Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i Plane & Pilot

My logbook entry on May 29, 1984, says Cessna 185, N93033, Dillingham to Bethel, 1.5 hours, “Lost.” The writing is small, sheepish, hard to admit. I was excited about my first big solo trip in the 185. The 185 was the first small airplane I had flown, and I had since been working on my ratings, learning aerobatics and getting tail-wheel experience. I started flying in Dillingham, about 300 miles southwest of Anchorage, only accessible by airplane or boat. My job there took me to the region’s native villages, and I had to charter a small airplane to get around. On the first leg of my first chartered flight, our Cessna crashed at the end of a muddy airstrip after our young pilot didn’t use the entire length of a…

When I first heard about Redbird’s Guided Independent Flight Training (GIFT), I was curious. So many recent advances in transportation technology have been moving us toward increased automation and computer-driven decision-making. That has its good points and its bad ones, but how does that trend extend to teaching someone to fly? GIFT—a series of smart scenarios designed by Redbird to be flown in its simulators—acts almost as a second flight instructor, albeit one that exists somewhere between the Internet and the sim software. It has the ability to grade a student’s performance and provide a certain level of review and feedback. I recently had a chance to run through a few of Redbird’s GIFT training modules. Going into the demo, I was of two minds: either it would be a…

Most commonly used aviation gasoline for piston engines: 100LL Dye used in 100LL: 1,4-dialkylaminoanthraquinone (also called C.I. Solvent Blue 98) Dye color: Blue Average cost of 100LL in the U.S., April 2017: $4.75/gal. Average cost of avgas in the U.S., 1980: $1.95 Density of avgas (all grades) at 15° C: 6.01 LBS./U.S. GAL. Density of avgas (all grades) at -40° C: 6.41 lbs./U.S. gal. Freezing point of avgas: -58° C Emission coefficient of avgas: 18.4 lbs. CO2 per U.S. gal. Octane rating: measures how much the fuel can be compressed before it spontaneously ignites (knock/detonation) Determining factor for minimum octane rating needed in an engine: compression ratio Benefits of higher compression ratio: more power for a given fuel burn Tetraethyl Lead (TEL): additive mixed with gasoline to allow increased engine…

Sometime next month, I’ll write an entry in my logbook signifying that I’ve spent 15,000 hours flying airplanes. This strikes me as a momentous, but arbitrary number. Most people don’t keep a detailed log of their work hours, nor do they break those hours down into neat categories. Within my 15,000, I’ve spent just shy of 13,000 hours in multiengine aircraft—just over 4,000 hours in turboprops and about 9,000 hours in jet aircraft. I’ve made nearly 7,000 landings (some soft, and some, shall we say, firm). 15,000 sounds like a big number. When you cipher it out, that’s 1.71 years flying airplanes. When I reflect that each flight hour is accompanied by several hours of planning, pre- and post-flight inspections, van rides to and from airports, and, of course, many…

Up where we were, it was smooth, cruising along at Flight Level 270, Utah’s Painted Desert, swaths of reds, browns and golds panning behind us as we flew. Just like the light, we were, as they say, golden, with pilots in other planes at altitudes both below us and above squawking nonstop about the rough rides they were suffering. Here in the 20s, not only were we by ourselves—the airliners thousands of feet above us and the pistons thousands below—but we were also apparently the only ones enjoying a smooth ride. Not a bump anywhere. It’s an apt metaphor for the remarkably successful Cirrus Jet, a single-engine, 300-knot 5-7-seat personal jet, that exists in a space all its own. There’s no airplane that’s a direct competitor, only ones that are…

For those of you who have actually finished an amateur-built plane, you get the old saying that the last 20 percent of any big job takes half the time. When it comes to homebuilding, that last 20 percent of the job is typically associated with installing the engine, applying paint and, yes, installing avionics. That last one, avionics, might sound easy until you’ve tried it yourself. In fact, installing radios can be a bear. Even after you’ve fabricated the radio racks, the job is a lot more than merely sliding in the new radios, flipping the avionics master and firing up XM radio for a little celebratory music. There are a number of challenges associated with avionics installs, but arguably none is as complicated or, if you, heaven forbid, wire…

At the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition (EBACE) in Geneva, Switzerland, Garmin unveiled its first head-up display. The first plane to get the new HuD will be the Cessna Citation Longitude, a super-midsized, long-range jet closing in on certification. If you’re not intimately familiar with the technology, a head-up display is a system designed to enhance landing safety. As you’re no doubt aware, a HuD projects all the critical aircraft information on a glass lens through which the pilot views the outside world and, hence, the landing environment, including the runway and all of its lights. Such a system allows pilots to keep looking outside the airplane while on approach instead of alternating between looking outside for the runway and looking down to see the flight instruments, which on…

It’s no secret that we pilots love airplanes, though the reasons why we do are, well, not so much mysterious as wide ranging and, at times, hard to pin down precisely. We love airplanes for what they are, where they can take us, and for reasons that are more related to aesthetics than utility. We feel that airplanes, at least some of them, are beautiful to behold. Part of that is the emotional mystery behind airplanes. They are, after all, doing something that, until 150 years ago, was impossible. So we have a reverence for aircraft that at its root is steeped in wonder. Not everyone believes that beauty is a mystery. For the past couple of decades, mathematicians have been attempting to quantify what we find beautiful, notably in…