A few weeks ago, there were news reports of Biblical rain in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. I checked the FAA’s web site for NOTAMs (no longer an abbreviation for the sexist “notices to airmen”) for FLL.
At first glance, using the default sort order, things looked pretty good on the morning of April 13:
There are some amendments to instrument procedures that you’ll probably not need (it’s sunny Florida!) and some signs and markings aren’t standard. If we scroll down a couple of screens, however, we find that there are some plans to maintain the runway status lighting system on April 18 and…. the entire airport is closed. That was the very last NOTAM presented.
Is GPT-4 as good at aviation as it is at law and medicine? Here are some interactions:
I rate this answer C- due to the failure to cite FAR 91.175, but a follow-up brings the grade up to a B:
A+ in flight planning:
How about oxygen regulations?
Now check the intelligence level:
GPT-4 knew that the published spin recovery procedure in an SR20 is to pull the ‘chute. It did a reasonable job of estimating fuel load for a flight. It seems to have assumed a 10-knot headwind and/or slightly worse than book performance (both reasonable, especially given that the book speed numbers are at a fraudulently absurd 400 lbs. below max gross weight).
How about the toughest checkride in the FAA’s arsenal? Could GPT-4 pass a CFI oral exam?
But where to find an airport that still has one of these?
I’m not sure why ChatGPT doesn’t offer links. It would certainly be a lot more convenient if the above answer had a link to the plate on airnav.com or SkyVector (why not at least the SkyVector airport page since ChatGPT specifically recommends the site?)
print out the 23-page NOTAM, which has detailed instructions for arrival and departure
print out “GAP” and “VFR” signs for display during arrival/departure taxi (the VFR sign is likely not critical since it is the default)
load airplane with tie-down kit and hammer if needed (screw-in tiedowns are sold for $30; the volunteers may not have hammers); tiedowns are required even if you’re there for one day and no weather is expected
note the frequency crib sheet toward the back (restatement of frequencies that are buried within the 23 pages of text)
I arrived at 10 am on Friday and the traffic was continuous, with 1-mile spacing, but not so intense that anyone was required to hold. Controllers are great at coaching pilots, e.g., “Cherokee on downwind, turn base now”.
Let’s start with some inspiring stories and people. Here’s a pilot who flies with no arms (in an Ercoupe, which was designed without rudder pedals and therefore requires only two limbs to operate):
Maybe I will stop complaining about my physical infirmities for a few hours…
How about for those of us who think that we need a huge climate-controlled house for day-to-day living? Here’s someone camping out of a minimal-size vehicle:
What if you’ve closing in on Elon Musk with evil billionaire status? Executive configuration PBY Catalina from World War II, privately owned by a guy in Chicago:
(After the Indianapolis was torpedoed by the Japanese and a distress call was sent out and the ship did not arrive as schedule, the U.S. Navy did… nothing. A PBY crew on a routine patrol four days later found the survivors who had not been consumed by sharks and sacrificed their aircraft to rescue some of the men (first radioing for the rest of the Navy to assist). The story is retold, with the government incompetence left out, in the movie Jaws. One interesting aspect of the story is that, instead of blaming its own bureaucracy and procedures for the men left to be eaten by sharks, the Navy court-martialed Captain Charles B. McVay III for failure to zigzag. As part of this blame-assignment effort, the Navy brought Mochitsura Hashimoto to the U.S. to testify against Captain McVay. The Japanese sub captain said that he would have been able to sink the Indianapolis regardless of any zigzagging, but Captain McVay was nonetheless held responsible.)
What about new and exciting products? Despite an industry unable to meet customer demand, e.g., people ordering a Cirrus today might get one at the end of 2024, not too much new stuff was on offer. If you want to connect with great aviators of the past, such as Hanna Reitsch, the rebooted Junkers A50, made by WACO in Michigan, might be the ideal choice. Less than $200,000, supposedly, at least for the first handful that will be built. You just need to be a better pilot than Chuck Yeager and Mike Patey to avoid ground-looping the taildragger.
Most talked-about in the discussion forums that I frequent was an updated noise-canceling headset from Bose, the A30 (not to be confused with the prior “A20”).
Bose says that this is no quieter than the A20, but has less clamping pressure and better weight distribution. I tried it briefly and found no difference.
Aviation + Florida = high risk of Deplorability. Here’s a pilot whom we might infer was a supporter of the January 6 insurrection and, therefore, is a candidate for a few months (or years?) in a re-education camp:
Speaking of Florida, even Maverick and Iceman travel by golf cart:
Cirrus runs a great hospitality center for owners. Here’s a picture of the Blue Angels from the balcony:
Speaking of the Blue Angels, their announcer thanked a seemingly endless list of people and communities, but left out two groups: (1) the taxpayers who paid nearly $5 trillion to the federal government in FY 2022; (2) the children who are going to be stuck with the $31 trillion in debt (plus another $31 trillion soon enough?) for all of the federal spending that wasn’t covered by tax revenue. Here’s a nice break at the end of the show. If these F/A-18s were fully armed, even a bad dude such as Corn Pop wouldn’t stand a chance against six of them:
If you’re not an elite owner of a two-decade-old Cirrus and want a good seat for the airshow, you can bring your own:
Sun ‘n Fun is set up well for afternoon air shows because the spectators are on the south side of the runway (9-27; east-west) and the sun is mostly behind everyone’s back.
The Mississippi-based Hurricane Hunters brought one of their 10 C-130s to the event. There are two pilots and a navigator in the front and two data-gathering and analysis experts in the back. One releases dropsondes and the other looks at the information received. They do a lot of flying at 500′ to 1500′ above the ocean surface everywhere from Hawaii to the Caribbean. The back of the C-130 is generally empty.
And here’s a military flying job you won’t see in a Top Gun movie… Team Target in a humble Dash-8:
I didn’t have a chance to talk to these folks. It may be that part of this aircraft’s mission is to find people in the water who would be at risk from live-ammo practice. USAF page on the E-9A Widget:
Modified with AN/APS-143(V) -1 Airborne Sea Surveillance Radar to detect objects in the Gulf of Mexico, the aircraft can detect a person in a life raft up to 25 miles away in the water. It downlinks this telemetry data to the range safety officer who determines the shoot area for live-fire activity, according to the Air Force fact sheet.
Not only was expressed support for Joe Biden non-existent at Sun ‘n Fun, but QAnon brought their own Siai Marchetti S-211 jet (characteristically, the group was unable to spell its own name correctly):
What about the hundreds of additional aircraft? Here’s a homemade one that has flown 30 years and 3,000 hours:
For lovers of cameras and film, a 1955 Fuji LM-1!
A window into the challenges faced by mechanics in the final days of the monster piston engines (airshow superstar Mike Goulian in the background):
A nice Beaver:
The Blue Angels celebrate Dr. Bill Cosby, American icon and University of Maskachusetts Ed.D., by naming their C-130 “Fat Albert”:
An RV-12 built by high school students in Wisconsin:
(If it had been built by students in a suburban Boston high school, would they have to keep repainting the fuselage as builders changed gender IDs and first names?)
No date for the 2024 gathering yet, but first week of April seeks likely.
On March 14 at 1856 GMT (around noon local time), the wind was from the south (190) at 43 knots gusting 64 knots. What if you decide to take off into that wind on 19L or 19R? Just a few clouds at 500′, a broken layer at 2500′, and overcast at 3300′ (all elevations above the airport, but the airport is only 13′ above sea level).
I find it almost comical that the METAR for a normal day at SFO is visually almost the same as the METAR on a day when a two-seater wouldn’t even need to start the engine in order to become airborne:
Maybe the next generation of METARs should allow emojis and there should be some of people being blown off the ramp. The current wind emoji is quite weak on Windows: 🌬️
Readers: Anyone been in the Bay Area through these recent storms? What’s the on-the-ground experience?
while the wind was blowing, politicians were meeting (CNN): A one-time payment of $5 million to each eligible Black resident is among recommendations unanimously accepted by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors as part of a draft plan by a panel proposing reparations.
The balloon was flying at an altitude of about 66,000 feet, according to a U.S. official. It can be maneuvered but it is also subject to the jet stream, which could eventually push it out of U.S. airspace, the official said.
The balloon is not going to run out of fuel, since it has solar panels. The official also said that the balloon steers by rudder and is corkscrewing around to slow its progress over land, but the jet stream continues to move it on a trajectory across the U.S. The Pentagon is still considering ways to “dispose” of it but has “grave concerns” about the damage it would cause if it fell to Earth.
It’s laterally above the U.S. so it is in our airspace so we can shoot it down if we want to? Let’s check “The Vertical Limit of State Sovereignty” (Journal of Air Law and Commerce, 2007):
Because there is no agreed delineation between a state’s territory and free outer space, the vertical limit of state sovereignty is unsettled and each state is left to define the limits of its vertical sovereignty. However, no state has explicitly done this.
U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said “the question of the ownership of upper air is a disputable question…. What the legal position is, I wouldn’t feel in a position to answer because I do not believe that the legal position has even been codified ….”, Later in the same news conference, Secretary Dulles answered a question by saying, “Yes, I think that we feel [that the United States has the right to send balloons at a certain height anywhere around the globe], although .. .there is no clear international law on the subject.””
Conclusion
There is no international agreement on the vertical limit of state sovereignty.
State sovereignty should be limited to a low altitude–I recommend 12 nm [73,000′]
In other words, at 66,000′ it is an open question whether this balloon is in U.S. airspace. The limit of controlled airspace, in which it is possible to get a clearance from U.S. Air Traffic Control, is 60,000′ (the Davos crowd may be found at 51,000′ in their various late-model Gulfstreams).
From Twitter:
Just give us two weeks to stop the balloon and flatten the curve.
FOR SALE: 2023 China Aviation Industry Corporation II non rigid ballistic helium ballon, like new and low time with only 380 hours TTAF, no damage history. Equipment includes GPS, NAV/COM, extra large gas storage, and weather equipment similar to XM. Military designed but only for civilian use, honestly. Has complete logs. The aircraft is still in use so flight times will change. No special type rating or endorsement needed. Fly wherever you want, whenever you want. Be advised that interest in this unique ballon is at an all time high, so act fast as this one won’t last!
On the last day of Kwanzaa, I decided to pay homage to Tom Brady by seeing him play live. This was only the third time at an NFL game in my life. Once was the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium, a horrible experience due to cold weather and multi-hour traffic jams. The second game was a recent Miami Dolphins game (previous post). Tampa is far and away the easiest from a logistics point of view. You fly, or get a friend to fly, a small plane to Sheltair TPA. No need to pay ramp or parking fees if you buy at least 16 gallons of fuel (enough for about 270 miles of travel in a Cirrus SR20!). The Sheltair folks will then zip you via minivan through closed-to-the-public airport roads (6 minutes) almost to the stadium front entrance. On the way back you can wait for the minivan or simply walk 30 minutes back to Sheltair.
In order to avoid get-there-itis, I waited until I was on the ground and on Sheltair’s WiFi network before purchasing any tickets (from the Ticketmaster verified resale market). Here are some photos…
(Note some of the Floridians above wearing long pants as protection against the frigid 75-degree temperature.)
Getting food or drink inside the stadium was a nightmare. If you don’t want to miss the game, put some snacks in your pockets before going in. Here are the lines outside the vendors 30 minutes prior to the game:
You’ll want to be on the west side of the field (the Bucs side) most of the season because then you’ll have the sun at your back.
Our hero of the gridiron and an inspiration to all men who are interested in marrying a woman (“All that you need to do to keep a wife happy is be in better physical shape, have a better personality, and be more successful than Tom Brady”) led the team to victory over the Carolina Panthers, 30-24.
It’s a different and more confusing experience than watching a game on TV. They do show closed captions from the TV broadcast on a screen within the stadium so it is easier to understand what the referees are saying. Or you can bother the expert fan sitting next to you, as I did every 5 minutes: “What just happened?” It’s also loud, so bring earplugs if you don’t want to be exposed to fatiguing levels of noise for 3+ hours (but Miami is much louder due to sound pumped into the stadium electronically; in Tampa the loudness is mostly from the fans).
Head over to the commercial airline terminal to see the giant flamingo sculpture. You can also eat authentic Lu Cai (Shandong) food at an authentic restaurant within this pre-security part of the terminal: P.F. Chang’s.
I was delighted to see that the airport terminal management takes Kwanzaa seriously:
Loosely related: I rode the FBO minivan with a Bonanza pilot who runs a logistics business. “All the people who were charging huge premiums a year ago are now calling me begging for business,” he said. “Trucking companies call me every day offering capacity at a discount.” From his point of view, the boom economy was over.
Summary: I’m still not a huge live football fan, but a late season game in Tampa is probably as good as it gets. The weather is likely to be dry and 70s. Every time the Bucs score, cannon shots are fired from a pirate ship at one end of the stadium. The fans are loyal and enthusiastic (in Miami, by contrast, it seemed as though at least half of the audience was rooting for the other team).
To commemorate the heroic efforts of our government’s millions of armed police and soldiers in putting down the very-nearly-successful January 6, 2021 insurrection, let me relate my own recent trip to Washington, D.C.
Our journey began at the Robinson factory in Torrance, California (KTOA). Here are some photos that I took there in 2013 (they don’t allow pictures anymore).
This is a wiring harness that will connect up all of the electrical items in a helicopter.Machining some parts from a block of aluminumtail cones
Getting out of Los Angeles we studied the FAA helicopter chart… (note that the official routes require some understanding of local highways)
And the Robinson-specified route:
One thing that Robinson does not give to pilots fleeing the City of Lockdown is a list of frequencies and elevations for all of the airport traversed, so I prepped a couple of days before by writing all of these down on a pad (we were a bit too low to get advisories from SoCal Approach and therefore went from tower to tower). I handled the radio while my co-pilot (a former student at MIT 15 years ago and, having started a successful business, now proud owner of a $700,000 new helicopter) flew the machine. We made it out of LA without losing our certificates.
We passed the Morongo Casino and the Banning Pass into Palm Springs and a stop at KUDD:
After a stop at the Phoenix-Goodyear Airport, we made it to Tucson, Arizona just after dark:
My co-pilot was skeptical as I waxed expansively regarding the marvels of the Sonoran hot dog at El Guero Canelo (James Beard award winner and also a song from Calexico). If you’re looking for shelter from Bidenflation, the $3.99 dish is ideal:
(Note that each hot dog costs taxpayers closer to $10,000 when military pilots stop in. Tucson/El Guero Canelo is, according to the FBO, a popular stopover on training excursions.)
The War on Christmas cannot touch the fortified positions of El Guero Canelo:
We cranked before sunrise at KTUS and headed into the mountains of New Mexico:
In El Paso we saw the cruel conditions suffered by asylum-seekers and reflected on Governor Abbott’s noble provision of bus transportation for those migrants who want to escape to sanctuary cities where progressives will cater to all of their needs.
A 17-knot headwind, which was to be our near-constant companion, plagued us as we departed El Paso. In Pecos, Texas, we found the best dim sum west of the Pecos:
The help wanted sign was typical. Seemingly every retailer and restaurant was hiring in every town that we visited. A Texas FBO manager who had paid $13/hour in 2019 for entry-level jobs now has to pay $20/hour. “I still can’t find anyone who wants to work,” he said. (We also learned that the wholesale price for 100LL at the time was about $4.70/gallon.)
We continued to follow Interstate 20 over Midland, Texas and into Sweetwater.
It was freezing overnight and we hadn’t been able to find a heated hangar so we visited the National WASP WWII Museum to give the engine a chance to warm up before starting. We stopped for an awesome dim sum lunch at Bushi Bushi in Addison, Texas, also home to the most luxurious FBO that we visited during the trip: Galaxy.
We flew in the dark to Atlantic in Jackson, Mississippi and shut down for the night. We shared a heated hangar with an Ercoupe. Corporate says it is all about diversity and inclusion, but the employees had selected Fox News and were enforcing gender binarism:
Speaking of Fox, here’s a throwback to November 20 from the trip. Twitter was “in chaos” and presumably the site was at risk of shutting down due to all of the valuable employees departing:
The most emotional moment of trip for me was circling the Talladega Superspeedway, which happens to be right next to the airport. Ricky Bobby‘s NetJets was waiting:
All over the Southeast, the landscape was scarred by the Federal Reserve Bank’s 0% interest rates. I wonder how many of these developments won’t be finished any time soon. (A few weeks later, I was in Death Valley, California and talked to a Mountain States builder. He’d stopped doing any projects at all. “It costs $400 to $500 per square foot to build and I’m not sure that people will pay enough for me to recoup my costs.”)
Best airport restaurant of the trip (Elevation at KRYY near Atlanta):
A fly-by of Dulles Airport on the way to landing at KGAI.
There was minimal traffic in Montgomery County, Maryland as I traveled to my mom’s retirement complex on the Beltway. “The economy hasn’t come back,” said the Uber driver. “People in D.C. are still working from home or not working.” Did that mean his income had fallen? “No. There are fewer customers, but nobody wants to work either so the balance isn’t that different. Also, a lot of my customers are guys who lost jobs in 2020 and can’t afford child support payments that were ordered when they were working. They can’t renew their driver’s licenses because they’re behind on child support, so they take Uber to get to work.” (see this article on the scale of child support profits obtainable in Maryland)
The labor shortage made it tough to get a post-trip haircut. The barber shops were jammed with people who’d made appointments in advance. On the other hand, maybe Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is working. One-way tickets from DCA to PBI were less than $200 just two days before Thanksgiving.
We were lucky with the weather, except for the headwinds most of the way and then some moderate turbulence from 30-knot winds around the Appalachian mountains toward the end of the trip that required us to slow down to 80 knots (best cruise in the R44 II is about 110 knots). Even though some of the infrastructure is frayed because so many Americans have withdrawn from the labor force, the U.S. private aviation infrastructure remains a marvel to behold. The bigger airports usually have FBOs that are staffed 24/7. There is usually a crew car when you need it. Air Traffic Control is always relaxed and helpful. Most of the fees to keep this going are rolled into the price of fuel (or, even better, paid for by the Gulfstream crowd) so you’re not hit with annoying small bites constantly as in Canada and Europe.
A friend is planning a trip to the Bahamas in his new Cirrus SR22 (more than 1 million Bidies for a piston-powered airplane!). When out of gliding distance from land, it is prudent to carry both life jackets and a life raft in an aircraft. Pre-coronapanic, rafts of all kinds were in stock at retailers and would ship within a day or two of being ordered. What does it look like after Americans took months or years off work? “I can’t find any of the brands that people like without a multi-month wait,” he said. “Winslow dealers are telling me 8 months to 2 years.”
It is unclear to me why Winslow is so backlogged given that the company is located in Florida and they were never ordered by a governor to shut down. But perhaps they are having trouble getting the components and/or being part of Collins Aerospace (a big bureaucratic presumably corona-averse company) has contributed to the shortage.
What do these look like? Here’s one from Switlik, which I like because it can go 5 years between recertifications (cumbersome and expensive):
Also, Switlik is a supplier to the U.S. Coast Guard, which presumably knows water at least as well as Dr. Fauci knows SARS-CoV-2. When is the Switlik available? They can’t even say on their web site! “Due to demand and limited inventory, this product is experiencing longer than normal lead times. Please call for quote – 609-587-3300.”
A raft isn’t required for a private single-engine airplane headed over water so it is quite possible that the disruption in the economy caused by COVID lockdowns will lead to additional risks being taken. And for every aviator who is at risk there are presumably 100 boaters who are having trouble getting the life rafts that they want. This is a consequence that I don’t think the technocrats recommending lockdowns in the spring of 2020 would have factored into their decision.
After nearly three years of complete coronapanic, the MIT campus reopened to the public on December 1, 2022. Consequently, if Maskachusetts officials don’t impose a Science-based lockdown in the next two weeks we’re doing our three-day FAA ground school in person on campus, January 11-13 from 9-5 in Room 1-390. Full details and a registration link on the class home page. For non-MIT students the course is available at a significant discount to the $500,000 list price of an MIT degree…. $free.
If anyone is concerned about contracting a SARS-CoV-2 infection in a 70-person lecture hall, I will be happy to purchase a P100 respirator for you so long as you promise to wear it for the full 7-8 hours of daily class. See below for Mx. Cherry and Mx. Nerode modeling this type of mask in a recent NYT article.
Here are some thoughts after flying a factory-new $700,000 Robinson R44 Raven II from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Our machine is the gold one in the foreground on the ramp at KTOA:
(One of the teachers in the safety course, regarding a photo of the R22, R44, and R66 lined up, said “They’re not going to win any beauty contests.”)
The $25,000 air conditioning is a great luxury and worth the 33 lb. payload penalty. The lack of a sliding window for taking pictures is a continued disappointment. If you want a good aerial photo you need to land, remove a door, take off again, take the photo, land, put the door back on, etc. Bell and Airbus manage to include simple mechanisms for temporarily obtaining an unobstructed camera position. Why can’t Robinson do this?
The $57,000 autopilot should have been a game-changer and it kind of was, but usually not in a good way. I have trained some Blackhawk pilots who were transitioning down to the R44 and they struggled initially because they always flew the Blackhawk with the stability augmentation system (SAS) enabled. The Genesys autopilot’s core mode is SAS, in which it seems to return the helicopter to whatever attitude was preset. The system is hyperactive, however. If there are small attitude changes from extremely light turbulence or just the vibration of the helicopter, the autopilot will fight those small changes. A human pilot would do nothing and assume that the attitude bumps will average out. In straight and level flight, the SAS system is applying a control input literally every second. It is like having the world’s most nervous copilot on the controls with you. It probably should try to figure out if a human pilot is on the controls and, if so, do nothing until there has been at least a 2-degree disturbance in attitude. We were able to get the autopilot to fly a NAV course, go down a glide path on an LPV approach, etc. It more or less works just like an autopilot in an airplane, but because the helicopter shakes so much more it is not as confidence-inspiring. Is it worth $57,000 (the pre-Biden price of an airworthy certified IFR-capable 4-seat airplane)? Maybe! Despite the annoyance factor, I think it is worth enabling SAS for night flights and any time visibility is reduced or there is a chance of inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions (i.e., going into a cloud).
Robinson has limped into the glass cockpit era, but not gracefully. The Garmin G500 is a primary flight display, but not an integrated flight deck like the G1000 (see the Bell 505). So the pilot needs to look at the warning lights above the PFD to see if anything dramatic is wrong with the machine. Although the helicopter is certified for visual flying only and there is nothing on the PFD that is necessary for continued flight and landing, the FAA requires that Robinson install a full set of backup steam gauges. These are much larger and easier to read than what’s on the Garmin glass (the vertical speed indicator, for example, is at least 5X the size).
The G500 does not display a lot of the information that you’d expect it would. For example, it shows the outside air temperature and the aircraft’s altitude. Even without access to the manifold pressure sensor, it could look up in a table to find out what the current maximum continuous manifold pressure should be (corresponds to a horsepower limit) and display that to the pilot. It becomes the pilot’s job to use a table on the checklist or in fine print on the cyclic. Robinson continues to have separate fuel gauges for the main and aux tanks so it becomes the pilot’s job to do a bit of arithmetic and calculate flight time remaining.
Our second radio was a Garmin 225B. It was entirely unreadable/unusable at night due to being so much dimmer than the G500H and the GTN 750 (the NAV/COM1).
