A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Stories about flying planes and helicopters, discussions of technique and teaching.
Folks:
I finished uploading 1.6 TB of “pro res” video to YouTube and assembled it all into a playlist for our Private Pilot Ground School.
Do the videos work reasonably well?
Is it fair to say that, on a bytes-divided-by-value-to-viewers basis, this is the largest ratio ever achieved by anyone ever uploaded to the public Internet?
Related:
Full post, including commentsReaders: Who has some good ideas for air shows this year? My personal favorite, the Rhode Island Air Show, has been canceled (NBC) :
“Hundreds of key National Guard members will be called to federal duty overseas in support of the RING’s primary mission of national defense,” a news release said.
“With this anticipated federal mobilization commitment in 2019, we have been presented with a difficult decision regarding our ability to safely and effectively conduct this public event. The volume, timing, and the particular trained skill sets of the more than 500 Soldiers and Airmen who will be away during the traditional timeframe of the Open House Air Show presents a unique challenge,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Callahan said in a statement. “Ultimately, we could neither compromise the training and support of those being deployed, nor the planning and conducting of our Open House Air Show. As such, we regrettably must forego the event in 2019.”
So New Englanders are out of luck, particular considering what a total Charlie-Foxtrot the Westover show is (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/07/13/great-new-england-air-show-this-weekend-at-westover/ ).
Excited about a female pilot flying a fighter plane (like Hannah Reitsch?) in a tight pattern around the runway? You’re out of luck there too: “Zoe Kotnik: First female F-16 demo commander out after two weeks” (BBC)
Here are some ideas:
AOPA Magazine’s March 2019 issue has an article on the bureaucratic saga of converting a U.S. pilot certificate to a European license:
That completed, I embarked on a 5-month process of extensive interaction with the CAA, sending mountains of paperwork and forms back and forth, ultimately finding that the U.K. CAA is at the moment in a state of disarray. Many items had to be chased through a bureaucratic nightmare, finally resulting in the issuance of my European private pilot license an astonishing five months after the checkride.
In all, the process took 16 months, and cost $4,061; it involved three airline flights, and activities in three countries. Only a few hours of cost involved time piloting an airplane, with the rest related to machinations of paperwork, travel, and onerous fees. The most challenging part was that no single party had an answer on how to proceed, leaving more detective work than I ever imagined to ensure legal compliance.
This tends to support my friend’s theory that regulatory compliance is our modern religion. He notes that folks in the Middle Ages spent a lot of time praying in church and observing rituals. Most Americans and Europeans don’t do that anymore, but they put the same amount of time and effort into filling out forms, reading up on tax law, etc.
Let this be a warning to pilots who said that they would emigrate if Trump were elected… and are still working on the practical details.
Full post, including commentsHere’s a Piper Malibu landing at Courchevel (1,762′): videos. The typical Malibu pilot is experienced and well-trained, so this supports my theory that we should all use FAR 121 minimums and go to runways in which the book landing length is no more than 60 percent of the actual runway length.
Even a good pilot can have a bad day.
Full post, including commentsOn a recent trip through Logan Airport, I found a celebration of recycling: artwork made from 1500 lbs of collected plastic. This was right in front of de-icing fluid being sprayed on aircraft that will burn 1500 lbs of jet fuel in the first 15 minutes of the climb.
(Folks who are passionate about gender equality will be dismayed to learn that 100 percent of the de-icing workers, who enjoy fresh breezes and freezing rain for much of the winter, seemed to identify as just one gender.)
Full post, including commentsThe U.S. government-produced video running behind the replica Wright Flyer at the Wright Brothers National Memorial shows the arc of aviation starting at Kill Devil Hills and ending with U.S. government-run programs such as the Blue Angels, the USAF, and NASA. All advances occur within the U.S. Entirely left out: the importance of the Wright Brothers’ time in France (the U.S. government was initially unreceptive to the Wrights); the first modern airplane (Bleriot, in France); the British invention of the jet engine (led by Frank Whittle); the jet-powered commercial airlines and airfreight services that have enabled our global economy:
Note the two propellers driven by one engine. What kind of rating would be necessary to fly that today? It is not “multi-engine” per se, but what if the drive to one prop fails? It would yaw just like a multi-engine plane on a single engine.
[Also potentially interesting: in the official government history of aviation, after Wilbur and Orville Wright completed their 1903 flights all of the notable advances were made by women. In the photos above, for example, Bessie Coleman is important enough to cite by name while the Tuskegee Airmen appear in an anonymous group (thanks for your 1578 combat missions, though!). Olga Custodio, the “First Latina to complete US Air Force pilot training,” is cited on the “Inventors” screen (Wikipedia does not credit her with any inventions). Amelia Earhart is featured (why not Jacqueline Cochrane instead?) and also Louise Thaden (from Bentonville, Arkansas, now an important center of aviation thanks to the Walton family). Sad: Kalpana Chawla is cited as the “first woman of Indian origin in space” (she was killed due to incompetent group decision-making (by government workers) in the foam-damaged shuttle Columbia).]
The wing-shaped stone monument started in 1928 is awesome: “Conceived by Genius; Achieved by Dauntless Resolution…”
The North Carolina state government set up its own monument in 2003: a life-size bronze sculpture by Stephen H. Smith of the team launching the first flight. Photography nerds will appreciate the bronze view camera!
The original takeoff and landing locations from December 17, 1903 are marked with impressive stones and engravings. Example:
[I wonder if these locations are approximate, though. There was no GPS back in those days. I don’t think the Wright Brothers bothered to make a careful survey of the sandy/scrubby field and then leave permanent survey monuments behind for future generations.]
AOPA members will appreciate seeing their dues put to good use in a pilot lounge built next to the adjacent 3,000′ KFFA runway. But how well does requiring secret pilot knowledge to get in work in the age of LTE and Google?
The surrounding area reflects a world changed more by the automobile than the airplane. The Wright Brothers had to seek help from the guys manning the local U.S. Life-Saving Service station (merged into Coast Guard in 1915) as the local population was only about 300. Today if they needed big guys to lug a glider up a dune they could wander over to the adjacent Try My Nuts and Duck Donuts. From the top of the dune one can see a wide strip of houses, stores, condos, etc. stretching to the horizon in both directions. U.S. population has grown a little more than 4X since 1903, but the summer population of Kill Devil Hills is more than 100X larger than it was in 1903. Nearly all of these folks arrive by car.
Full post, including commentsIn a room of about 70 people at MIT (mixture of undergrad, grad, and alum), I asked how many thought that Captain Sully had another pilot up front with him in the Airbus A320 that landed on the Hudson.
A few hands went up.
“What was his name?”
Blank stares. One student seemed to be struggling and then came out with something that sounded almost like “Jeff Skiles“.
I gave him $20 on behalf of current and former First Officers.
Full post, including commentsRecent conversation in the D.C. area:
Related:
Mike Busch, author of “the big book on piston engines,” has a helpful article in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of COPA Pilot, the Cirrus owners’ group’s magazine. Busch explains why engines need to be run hard for a few initial hours and then offers a concrete procedure:
Break in the engine by running it as close to maximum continuous power as possible without allowing any CHT to exceed 420F for Continental cylinders or 440F for Lycoming cylinders. Run it this hard for an hour or two until you see the CHTs come down noticeably , indicating that the lion’s share of the break-in is complete.
This requires running at nearly full throttle at a low altitude (the engine won’t generate more than about 75 percent power after climbing to an ordinary cruising altitude of 6,000 or 7,000′ due to the lower density of air molecules up there).
This is timely for me because we’ll be breaking in a new engine for the Cirrus SR20. After 14 years and roughly 2,000 flight hours it seems prudent to swap out the engine, despite the fact that it hasn’t given any signs of ill health (this is contrary to Busch’s recommendation to wait until the engine tells you it is sick and then maybe only replace one cylinder).
Maintenance shops say that they hate dealing with Continental and love Lycoming, which might be one reason why Cirrus has switched to the Lycoming IO-360 engine for the more recent SR20s. Our little cluster of T-hangars also contains at least one story of a Continental engine that failed after a few hundred hours due to manufacturing defects and terrible support from Continental (instead of sending out a new replacement engine for the nearly new aircraft, the best that Continental would do is take the old engine back, try to fix it, etc. That would have resulted in months of downtime at a minimum. So far the wisdom of the shops has been proven correct. We had some issues with our order and couldn’t even get a return phone call from Ernesto Rodriguez, the customer support manager at Continental. I kind of like the idea of the 200 hp 6-cylinder Continental engine in the SR20 as offering greater smoothness than a 4-cylinder engine (what Cirrus is buying now from Lycoming), but one notable feature is that the per-mile cost of engine reserve actually becomes higher for the older SR20 compared to the SR22 (they both use 6-cylinder Continental engines and the cost of overhaul or swap-with-reman or swap-with-new prices are almost identical between the 200 hp SR20 engine and the 310 hp SR22 engine, as you might expect given that the mechanical configuration is pretty similar other than dimensions). To minimize interactions with Continental and save about $12,000, perhaps the smarter thing to have done would have been to wait for the engine to get sick and then ship it to one of Busch’s favorite field overhaul shops (see previous post: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/08/13/euthanasia-for-aircraft-engines/).
Why do engines need breaking in? Busch has some interesting figures showing the grooves in a new cylinder that are supposed to make the barrel “oil-wettable”. These have a spiky top that you want to grind down with hard usage to slightly flatter. Busch says that ordinary Philips 20W-50 “might be a better choice for break-in oil” than the traditional straight-weight Aeroshell W100.
Full post, including commentsBefore a recent night flight from Hanscom Field (KBED) to Land of Gulfstreams (Teterboro, NJ; KTEB), I decided to call the official government-sponsored weather briefer at Leidos. The KTEB folks were shutting down one runway and I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything else important.
The briefer asked “You’re familiar with El Chapo’s TFR in Brooklyn?” I hadn’t heard about it, but it seems that El Chapo is being protected by a temporary flight restriction centered on the courthouse, with a radius of 0.4 miles, and from the surface up to 1,500′. The user-friendly page doesn’t mention El Chapo, but the XML text does:
<XNOTAM-Update xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://atasoap.atalab.faa.gov/NOTAMS/xNOTAM.xsd" version="0.1" origin="" created="2019-01-21T06:40:13">
<Group>
<Add>
<Not>
<NotUid>
<txtNameAcctFac>FDC</txtNameAcctFac>
<dateIndexYear>2018</dateIndexYear>
<noSeqNo>4123</noSeqNo>
<dateIssued>2018-12-22T00:47:00</dateIssued>
<txtLocalName>190107-190228 NYC El Chapo New</txtLocalName>
<codeGUID>80c5da6e-ffc3-431d-9aee-2338aee5a52d</codeGUID>
<noUSNSWorkNo>18-018534</noUSNSWorkNo>
</NotUid>
<codeDailyOper>false</codeDailyOper>
<dateEffective>2019-01-07T05:01:00</dateEffective>
<dateExpire>2019-02-28T23:59:00</dateExpire>
<codeTimeZone>EST</codeTimeZone>
<codeExpirationTimeZone>EST</codeExpirationTimeZone>
<AffLocGroup>
<txtNameCity>BROOKLYN</txtNameCity>
<txtNameUSState>NEW YORK</txtNameUSState>
Separately, let me say thanks to the good folks at Meridian TEB. It is a bad day for any FBO when a piston-powered aircraft shows up and that’s especially true at Teterboro (do you want to sell 15 gallons of 100LL to Joe CFI in the flight school Cessna or 2000 gallons of jet fuel to Gulfstream Al (Gore) or the Clinton Foundation?). Meridian has always been friendly and helpful, even keeping midget chocks around for those of us who fly Cirrus or similar. This was a business trip and my departure was set for Official Polar Vortex Panic Day. It was 3 degrees overnight on the ramp and warmed up only to about 12 by mid-day. Starting an aluminum aircraft engine after it has been cold-soaked does a lot of damage. Meridian kept the plane in their warm maintenance hangar overnight and until our 2 pm departure. It is ground-support folks like this that make personal aviation practical in the U.S.
Finally, now that the shutdown is over, our local government workers are working 24/7. Email received today:
Please be advised that the Bedford Air Traffic Control tower will provide ATC services during the overnight hours 2300-0700, this Sunday night, after the Super Bowl.
Additional Airport Operations staff will be on hand to support the increased aircraft arrivals.
(usually the tower is closed from 11 pm to 7 am)
Full post, including comments