Category: Flying

Stories about flying planes and helicopters, discussions of technique and teaching.

Garmin rescuing owners of older aircraft

by philg

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…

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Notable women in aviation featured tonight at AirVenture

by philg

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!]

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Helicopter talk at Oshkosh (AirVenture) tomorrow morning

by philg

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.

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How to get a free tie and wristwatch

by philg

Day 2 of EAA AirVenture and the air is filled with fast jets.

Martin-Baker, the family-run English company that makes ejection seats, won the Aero Club of New England’s Cabot Award this year. The British executive accepting the award failed to adhere to American Facebook standards. He said “it is an honor and a pleasure,” not “we’re honored and humbled.”

Thinking of taking politicians’ advice to go into STEM? One engineer in the early days ejected 18 times. Those first devices required the pilot to pull a parachute rip chord after being rocketed out of a plane (the company still operates two Gloster Meteor World War II jet fighters plus a Wile E. Coyote-style rocket test track near Belfast (for which expired air-to-air missile rockets are used)).

Roughly 80,000 seats have been made and 7,600 used (latest). The company refrained from offering a “Mk 13” version of the seat. Martin-Baker is managed by engineers and the product is far more complex than one would expect. Numerous airbags deploy in precise sequence to try to prevent a pilot from being injured during the ejection. (John McCain is the most famous pilot to have been injured by the process; the injuries that some people imagine he sustained as a POW were actually inflicted by not being positioned properly during ejection. The latest and greatest Martin-Baker seats require less of the pilot.)

The highlight of the award lunch was meeting Col. Joe Kittinger, who has used a Martin-Baker seat twice. He wore the tie that the company gives to everyone who ejects and the watch that Martin-Baker gives to pilots who shoot down an enemy plane and then are forced to eject. (Apologies for the iPhone photos taken in dim light; where’s the Google Pixel when you need it?)

As with the B-17 bomber crews who went out to Germany in 1943, I am not surprised that someone would go out on that first mission, but it is tough to imagine going out for the second.

Here’s to the guys like Joe Kittinger II whose bravery took most of the risk out of the flying that we do today and thereby enabled a mass aviation celebration like AirVenture (“Oshkosh”).

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New history of GPS; when $1 device works better than $100,000 receiver

by philg

Opening day for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). I hope to see readers during and/or after my Wednesday talk on helicopter aerodynamics (0830 on Forum Stage 6).

One big theme at Oshkosh is the innovation and excitement in the world of experimental aircraft world compared to the glacial pace of progress in the world of certified aircraft.

The month of June was not exactly a success story for regulation. A certified helicopter that lacked even 1% of the intelligence of a DJI drone was crashed into a building in New York City (NYT). Less dramatically, the FAA-certified GPS ($100,000?) in the Canadair Regional Jet that I used to fly failed due to a software problem (AOPA). Meanwhile, the GPS chips inside phones ($1?) continued to work nicely.

[On nearly the same day that these regional jets were back to using VORs, a Facebook friend linked to a post from The Female Lead:

Of course, I couldn’t resist commenting “She also invented the semiconductor transistor and the silicon integrated circuit.” This was greeted approvingly.]

The FAA became a lot more nimble starting a few years ago regarding the approval of avionics that could make small aircraft safer. So it will be interesting to see this week whether there is more innovation in the kit or certified world.

Related:

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Flight school lobbies should have a fleet position display

by philg

National Flight Centre in Dublin has an interesting functional decor item next to the front desk: two big flat-screen televisions showing the location of the flight school’s fleet (why two? a view of the traffic pattern and then a view of the region). ADS-B is not mandated in Ireland currently so they are doing this with portable GPS trackers that are in a key/notebook bag that students take out to the plane when renting. For a U.S. school in a transponder-required area, however, I think the same thing could be done with software pulling ADS-B data from public sources.

When customers and potential customers come in they can see all of the fun that is happening. For our school it would be planes out on Cape Cod, up in Maine, etc. (Would need to program the software to show the last received position so that the plane does not disappear from the Martha’s Vineyard airport once shut down.)

Readers: What’s the easiest way to build this using ADS-B data? What source?

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New York helicopter crash: why not robot intelligence?

by philg

Last month, New Yorkers were stunned when a helicopter crashed into a building on a miserable cloudy day. The NTSB report describes the machine as an Agusta A109E, the “Power” edition of the twin-engine helicopter that came standard with an autopilot.

Thus we have a machine with autopilot servos that can manipulate cyclic and collective. The machine came with a glass cockpit so it also should have at least two digital attitude sources (whether the helicopter is pitched up, banked left, etc.). Finally, it almost surely had a GPS receiver and a digital terrain database, which would have included the obstacles of Manhattan.

Media coverage centered on the pilot’s lack of an instrument rating (example: CNN). (In fact, being capable of instrument flight does not help that much unless one is actually planning an IFR flight from airport to airport with established procedures for departure and approach/landing.)

Nobody seems to have asked “If it had autopilot servos, attitude sources, and a GPS, why couldn’t a $10 million helicopter fly itself through the low clouds, away from the buildings, and to the destination? A DJI drone would have been able to do that.”

We expect so much of our phones and so little from our aircraft!

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Cougar 91 lesson: on-board computers should run the checklist flowchart

by philg

I recently had occasion to go through materials regarding the crash of Cougar flight 91, a nearly new $20 million Sikorsky S-92 that went into the water off the coast of Newfoundland.

The helicopter featured five big bitmap displays, all driven by on-board computers. From the (Canadian) TSB report:

Following the sudden loss of oil in the main gearbox (takes power from the two engines and sends it up to the main rotor and back to the tail rotor), the screens were displaying a MGB Oil Pressure red warning message and a main gearbox oil pressure of 0 psi. The pilots were supposed to get out the paper checklists, see that MGB red light plus < 5 psi implies “land immediately” (i.e., ditch in the sea), and then act on the result of this IF statement. It turned out not to be easy to find the correct checklist (2.5 minutes) and it was ultimately 6.5 minutes after the catastrophic oil loss that the pilots realized that Sikorsky’s recommendation was to “land immediately” (i.e., ditch in the sea despite the risk of rolling over and potentially drowning).

There were a bunch of changes recommended after the accident, but nobody seems to have questions that it was the task-saturated pilots’ job to get out paper checklists and run flowcharts.

It was a computer that was displaying the red message and a computer that was displaying the oil pressure number.

Shouldn’t the computer have an additional two lines of code to run the algorithm itself and display a “MGB FAILING: LAND IMMEDIATELY” message?

[Why wasn’t it obvious to ditch rather than try to make it back to land? In aviation it is more common to have an indication problem than a real problem. If a gauge is showing “unhealthy” but there aren’t unusual sounds or other secondary indications, it usually does not make sense to take immediate drastic action. Putting a helicopter down in the open ocean, even a helicopter with pop-out floats, entails the risk of a rollover and then occupants having trouble escaping.]

Intro to the emergency checklist section of the S-92A RFM:

After a bunch of distracting preliminary pages, the RFM does say that the reading of oil pressure below 5 psi is a secondary indication to the red warning:

Keep in mind that it is one thing to find this page in a massive book and then follow its logic while sitting at a desk drinking a latte and quite another to do it in a stricken helicopter with 16 passengers in the back and an 8-foot swell in the cold Atlantic Ocean below.

Related:

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