Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

This is a report to friends and family on my main activity this week, a trip from Boston to Las Vegas in a Diamond Star DA40. The owner, my friend Tom, started the trip with 150 hours and a Private pilot’s certificate. His goal is to get an instrument rating within the next few months. Tom’s knowledge is almost perfectly complementary to mine. He knows about running marathons, living in the suburbs, keeping and wife and kids happy, and investing in bonds.

The trip started Saturday morning with a 4:00 a.m. alarm clock. Tom showed up at 4:45 a.m. in an Aston Martin convertible. We struggled to fit our luggage and flight gear in the trunk and back seat. Only the British could make a car that is more expensive to own, less reliable, and less capacious than a trainer airplane. We lifted from the Minuteman airport in Stow, Massachusetts (6B6) at 6:15 am and went to Worcester, MA for a practice ILS approach then onward to Ithaca, NY for another ILS and a fuel stop. Our next leg was to Youngstown, Ohio where haze and cumulus clouds forced us to get a real instrument clearance and fly an ILS through actual conditions to land in the withering heat and humidity of the late morning. Our final destination was Chicago Midway where we went downtown to meet Jen for “Venetian Night” (crowds, lit-up boats), then collapsed  at the Hampton Inn next to Midway.

On Sunday we departed Midway at 7:30 a.m. for Iowa City, Iowa. The temperature was well into the 90s and a crazy high school girl was preparing to take her first flying lesson. After pounding back some cold drinks and chatting with folks at one of the country’s friendliest FBOs, we departed for Lincoln, Nebraska. We landed in 102-degree (39C) heat and got organized with a rental car and rooms at the Cornhusker Marriott downtown. I walked over to the university to check out the three art galleries, including one designed by Philip Johnson. There are enough interesting paintings and sculpture to inspire rebellion in the soul of the next Jackson Pollock (born in Cody, Wyoming, but the same general idea). We had a good dinner in the Haymarket district with Doug and Amy’s friend Jill.

Over dinner at Fireworks, Jill told us of a sad local case involving a medevac helicopter pilot whose fancy turbine Agusta’s tail rotor failed.  He must have done some sort of autorotation because there were survivors, but he was not among them.  He left behind a wife and seven children who are suing the manufacturer.  It is hard to believe that anyone can make money in aviation because, under the American legal system, Agusta ends up selling insurance when they thought they were selling helicopters.  The engineering reality is that it is impossible to make a helicopter that won’t break.  If you made everything incredibly strong, the helicopter would be too heavy to fly.  Pilots are aware that at any time the engine or transmission or tail rotor could fail and it will be time for an autorotation.  There are areas of the planet and phases of flight where this won’t result in a soft landing and that is one reason why being a commercial helicopter pilot is probably the most dangerous job in the U.S. (I’ve not seen the stats broken out separately, but commercial pilot is one of the most dangerous and it includes airline 747 crew, whose jobs are not dangerous at all).  Nobody with a wife and seven kids depending on his next paycheck should take a job flying a helicopter unless he has a lot of life insurance.

On Monday, after donning our oxygen cannulas, we departed Lincoln at 7:00 a.m., planning to follow I-80 to Salt Lake City. The sensible ways to cross the Rocky Mountains are I-80 (passes up to 9,000′ or so) and I-40 (passes up to 7,500′). There were some thunderstorms and/or rain developing over both of these routes, so we diverted to Jeffco airport in the northwest suburbs of Denver, Colorado and refueled. I called flight service for an update and found that the winds aloft were light and mostly from the north, which meant that we wouldn’t have too much lee side turbulence approaching the Rockies. More interestingly, there were a couple of pilot reports from small Cessnas that had made it across in the preceding hour or two. We were emboldened. We took off from Jeffco around 11:00 a.m. and climbed up to an indicated 14,500′ on the altimeter. Due to the high heat, we were closer to 15,000′ above sea level, a fact confirmed by the GPS, and well above the numerous 14,000+ peaks that I-70 threads its way throught. For flatlanders, this kind of flying is unnerving, but it was never unsafe. We landed in the early afternoon at Canyonlands (CNY) in Moab, Utah.  This was Tom’s first landing at a high density altitude (8000′ or so) where he had to fly a pattern (at Jeffco we’d done a practice ILS approach).  I said “you’re going to be going really fast over the ground at normal pattern airspeeds, so be sure to widen out”.  Tom did so, but got down to a slower than normal airspeed of about 70 knots without realizing it.  The ground rush was consistent with our 85-90 knot groundspeed, so he thought he was flying a standard DA40 downwind at 85 knots or so.  We rented a brand new Jeep Wrangler, which was much noisier and bumpier than a 1995 Kia, did a short hike in Arches National Park, and had dinner at Buck’s Grillhouse.  An older biker couple walked out to their Honda Goldwings.  The guy wore a badge on his leather jacket that had exactly the right shape and color for Harley Davidson’s logo, but instead of reading “Harley” the badge read “Asshole”.

On Tuesday, we enjoyed a smooth morning flight over Bryce and Zion national parks, then did a practice instrument approach and landing at St. George, Utah.  It was getting bumpy and windy by the time we landed, just after noon, at Henderson, Nevada (HND).  22.9 hours on the Hobbs meter.

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When Boston’s Big Dig project was getting started, in the late 1980s, an MIT professor of civil engineering and I went over to see the guy in charge. We showed him a bunch of computer software that we’d built and pitched him on the idea of using computers to track the flow of materials and the state of the work, much as is done in any modern factory. He said “I’m not interested in anything that might save money. This is a cost-plus project and the more we spend, the more profit we make. If we build this new highway using the same technology employed by the Romans, that’s fine with me.”

Predictably, the project cost a lot more than planned, the guy we talked to made a lot more profit than budgeted, and the schedule slipped. What wasn’t predicted were the quality problems that have come to obsess Boston in recent weeks, after the death of Milena Del Valle.

What would the French have done? (WWtFhD) The contract would not have been to build the road. The contract would have been to build the road and maintain it for 20 years, thus giving the contractor an incentive to maintain high quality.

[Note that this is a separate practice from the French allowing private companies to build, maintain, and operate private toll roads.]

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One of the things that I always wondered was “How am I ever going to teach someone to land an airplane?” The flare happens fairly fast and the difference between a reasonable and damaging landing is a matter of just a few seconds and/or an inch or two of stick movement. One year after receiving my CFI, I think that I’ve finally figured it out. Most people flare too early. They are going 60 knots and plummeting toward what looks like a hard and unforgiving asphalt surface. When that runway gets close, they start to yank back on the stick. The result is a balloon, the airplane loses flying speed about 15′ above the ground and then the sickening sink begins. The instructor wonders “How am I going to live this one down if we bend the gear?” while adding power. The student is frustrated because the controls have been grabbed.

My new religion:

• insist that student trim the airplane for approach speed and verify that it is properly trimmed by removing hands from stick at 200′ AGL
• remind the student to look far down the runway as we approach the ground
• put a fist behind the stick so that the potential travel of the stick is limited
• talk the student through the flare

The student will probably still try to flare too hard and maybe too high, but it won’t matter because you’ve limited the rearward movement of the stick. After a few of these, the student learns the correct attitudes for landing and stops pulling back so hard.

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Resting up in a Moab, Utah hotel room, a news item flashed across the TV screen concerning Fidel Castro handing over power, temporarily, to his brother Raul. Coincidentally, the July 31, 2006 New Yorker magazine carries an interesting article on Cuba by Jon Lee Anderson, author of a very interesting biography of Che Guevara. Some interesting items from the article:

• “Castro has a fascination with Alexander the Great” and named three of his sons Alexis, Alexander, and Alejandro (Castro has a whole bunch of kids from at least two wives).
• Raul’s wife, Vilma Espin, is “M.I.T.-educated”.

Castro’s continuing ownership of Cuba is a great example of the limits of American power. We pay taxes to support a vast military force. You’d think that, for all the money we spend, it wouldn’t be possible for a guy to run around talking trash about the U.S. while amassing a personal fortune estimated at around $1 billion (it would be a lot more except that the 11.3 million Cubans don’t produce much that is valuable in our globalized economy). Yet Fidel Castro has done pretty much whatever he wanted since 1959.

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The annual Oshkosh fly-in is winding up and there are a few interesting developments in the world of small airplanes that might interest readers of this weblog. Here are the news stories that caught my eye…

The market for small airplanes is improving, with shipments up roughly 20 percent over the first six months of 2005. Business jet shipments are up 28 percent to 415 machines (Jan-June 2006) and will go up a lot more because Eclipse Aviation just got its FAA certification and they’ll be making more than 500 jets per year at $1.5 million each. Honda has decided to turn its experimental jet into a product, to be certified in 2010. They’ve partnered up with Piper, one of the old-line companies that is devoted to high prices, low volumes, and bad customer service. Eclipse is probably the more interesting company because they’re doing everything from scratch. The problem with the little jets is limited range. Eclipse started out promising 1800 nautical miles, but now they’re down to 1100 n.m. or so. Honda’s projected range is similar. You’d have to stop twice on the way to California, once on the way back. A more interesting jet might be the Taiwan-financed Sino Swearingen, which was certified last year. It costs $6 million, but it does the things the average person would expect a jet to do. It will go fast and it will go far: 2500 n.m. A standard bizjet that performs like the Sino Swearingen costs closer to $15 million and is much more costly to operate.

Garmin, the guys from Kansas who bring the grace and elegance of Soviet locomotives to in-flight user interface, has released a certified aftermarket glass cockpit, the G600. It won’t be available until mid-2007 and it will cost $30,000, but it will let owners of tired old planes replace all of the instruments at once with a couple of LCD screens, smaller than but similar to the glass cockpits that come with most new airplanes. Something like this would be excellent for helicopters because the gyros in the G600 will be solid-state and won’t get destroyed by vibration the way that “steam gauge” mechanical gyros do. For about $4000 and shipping right now, you can get an arguably better system that isn’t certified by the FAA: VistaNav. This does the obvious thing and gives you a Microsoft Flight Simulator view of the world outside the airplane.

SMA, a French engine company, received an STC to install its diesel engine in old Cessna 182s. The diesel engine burns Jet-A fuel and affords a lower fuel burn and longer range than the standard Avgas engine. There is only one power lever (more/less) instead of three (throttle, prop speed, mixture).

Cirrus, the Saudi/Kuwaiti-owned company that makes my little airplane, is going to sell a turbonormalized version of the SR22. This will make the plane more useful in the West where people need to take off from high altitude airports and fly over tall mountains. “turbonormalized” means that the turbocharger works to maintain sea level power up to higher altitudes. The SR22 isn’t pressurized, however, so folks flying up at 15,000′ or whatever will have to wear oxygen equipment.

Diamond, the Austrian/Canadian company that made my previous little airplane, flew its prototype single-engine D-Jet to Oshkosh. This will compete with the Eclipse by having only one engine, flying only to 25,000′ (compared to 41,000′), shipping a couple of years later, and costing… about the same. The D-Jet will have a “whole-aircraft ballistic parachute”, made by the same company, BRS, that makes the parachute in the Cirrus.

Thanks to heavy and sluggish government regulation, aviation is one of the slowest moving industries. The Cessna 172 and 182 turned 50 this year and are still competitive products! Nonetheless, progress is being made. By the end of 2006, you’ll be able to buy a brand-new business jet, a brand-new four-seat helicopter, and a couple of full-time immigrant pilots all for less than the cost of a single family house in a decent neighborhood in my home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In another few hours, I leave for Las Vegas in a Diamond Star DA40, helping a friend who owns the G1000-equipped machine with his instrument rating. The plan is to spend Saturday through Tuesday or Wednesday getting there, getting baked under the canopy in a Midwestern heatwave and stuffing cushions between myself and the DA40’s unforgiving seats. We’ll stop every 1.5 hours to do a practice approach and bathe ourselves in ice water. Such is the luxury of travel by private aircraft. I expect to return on Thursday, August 3. Lacking a private airplane (my friend is going to hang out there for a family event), I will be forced to suffer the miseries of commercial airline travel. It may cost as much as $150 for the 5-hour air-conditioned TV-equipped return trip on JetBlue.

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The top story in today’s Boston Globe is headlined “three more loose bolts in tunnel”. Every day for the past two weeks, the top story in every Boston newspaper has been about some defective ceiling panels in our new Big Dig highway tunnels. Africans may be slaughtering each other wholesale (Darfur?), but we mourn for Milena Del Valle, one of our neighbors, who was killed by a falling concrete block on July 10, 2006.

During the Cold War, folks used to say that if New York City were destroyed by a Russian nuclear bomb, the headline in the Globe would read “Framingham man missing”.

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I’ve drafted a plan and advertisement for a Robinson R44 transition training course.  I would appreciate it if rated pilots would respond with suggestions for improvement.  The draft is at http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/r44-transition-training
Thanks in advance,

Philip

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Some friends and I organized a helicopter ride day out of Jet Aviation at Hanscom. We served brunch and took people in three-person groups down to the still-running R44 for 10-20 minute rides around the airport or into downtown Boston. At the end of the ride, we asked them to toss some cash or a check into a bowl for http://www.sustainableharvest.org/. Not sure how much money was raised, but probably less than the cost of running the helicopter.

After 4.5 hours of flying friends, Dan McGuire showed up. This guy is my candidate for “world’s best brother.” He had arranged a surprise 30th birthday party for his sister Colleen at his house on the beach in Quincy. He set up a tent, made sure that the local authorities wouldn’t freak out if we landed on the gravel exposed by low tide, and told his sister that she’d be going on a sightseeing ride from Hanscom. I asked sister what she’d like to see and she mentioned her brother’s house so we cruised through downtown Boston and down the beach. This is in the Logan Airport Class B airspace, so we were talking to Boston Tower. I flipped the intercom to “pilot isolate” and told the controller that we’d be landing on the beach and would call when back up. We circled over the house and Colleen said “look at the tent, the neighbors must be having a party.” I said “let’s take a closer look” and lowered the collective while turning. We did an easy approach over the water and landed on the beach. A huge crowd of partygoers awaited behind a seawall. Colleen was ecstatic with surprise and joy.

We shut down and joined the party for a few minutes, then got back in the helicopter and fired up, hoping that the starter motor or battery wouldn’t choose this moment to fail (we had at least two hours before the water came up to where we were parked). Then it was back to Hanscom. The R44 flew for 5.6 hours today, all of it fun.

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One of the things I’ve discovered from my students is that the only sound a young person likes less than fingernails on a chalk board is Prairie Home Companion on the radio. For the older readers of this Weblog, therefore, a link to Garrison Keillor singing a reworked version of “Mama Tried” (follow the link and then click “listen”).

[Close readers/listeners of the lyrics will note the line “black T-shirts and jeans were all I wore” and compare to the image on my home page. Ever since I took up flying unairconditioned aircraft, I have switched to clothes with a higher albedo, e.g., grey T-shirts and zip-off pants.]

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Julian had a business meeting in Manhattan, so we decided to stretch the legs of the Robinson R44 helicopter. I loaded Mark, a helicopter student friend, into the ship at Hanscom on Tuesday morning and we departed for the Beverly, Massachusetts airport (BVY). At BVY, Mark got out of the front right seat and moved to the back. Julian got in. We proceeded through downtown Boston and picked up the AMTRAK rail line south to Norwood, Massachusetts.

The clouds were less than 1000′ above the ground, but the visibility underneath the clouds was reasonably good at 7-9 miles, so we hugged Interstate 95 all the way through Bridgeport, Connecticut where the ceiling began to lift a bit. Not quite sure of the most polite way to navigate the airspace around New York City, we contacted New York Approach for VFR advisories just SW of Bridgeport. They handed us off to a special LaGuardia Airport tower frequency, 126.05, for low-flying VFR aircraft, especially helicopters. We were cleared through the LaGuardia Airport Class B surface airspace and down the Hudson River. We circled the Statue of Liberty and then called for landing advice at the Downtown/Wall Street heliport. The friendly guy working the radio gave us the winds and directed us to a transient pad where Julian got out and walked to his meeting while Mark moved into the front seat for the short hop over to Teterboro, New Jersey (TEB).

We shut down at TEB for about 30 minutes and loaded my cousin Lynn and her 11-year-old daughter Olivia into the helicopter for a scenic tour up Rt. 17 (mall, mall, mall) and then over their hometown of Allendale, New Jersey. After circling Olivia’s school, we proceeded over the George Washington Bridge, down the Hudson, around the Statue of Liberty, up the East River, over Central Park, and back through the haze to Teterboro. Nobody complained about the haze or the bumps.

Back at Teterboro, Jet Aviation insisted that we land on a dolly, which is difficult enough for most helicopter pilots. The advantage for them is that they can tow the helicopter around and reposition it. The challenge for the pilot is that the dolly isn’t much larger than the skids and any mistake will result in the helicopter falling off the 2′-high dolly and crashing into the ground. The line guys at Jet Aviation made the challenge vastly more difficult by positioning the dolly so that (1) I would have to land with my tail into a 20-25 knot gusty wind (facing into the wind is the more stable way to hover a helicopter), and (2) I would have about 5′ of clearance between my tail and a $5 million business jet parked right up against the dolly. Most of the helicopter pilots who land at TEB are professionals and in theory all of them would be up to the task of putting their tail into the wind and up against a bizjet, but even for a heroic Vietnam vet it probably wasn’t a prudent thing to be doing. I refused to do it, calling on the radio and insisting that they move the dolly to an uncluttered area on the ramp and point it so that the helicopter would be facing into the wind. The line guys never seemed to comprehend the “face into wind” part, but at least they moved it and the set-down would be crosswind rather than downwind. I didn’t see the need to involve anyone but myself in the flaming wreckage of our new helicopter, so I had Mark escort my cousins out and well away from the helicopter/dolly interaction. In the end, the setdown turned out to be uneventful.

Julian checked us into the W Hotel Times Square, one of the few hotels in Manhattan that had rooms left. It is unclear who wants to visit New York City when it is 90 degrees out with 90 percent humidity, but apparently there is no shortage of customers in July. The room was $400 per night. Julian has a fancy Amex card and got upgraded to a “spectacular” room. It was just barely larger than the two beds, which were the room’s only furniture other than a narrow counter/desk by the window and one desk chair. Julian wrinkled his nose “This room smells like body odor”. The A/C didn’t work right. The clock and phone by Julian’s bed shut down when he turned off the overhead light. Escaping to the lobby wasn’t an option because it was deafeningly loud (music, bar, bare stone) and too dimly lit to read a magazine.

Dinner at Lever House was almost good enough to compensate for the crummy hotel. The other Manhattan highlight was a trip to the new Morgan Library.

The trip back to Boston would have been a great advertisement for Amtrak. We waited for about 20 hours for severe thunderstorms, which included tornados and hail, to clear out of the Northeast. We departed Teterboro through haze and made it as far as Hartford, Connecticut before rain and low clouds started making us feel uncomfortable. By the time we got near Providence, Rhode Island we needed a break from following roads and dodging towers. We set at at North Central airport, SFZ, near Smithfield, Rhode Island, and waited for four hours. Our final legs to Beverly and Bedford included some beautiful rain-cleared weather complete with a rainbow terminating in the center of Logan Airport.

The R44 is just about ready for its first 100-hour inspection. So far the machine is rock-solid. By contrast, our Cirrus airplane is just out from its annual inspection, which took three weeks and constituted the plane’s fourth month in the shop during its first year of ownership. Immediately after coming out of the inspection, one of the cylinder head temperature probes began to give erratic readings. Today Avidyne called and said not to fly the plane on instruments because they are recalling our primary flight display (PFD). The PFD was removed from the airplane and upgraded with some new software back in January, with a cost in downtime of about three weeks. This was supposed to fix the PFD’s tendency to crash during flight. Apparently there are some other issues and now Avidyne wants to shut the plane down for about two weeks.

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