Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Plane & Pilot

F-4 Phantom II Engine Blade The F-4 Phantom II Engine Blade ($120) is a little piece of aviation history. This isn’t a replica—it’s the actual blade of a General Electric J79 turbojet engine that once kept a McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter jet airborne. As one would expect from a piece of metal that spent time as part of an engine, each blade is unique in appearance. First flown in 1958, the Phantom II was used extensively in the Vietnam War. More than 5,000 of the supersonic, twin-engine fighters were built. It is the only aircraft to have been used by both the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and the U.S. Navy Blue Angels. Each blade is cleaned and polished before being mounted on a circular aluminum base. The base…

The acronym on approach charts is VGSI, which means Visual GlideSlope Indicator. This could be a Visual Approach Slope Indicator (VASI), which usually looks like two sets of lights that appear red or white, or a Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI), which looks like four lights in a row that form different combinations of red and white. The VGSI is an essential component of instrument approaches in low visibility, but it’s also used by VFR pilots to ensure a safe path to the runway, especially at night. The trap is that too many pilots believe they’re safe when they have exactly zero protection. It’s possible to see a VGSI 10 miles from the airport and start following it down only to fly right through some powerlines on a hill 6…

What happened that led an Airline Transport Pilot with an estimated 12,100 hours of flying time to allow an instrument approach to go so frightfully wrong that it cost his life and the lives of his six passengers? The NTSB doesn’t pin it on any one thing. Rather, as is so often the case, the Safety Board points to several otherwise manageable factors that came together in such a way as to create too big an obstacle for the pilot to overcome. But the evidence it used when formulating its conclusions falls short of being conclusive, in my view, and maybe in yours too. The accident took place on April 7, 2015, in Bloomington, Illinois. The airplane was a Cessna 414A Chancellor on a Part 91 personal flight. The airplane…

Comfort/noun: 1. A state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint. 2. The easing or alleviation of a person’s feelings of grief or distress. Rochester, New York, on the south shore of Lake Ontario is infamous for frigid cold and snow-packed winters. Back in the day, I was a newlywed just back from two years of contract flying in North Africa—freshly relocated from our hometown of Washington, D.C., to KROC, where I had landed a job flying/marketing for a Beechcraft Dealer. Comfortable. Having graduated from Syracuse University, my (now “ex”) wife knew what we were getting into (discomfort), so, as a condition of taking the job, I had to promise to bring her home to D.C. whenever she had had enough of upstate New York, weather wise or…

“So tell me, Jeremy, what would you do? It’s the end of a trip, and you’re itching to get home for your kid’s soccer game. You bid this trip specifically so that you’d get home with just a few minutes to spare before it begins. But, on landing, your phone rings. It’s scheduling, and they want you to do a round trip to Jackson, Mississippi. You’ll miss your kid’s game.” The man doing the asking was Danny Robertson, a former chief pilot who had moved into his sunset posting as a pilot recruiter and interviewer. It was the final question of the interview for my first real flying job. “Sir, I am 27 years old. I don’t have a wife or kid, and I can’t answer this question with the…

CESSNA 182 SKYLANE Mackay, ID: 2 Minor The pilot reported that, while flying in mountainous terrain around 9,500 feet mean sea level (700 to 1,200 feet above the ground), the airplane encountered a downdraft. He added that he immediately turned away from the mountainside in a right turn, added full power, selected 10º of flaps, and pitched the nose up to maintain the airplane’s maximum angle-of-climb airspeed (VX). Subsequently, the airplane was unable to climb, and it then impacted wooded, snow-covered terrain along the mountainside. The fuselage and both wings sustained substantial damage. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. The calculated density altitude near the flightpath was about 10,339 feet. According to the Federal Aviation…

Back in the day, vertical guidance on final approach was reserved for the Cadillac approaches, which almost always meant an ILS. Airports whose tax base or FAA grant status didn’t cut it were stuck with non-precision approaches. Without vertical guidance, we’d cross a fix and step down to the next altitude, fix after fix, until stepping down to the minimum descent altitude (MDA), where we’d level off and peer hopefully into the murk looking for an airport. If we got lucky, we saw it before it was directly below us, and too close to descend further and land. GPS changed all that. RNAV (GPS) approaches often have an option for “Localizer precision with vertical guidance,” or LPV. This offers ILS-like guidance and minimums using only GPS. It requires the more…

There are many websites dedicated to wilderness and backcountry recreational activities. The Wilderness Connect website (wilderness.net), operated by the University of Montana, is a great primer on the development of public lands, how they are managed, access rules and responsible agencies. Wilderness Connect offers “information about all of the 756 wildernesses that make up the National Wilderness Preservation System.” The database is searchable and easy to access. Wilderness Connect dovetails nicely into the information presented on the Recreational Aviation Foundation (RAF) website (TheRAF.org). The RAF website provides a ton of important information for pilots interested in backcountry flying as a solitary or family activity. On it, you will find a list of state RAF liaisons. These are the folks to call to get started and meet the backcountry tribe in…

If you choose to live in a tropical or sub-tropical climate, you have to be aware of the threat of hurricanes. Like an in-flight emergency, it may never happen, but if you are prepared, you increase the chances of survival for you and your passengers. Hurricanes are nothing to be cavalier or blasé about. This spring, I asked a friend who recently moved to Florida if she had thought about hurricane season, and it concerned me that she answered “No.” When summer heats up and waves of tropical weather start building off the coast of Africa, hurricanes can develop remarkably fast. And while no one is ever truly ready, it’s a fallacy to think there will be sufficient time to prepare. Will you leave or stay? Do you have plywood…

When I was a kid, a few years back, I always considered myself lucky to be growing up a government brat. My father was an inspector with the Department of Justice, and we moved around quite a bit. (Standard joke in the family: “My dad has been in and out of jail for 30 years.”) Our most exciting move was to Anchorage, Alaska, when I was 12, and that’s where I discovered airplanes and Siberian Huskies, more or less simultaneously. It seemed Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes and other Arctic variations thereof were practically everywhere in Anchorage, and I’m convinced they’re almost universally the happiest creatures on the planet. Dogs laugh with their tails, and that’s especially true of Huskies. They don’t wag their curved, bushy tails so much as they rotate…