Category: Flying

Here’s some unusual weather at SFO:

KSFO 142256Z 23024G38KT 3SM -RA BR FEW008 BKN029 OVC047 13/12 A2970 RMK AO2 PK WND 20044/2201 SLP058 P0000 T01330117
KSFO 142209Z 22030G44KT 2SM -RA BR FEW008 BKN012 OVC017 14/12 A2968 RMK AO2 PK WND 20044/2201 PRESRR P0000 T01440122
KSFO 142156Z 21031G45KT 3SM -RA FEW008 BKN010 BKN017 15/12 A2966 RMK AO2 PK WND 21051/2129 RAE30B47 SLP043 P0000 T01500122
KSFO 142056Z 20039G54KT 3SM -RA FEW005 BKN012 16/13 A2959 RMK AO2 PK WND 21067/2011 SLP021 P0000 60000 T01610133 51022
KSFO 142054Z 20038G53KT 3SM -RA FEW005 BKN012 16/13 A2959 RMK AO2 PK WND 21067/2011 P0000
KSFO 141956Z 20042G57KT 3SM -RA FEW005 BKN017 OVC026 17/13 A2955 RMK AO2 PK WND 19062/1945 RAB12 SLP008 P0000 T01670128
KSFO 141856Z 19043G64KT 10SM FEW005 BKN025 OVC033 18/13 A2953 RMK AO2 PK WND 19064/1849 RAE07 SLP000 P0000 T01780128
KSFO 141815Z 18032G51KT 10SM FEW006 BKN029 OVC041 18/13 A2955 RMK AO2 PK WND 17051/1801 RAE07 P0000 T01780133
KSFO 141756Z 17033G49KT 10SM -RA FEW006 BKN033 OVC046 17/13 A2957 RMK AO2 PK WND 18049/1756 RAE22B48 SLP013 P0000 60062 T01720128 10172 20133 56020
KSFO 141656Z 17022G36KT 4SM -RA FEW006 SCT023 OVC032 16/13 A2957 RMK AO2 PK WND 16038/1645 SLP014 P0001 T01610128

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:

KSFO 151956Z 04006KT 10SM FEW020 13/07 A3002 RMK AO2 SLP164 T01280067

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?

Related:

• “77-mph gust hits San Francisco as atmospheric river pummels California with flooding rains, wind” (Fox)
• 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.

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).

I arrived in Los Angeles for the Robinson Helicopter Company’s safety course on November 13. The engineer who founded the company, Frank Robinson, died the day before at age 92 (AVweb). Frank democratized helicopter flying with his reasonably priced machines that were simple to operate and maintain. I had a few conversations with him over the years and he was always generous in sharing his time and direct in sharing his point of view.

Frank’s son Kurt Robinson now runs the company and he welcomed us to the class: “We want you to know what we know.” He stressed how important the safety course was to his father, a point later backed up by Bob Muse, a legendary LA helicopter pilot and teacher. “Frank missed fewer than 5 safety courses over the years,” Bob noted. “He would reschedule vacations and business meetings so that he could welcome every class of pilots. Frank loved aviation and the company. It was never about money.”

Bell and Airbus (“Eurocopter”) pilots enjoy heaping scorn on Robinsons, but we learned from Bob and Tim Tucker about how the pilots and engineers at all of these companies cooperate and fly each other’s machines. Robinson has been a leader in some safety areas, e.g., crash-resistant fuel bladders and standardizing on the Vuichard technique for recovery from vortex ring state (most likely encountered during a downwind steep approach to an off-airport landing zone).

Some of Bob’s points:

• we overemphasize autorotations in training; it is rare to see accidents that are caused by something that would require an auto
• seek recurrent training every 6 months, which is what the most experienced pilots will get
• look at NTSB Safety Alerts
• take phones away from mechanics; interruption by phone call is a common reason for a procedure step to be skipped

The previous generation’s aircraft mechanics have been retiring and are being replaced by younger less intelligent less conscientious Americans. Maintenance-related crashes are nearly twice as high a percentage of the total (still less than 10%, however) compared to 10-20 years ago. The biggest causes of Robinson accidents are wire strikes and weather, each contributing roughly 30 percent.

A huge number of safety-related initiatives and FAA regulation updates that would improve safety have been delayed by two years or more due to coronapanic. Everything that was on track to be approved in 2020 is still pending. One big change would be to revoke SFAR 73 and update the Robinson POH to add similar requirements, e.g., 20 hours dual before going solo, to the limitations. The requirements would then apply to international customers as well (currently about 80 percent of Robinson’s production is exported).

The latest Robinsons all come with dome light cameras (see Time for a robot assistant up in the dome light of the cockpit? for what I think it should do, but of course it doesn’t!). These have been very helpful in investigating accidents. (As with seemingly everything else in aviation, it was already obsolete when installed. The limit on memory card size is 128 GB, which is good for 10-15 hours. There is also an internal 16-hour memory that the pilots can’t access and that is recorded to even when the camera and audio are switched “off”) The dome light camera also provides some interesting cautionary videos. In one video a Bell 407 pilot, who previously did a lot of flying in Robinsons, is getting current again in the R44. She pulls the mixture, thus shutting off the engine, instead of the carb heat. She then immediately pushes the mixture back down, but the engine quits anyway. If they’d crashed, it would have been due to an “unexplained power loss.” (As it happens, the instructor in the left seat pushed the collective down and did a nice autorotation to the side of a railroad track. We then see him frantically pulling on the rotor brake. It turns out that a train was coming!)

My favorite video featured Julie Link on a sightseeing tour in Hawaii. The R44’s engine quits (the mounting block for the magnetos failed; apparently they’re both on the same piece of metal) and she does an autorotation to a field with two tourists in the back who don’t seem to be aware that things have become perilous. After they land, we hear her say “The engine stopped. It happens. It happens to me a lot.” (She previously did a heroic autorotation in an R22 to a street in Honolulu (Daily Mail).)

Once established in an auto, if the low RPM (97%) horn goes on, I like to take out half of the collective check that is in. Bob says to push it all the way down so as to build that reflex and then pull it back up slightly after the RPM is back to 100 percent.

Bob recommended watching a U.S. Army video on mast bumping.

Robinson now offers a polycarbonate windshield that will ruin a bird’s day, but not yours. We talked to a guy who owns 13 R66 (the turbine-powered Robinson) helicopters and he said that the view is distorted (he also said that he’s had disabling engine problems with 4 out of 13 Rolls-Royce turboshaft engines!). Robinson says that they scratch just as easily as the standard acrylic windshields, but the scratches cannot be repaired.

Those are some of the things that Frank Robinson might have wanted you to know! It is sad that he is gone, but he did pack a lot of achievement into his 92 years. He is the only person in world history who built a sustainable piston helicopter business.

After the class, I joined a former student from MIT who was picking up his new R44 Raven II helicopter. We flew from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. together and the only squawk was that the left front door became a little tougher to latch after about 15 hours (we picked it up with 4 hours on the collective Hobbs). It is tough to think of another aircraft manufacturer that delivers this kind of quality, especially down in the piston ghetto. I think it is reasonable to say that the more than 13,000 helicopters Robinson has built are Frank Robinson’s true memorial.