Category: Flying

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!]

Stopped by the Airbus booth at EAA AirVenture and they were giving out hats…

Slides for my talk on helicopters tomorrow at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture, officially): https://tinyurl.com/AirVenture2019Helicopters

If you want to come, set your alarm! The talk is at 0830 in Forum Stage 6. Given that the venue seats hundreds, it will be a Spinal Tap-style situation of audience-to-seat ratio.

The decision to fly in via United Airlines and stay in the dorms is looking good. The “set up weekend” preceding EAA AirVenture was plagued with nearly 5 inches of rain an 70 mph wind gusts.

The event officially opened today and I should arrive by early afternoon.