, a United Airlines check airman, captain on EAA’s B-17 Aluminum Overcast, and avid aircraft restorer.

[In other words, two of the folks on stage at the event “to celebrate female pilots” are actually working as pilots!]