Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2018 i Plane & Pilot

“I felt like I had let down a member of our family. I had hurt our airplane through my complacency…there are lots of things I should have done differently.” While I may be a relatively experienced pilot, that doesn’t mean I know everything and can’t make mistakes. No pilot is ever that good. One of the things that I have always tried to do is to be willing to share when I mess up if others can learn from it. Sometimes this can be embarrassing, but a little humble pie can be a good thing for all of us sometimes. One such lesson is that a little complacency can quickly trump any experience we may have, even if you haven’t left the ground. On a flight in our Stinson en…

If you’ve been flying for more than a few days, odds are pretty good that you’ve done something that’s not quite cricket. Maybe you accidentally clipped the edge of Class C airspace without talking to ATC first. Or maybe you let time get away from you and flew your plane with an expired annual. Or maybe you did something truly dangerous, like landing on the wrong runway or busting minimums on an instrument approach. Whatever it is, it’s possible you’ve done something that could have gotten you into at least a little trouble with the FAA, and you’ve probably wondered, “What would happen if I got caught?” The simple answer is, it depends. Did your action create a hazard? Was it intentional or accidental? Did you take immediate action to…

The pilot of a Piper PA-31-325 Navajo that crashed on August 16, 2016, near Northport, Alabama, killing all six on board, had given air traffic control his diagnosis of the problem the airplane was experiencing. Apparently, the pilot didn’t believe it was dramatic enough to declare an emergency, and he expressed confidence he’d have no trouble diverting to the airport at Tuscaloosa about 20 miles ahead. When given the option of taking a vector for an airport at three o’clock and just eight miles, the pilot said, “Nah, Tuscaloosa’s perfect.” What NTSB investigators learned from airplane maintenance records and a flight instructor who had flown frequently with the pilot raises the possibility that instead of trying to gather current facts and make a current diagnosis, the pilot believed he was…

The term “disruptive technology” gets thrown around so much that it’s started to lose all meaning. With other cases of overuse, it’s often the unintentional misuse of a popular term, like “app” versus “software” or the aviation term “integrated,” which means one machine, instead of “federated,” which means numerous separate machines working closely together. In contrast, the misusers of the term “disruptive technology” almost always know exactly what it means. It’s a new technology, like ride-sharing apps, that changes the underlying paradigm of a thing, in this case, the taxi industry. An example of the term “disruptive technology” misused would be, say, calling a new kind of aircraft empennage a disruptive technology. It’s not. Airplanes still have tails, so this new (mythical) tail would simply be an improvement or an…

If I had to pick one of the most game-changing items for how light airplanes do IFR, I would say GPS. A close second would be datalink weather—specifically NEXRAD—delivered to the cockpit. Put the two together, and you have the backbone for how small airplanes pick their way through big weather. In my younger days, my concept of weather data in flight was watching the clouds get darker as I trundled along the VOR radial wondering how rough the next 30 minutes might get. Now I feel naked without datalink weather and will ask for deviations around denser precip just to keep from spilling my coffee. Datalink lets me pick my routes, and GPS lets me fly them, provided I can convince ATC to let me. Saying the requested deviation…

For years, we’ve heard how aviation is good for business, and a lot of that message has centered around how companies that use GA aircraft to get around beat their competition to the punch and to the new business on a regular basis. But what about CEOs who fly because, well, they just love flying? Now there’s convincing evidence that those leaders are better in the boardroom and with the bottom line not in spite of but because of their affinity for aviation. Studies show that CEO pilots are more successful than their non-flying peers across key parameters, including risk management and the willingness to embrace innovation. Anecdotally, there have been examples of this for decades, from the legendary Howard Hughes to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, but now’s there’s actually…

The life of the modern jet pilots tends to be most unexpectedly lonely…foreign countries are places to reach accurately and to leave on time. Distance is a raw material to work with. —John Pearson, Sunday Times, 4 Feb 1962 Have you ever been lonely? Yeah, who hasn’t? If you’re a pilot, you know that being alone in a hotel room in a place you’ve never been can be lonely experiences. What do you do to ease the ache? Because we travel, we spend a lot of time alone—waiting out weather in an FBO or in a hotel room. You may be surrounded by a dozen strangers at an airline terminal, but it is no substitute for being with friends. Airline pilots sit on a flight deck with a crew they’ve…

The noninstrument-rated private pilot was returning to his home airport along a mountainous route that he had traveled multiple times in the accident airplane. After landing for fuel at an intermediate airport, he called his wife and reported that the landing was challenging due to strong winds. He subsequently departed on the final leg of the flight, and shortly after departure, he sent her in-flight photographs which revealed limited visibility, dust storms, and lenticular cloud formations in the general direction of his intended route. The flight progressed on a relatively constant track for the next 2 hours, during which time the airplane encountered significant headwinds, which reduced its ground speed to about half of its typical cruise speed. As the airplane approached the high terrain of the Sierra Nevada mountain…

“What Bob was trying to instill in me was an ethic. He believed that learning to operate machines properly was a solemn obligation.” As a newly minted first officer, I was assigned to a rather senior IOE (Initial Operating Experience) captain. Bob was a man of few words. He was also a man of eminent good sense, zero pretense and an almost supernatural calm. From day one, and nearly every day thereafter, he urged me to strive for what he called “smoothness.” Good airline pilots, he assured me, fly smoothly. They accelerate smoothly, rotate smoothly, climb smoothly, descend smoothly, land smoothly and taxi to the gate smoothly. Certainly, he admitted, there were exceptions to the rule, such as landing on a short runway with uncertain braking. “Slamming and jamming,” though,…

Many VFR pilots know they can contact Approach or Center for flight following as they cruise along direct to their destination. When thunderstorms pop up, VFR pilots must do what IFR pilots prefer to do whenever possible: Navigate visually around cells. Cockpit NEXRAD is a huge boon here as well. It lets you see around corners and anticipate problems rather than try and find a way out of them. VFR pilots are less likely to need ATC’s view of the weather, but there’s a wealth of other information at the controller’s fingertips one could ask for as weather closes in. Need help picking an airport to divert to and land? Ask ATC for the nearest options complete with distances and directions. ATC can also provide the current weather at each,…

Perhaps no other CEO pilot has succeeded to the degree of Sam Walton. In 1954, he bought an Ercoupe for $1,850. Walton had already begun to assemble a small collection of retail stores that would eventually grow into Wal-Mart, the world’s largest physical retailer, and was fed up with the time it took to drive anywhere from northwest Arkansas. He flew himself in the aircraft to keep tabs on his stores and scout physical locations for new ones, gradually upgrading through a series of larger and faster aircraft as his business grew. Although Sam Walton personally disliked computers, he was one of the first to realize their potential in the retail space. Overall, Wal-Mart was one of the first national retailers to broadly embrace automation. In 1975, when it had…

Like many of you, I bought my first airplane a long time ago, and the panel looked like something out of a South American locomotive. There was a very tired, crystal-controlled Narco VHT3 navcom that worked on alternate Thursdays when the moon was full. There was also an equally weary but still functional Bendix T12D ADF that looked as if it shouldn’t work but did. At the time, I regarded the Bendix as a wonder box. It was the simplest possible form of radio navigation. The needle pointed at the station. End of directions. Simplicity isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. ADF offers no distance or altitude information and no internal heading info, though following the needle could provide a bearing to the station. If you could receive…