I’m just finishing up transition training for the Piper Malibu Mirage airplane down in Vero Beach, Florida. Vero Beach is the home of New Piper Aircraft, manufacturer of the Malibu, and is located on the SE Atlantic coast of Florida, halfway between Cape Canaveral and Miami/Ft. Lauderdale.
The Malibu is interesting because it is a personal airplane that actually can do most of the things that non-pilots believe any personal airplane ought to be able to do. Imagine telling Joe Random that you own a small airplane. He will imagine that this machine could get you from any place in the U.S. to any other place within a day or two. Joe’s imagination would conjure up an airplane that could fly through clouds, fly above the clouds, keep the occupants comfortable inside, and not inflict too much noise on the passengers. An actual small airplane, e.g., a brand new $250,000 Cessna 172 or $400,000 Piper Saratoga (JFK, Jr’s plane), can’t do any of these things. A basic airplane will have a basic piston engine that loses power the higher one climbs into the thin air of high altitudes, which contains fewer molecules of oxygen for combustion per unit volume. Thus the little Cessna, for example, goes slower and slower as it climbs higher until finally it is using almost all of its feeble power to climb rather than to move forward. A 172 isn’t practical to operate above about 14,000′. Clouds typically extend up to around 20,000′ and therefore the Cessna is condemned to fly through the clouds rather than above them.
What’s wrong with flying through the clouds? In the summer the clouds contain embedded thunderstorms that can make an airplane impossible to control and it is difficult for a cloud-bound pilot to avoid those thunderstorms because one can’t see out of a cloud. In the winter the clouds contain ice that alters the airfoil and weighs down the airframe to the point that the airplane doesn’t have enough power to hold altitude. At all times of year clouds are typically bumpier than the air above the clouds. A small plane can still get you places but you may have to wait many days for hazardous weather to clear. Even with the best weather the average small plane is incredibly noisy, is unpressurized so passengers are exposed to the discomforts of breathing thin air or having an oxygen system stuck up their noses, and has no air conditioning.
The Piper Malibu has two turbochargers attached to its engine, making a total of 350 horsepower nearly up to its service ceiling of 25,000′. This is high enough to get above most clouds most of the time. Bleed air from the turbos is fed into the cabin for pressurization. Two heaters cope with the -40 C temps at altitude while an air conditioner keeps folks cool closer to the ground. At 25,000′ it is so cold that the air isn’t capable of holding much water and therefore the risk of accumulating ice is minimal. However, one might have to climb up or descend down through an icing layer and therefore the Malibu comes with a heated propeller, some heated sensors for the instruments, and rubber boots on the leading edges of the wings and tail. These rubber boots can be inflated by the pilot to crack ice off.
Basically the Malibu does everything that a jet-powered airplane does without the fuel consumption of a jet or the high initial cost of a jet (the same airframe is available with a jet engine driving a propeller; it is called a Piper Meridian and is about $700,000 more than the Malibu). Introduced in 1984 only about 1000 have been built, including jet-powered versions. It is difficult to get insurance for the Malibu because so many have been crashed. These crashes fall into two categories: (a) pushing weather, and (b) mechanical failure. Because the airplane is so capable guys attempt getting through ice and around thunderstorms in a way that would never occur to them in a simpler airplane. Because the airplane is so complex it is prone to failures that are simply not possible in a basic airplane. If either turbocharger fails, for example, the engine oil can leak out and the engine will stop. My old Diamond Star didn’t have turbochargers, by comparison. The Malibu does what an airliner does but without the redundancy. So you have to be prepared to land the airplane in a field or on a road. Because of these accidents the insurance companies require professional training before writing a policy.
Half of the training involves ground school in which one learns as much as possible about all of the airplane’s systems, e.g., the hydraulic pump and lines that drive the landing gear up and down. This is important in case you’re flying around and the landing gear won’t come down or the magic three green lights that indicate “down and locked” won’t come on. This actually happened to me a few times in the last two weeks. Twice I put the gear lever down and nothing happened. It turned out that the hydraulic pump circuit breaker had popped. One, after a 6.5-hour flight at high altitude, I put the gear down and only two of the three lights went on. A little in-the-air debugging and the last light lit up but the gear might have been down all the time and the switch frozen.
Most of the flight training involves the student wearing special googles or a hood that obscures everything except the instruments on the panel. This simulates instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), which is where things tend to get challenging. My instructor was Ron Cox, former head of training for Piper Aircraft and then Simcom and previously a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Ron covered up all the instruments with a chart and had me do some turns climbs and descents purely by feel. “Now you’re JFK, Jr.,” he noted (kind of odd that JFK, Jr. is the canonical example of a confused pilot even among long-time aviation nerds), and whisked the chart away. I was supposed to be straight and level. My body was uncertain as to its orientation relative to gravity. The instruments showed the airplane in a steep climbing turn, an “unusual attitude” that needed to be corrected with a combination of throttle and yoke. Many hours were spent doing instrument approaches to various airports on Florida’s Atlantic coast. An instrument approach involves flying to a specified point in space and then flying a specified path in three dimensions down to a point where the pilot either sees the runway or executes a “missed approach” procedure by climbing up and proceeding to a published holding position and driving the airplane around in ovals.
Because so many Malibu engines have quit in flight, a great emphasis is placed on practicing engine failures in the clouds. You wear the hood and the instructor pulls back the throttle and you have to figure out if there are any airports within gliding distance then set up the airplane for best gliding performance (90 knots) and make it down to a runway without pulling the hood off until the last 1000′ or so. One great thing about the Malibu is that it glides better than 10:1, i.e., if you’re up at 25,000′ (5 miles) you can glide more than 50 miles horizontally.
I came away from the training with some improved flying skills and an appreciation for all the things that can wrong in a Malibu. My personal summary: the airplane can do just about everything that an airliner can do but there isn’t much redundancy so it isn’t wise to do the things that the airlines do, e.g., overfly truly horrible weather or fly into low instrument conditions. An airliner will have multiple engines, hydraulic pumps, etc. and will be piloted by two full-time professionals in front.
[Incidentally, last year’s hurricanes hit Vero Beach very hard. It appears that all pedestrian streets were destroyed, along with most sidewalks. All the bookstores are gone as well as every classical music radio station. Every person under age 55 not employed in the service industry was apparently killed. The only things that are left here are gated communities full of rather old rather rich people, strip malls, real estate brokers, urology offices and MRI scanning centers.]
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