Waiting on the FAA

My medical certificate is a special issuance, so I operate under slightly more stringent rules than other pilots. I am supposed to notify the FAA promptly of any change in my condition. It used to be that I would call them up and tell them what happened, they would tell me that I was grounded, and a couple of days letter a certified letter would arrive containing a self addressed stamped envelope and the equivalent of an orange sticky note with an arrow pointing into the envelope saying "insert medical certificate here." I guess that they became afraid of spoofing, and no matter how unlikely it is that someone would call them up and falsely report a disqualifying condition, they insist on a letter. I sent them the letter. I have yet to get a reply, so I do, in fact, still have a medical certificate, even though it is not valid.

But all of that is moot. After the abnormal stress test in September, I stopped exercising, but my joints began to hurt more rather than less. One of my doctors suggested that this was a side effect of one of my medications (a statin), but another refused to let me stop. The problem got worse, so I voted to break the tie and stop.

It didn't help. In fact, it got worse. I could not run, or even climb stairs. I had trouble sleeping, because the pain kept waking me up. My doctor prescribed narcotics and blood tests. Unable to even climb into an airplane, I did not say "I can't take narcotics because I am a pilot." I took them eagerly.

They didn't help much, but the blood tests were way out of whack (think lots of metal in your engine oil analysis), and I got sent to a rheumatologist. It took a week to get an appointment, during which I slept little and hurt more.

Thinking I would have some time on my hands, I bought the new translation of War and Peace. I had promised myself that I would read it when the paperback came out. I took the book to the cashier at one of the big chain stores, and he kind of tried to make fun of me. "Have you been through this before?" he asked.

"Yes, a long time ago, but everyone says that the new translation is great."

"Well, good luck." He did not sound sincere. And I thought it was a cardinal rule of retail to avoid customer ridicule.

As I waited for my card to ring through, I had a sudden memory of the issue of Flying after the downing of KAL007. This was one of the best issues, ever, worth digging up in the library. Peter Garrison wrote about flying his homebuilt Melmoth to Japan, and the contingency of landing in the then-Soviet Union if his single-engine airplane, carrying his wife and son, had trouble over the ocean at night. (You may shiver now.) He did not imagine it going well, but his consolation was that "they wrote better novels." So maybe I would see.

The rheumatologist, a kindly man with a soft touch and a keen eye, took more blood and ordered more tests. He got me to scream with one of his "Does this hurt?" tests. ("I thought you had no foot pain," he said, looking hurt himself.) Better yet, he gave me a cortisone shot, which is supposed to provide some temporary relief.

I hope he's right. Not only will it be good to climb into an airplane; it will be good to have the strength to lift the book and start to read it.

Pilots and Maintenance

John, aka Aviation Mentor, tweeted this morning about some major fines the FAA is proposing for United Air Lines and US Airways for maintenance lapses. Some were egregious, either for the shoddy maintenance practices involved (UAL) or for the fact that the continued to fly a deficient airplane even after the FAA pointed it out to them. Links to the FAA press releases are here.

I don't think that you can put too much blame on the pilots, especially in the 14CFR121 world. Pilot interest in maintenance is as variable as pilot interest in anything else. I have known some who were maintenance aces, and others who refused to do a walk-around.

Once when jumpseating home on SkyWest I sat next to one of my regional airline buddies. Somehow we got to talking about a 1997 incident in which a SkyWest Brasilia had an engine fire followed by a complete loss of hydraulics. The crew made a nice emergency landing at Miramar NAS. I used to use this to illustrate how to behave in a crisis when I was a 14CFR135 (charter) instructor. (The NTSB report is here.)

Todd looked around for a second and got all excited. "Dude!" he exclaimed, "it was this airplane." Todd makes it his business to know the fleet inside out.

But I used to fly gliders with a guy who was a mechanic for SkyWest. "So," I asked him, "do you get a lot of pilots
hanging around in maintenance, poking around the airplanes?"

"No," he replied, "almost never."

That seems like a lost opportunity to me. When I bought my Taylorcraft, I did the first annual (under supervision, of course); after that, I felt like I knew every bolt.

When I was flying King Airs, I looked forward to the major maintenance checks, not because it meant time off, but because it meant I would be able to learn more about the airplanes. I took a digital camera to record what I found.




Here we have the battery, which sits in the right wing near the root. Batteries are crucial for starting turbine engines: a weak battery could lead to low starter RPMs which could lead to a hot start which could lead to bankruptcy. While there is an overwhelming amount of cockpit instrumentation for the electrical system, the battery itself is hidden out of the pilot's view.


Here are the outflow valves from the pressurization system. One is the control valve, the other is the emergency valve. Again, they are hidden behind a big inspection panel with lots of screws, out of sight of even the most meticulous preflight inspection.



And here is the inspection plate for the nacelle tank. This was taken at a remote airport, after a passenger asked about the clear liquid running down the wing.

Maintenance sometimes need to get in there, which is probably obvious given the amount of plumbing on top. To get to the nacelle tank, you remove a large inspection panel; it's been removed in the picture. So, again, no preflight inspection.

Now notice the bits of orange at about 8 o'clock in the picture. When the tank is reassembled, maintenance puts a spot of paint on the bolts. If the bolts are removed, the paint tears away. What you see here is evidence that someone serviced the tank but did not put it back together.

I didn't - couldn't - catch it during the preflight. I have no idea when the maintenance was done, since this was my first flight after a long vacation. For all I know, the airplane had been leaking fuel for the past three weeks, but the first one to notice was my passenger.

The dozens of United pilots who flew around with shop rags in the engine couldn't have noticed, either.

Who is a Pilot?

I met with the cardiologist the other day. Things are looking really good. "And you're doing everything right," she said, meaning diet, exercise, and drugs. "What about stress?" I asked.

"Stress is bad," she said, 'What kind?"

The university is a high-stress environment right now. The local paper has daily stories about friction and potential abuses. The State Board of Education is suggesting that administrations have wide powers to dismiss tenured faculty. The Faculty Senate minutes are "A tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." [Macbeth, Act V] Ugly stuff. You'd think I'd be used to it.

"Maybe you should try an antidepressant," she said, "Some patients have found low doses helpful in stress management."

"You mean SSRIs?" I asked. That's Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of drugs including Prozac.

"Yes."

"I can't take those," I said, "because I am a pilot."

---

"I can't take those because I am a pilot." That's an odd thing for a guy who just lost his medical to say.

I think that most of us who fly identify ourselves as pilots. It's one of the first things that strangers learn about us, even if we try not to talk about it. Some of us go on to identify ourselves as certain kinds of pilots. This has nothing to do with the certificates we hold. I've seen private pilots who flew like seasoned ATPs, and vice versa.

So, what makes us pilots? It's an outlook on life.

I plan to stay IFR current while I wait for my medical to be reinstated. I might let night currency slip, although it is easy to find a pilot friend to act as pilot in command on a pretty night. (Volunteers are welcome, as long as you are night current.) I've been taking it easy but it's time to find out who needs a BFR, who wants to become a CFI, who wants a mentor for long cross-countries. There will be plenty of flying.


But being a pilot is more than proficiency, which is more than currency. Consider the picture to the right. Here's a Jaguar - a nice car! - parked facing downhill with its wheels pointed away from the curb. Is this driver a pilot?

Perhaps. The only time I every got to drive a Jag was the crew car at Signature at Midway (KMDW). So the right question is what kind of pilot?

One night during the Christmas freight rush a bunch of us were hanging around at UPS in Salt Lake City. We had each flown down in a Seneca, because UPS wanted to have lots of extra "uplift" available for the Christmas rush. This was almost fun: we left home at about 0300 and were either sent someplace on short notice (I once carried a load of hams to KSUN, Hailey, Idaho), or were sent home to sleep and do it again the next day. We saw old friends and made new ones.

There was no place to sit, so we all sat on the floor, abuzz with no sleep and bad coffee. Conversations started and ran out of steam. Some dozed.

Pollux (not his real name, but he had a twin brother whom I would call Castor if he figured in the story) broke the ice.

"I don't want to get an ATP," he stated. We all shook off our sleep and stared at him. His career goal required it.

"Why's that?" someone finally asked.

"It's too much work." I think he meant that getting the ATP was too much work: the written, the training, the flight check, and all that. But I took away another thought.

I told him that he was right: Being an ATP meant much more than flying the ILS with minimal needle deflection. Being an ATP starts when you get out of bed, and note the weather, and smell the air. It meant continually quizzing yourself on airplane systems, practicing emergency procedures, enhancing situational awareness. It meant being aware how impaired you might be the next morning after six beers last night, even though the regulations said that you were legal. It meant analyzing each flight, each action, each approach, each taxi, each fueling, each bit of paperwork. It meant pointing your whole being at reducing every risk so that you could deliver your passengers safely, even elegantly, in difficult conditions.

This applies whether you have the certificate or not: the certificate shows that you have, at one point, demonstrated the ability to be this way. Whether that continues is your business. And you can develop this ability without any certificate at all. Michael Ruhlman describes the life of a chef in the same way in The Making of a Chef. (The kitchen and the cockpit are more closely related than most people realize, but I have to rush home and cook dinner, so that must wait for a later essay.)

There were some mumbles of agreement, then each of us settled back to listening to the white noise in our heads.

So, maybe the Jaguar driver was a pilot. But the Jaguar driver was not an ATP. A true ATP, starting a PT-6 engine on an icy ramp, starts it in feather. Why risk sliding across the ramp while cursing the brakes for suddenly failing? A true ATP doesn't park a nice car facing downhill with the wheels pointed away from the curb.

---

When Pollux got his first "real" job, he waited until his last student (a concept I can't fathom) passed the checkride, then went out in the woods with a .22 and shot his instructor certificate to pieces.

The only thing I plan to shoot is approaches. Medical certificate or no, I will continue to work on becoming a true ATP.

Rolling the Dice

It was night, and snow showers were passing through the area. The hospital called me at home. "Can you go to Afton?" Afton is a mountain strip in a deep valley.

I was very familiar with Afton. When I was a 135 (charter) instructor, I used to take new pilots there and say "OK, it may not be legal, but you have to get the antidote out of here or the world will end. Make a plan." The only navaids are GPS and dead reckoning.

They would make a plan for some GPS waypoints to keep them in the valley, and then I would have them fly it. Under the hood. But it was during the day, and I was there to watch out for the mountains.

Tonight it was for real; a patient (they never tell the pilots about the patient, on purpose) in their tiny clinic needed to be flown out of there, tonight. My students did it in a Cessna 182; at least I had the pressurized 414.

The weather was iffy but I remembered that there was a new GPS approach into Afton. I accepted the flight. But then I reviewed the approach chart: "NA [not allowed] at night," it said. Still, the medical team were willing to fly there and take a look into the valley from a safe altitude, like 12,000 MSL. "I'm not going down into that valley for two streetlights," I said. The nurses, who plan to see their families again, agreed. It was a roll of the dice for the patient.

We got to Afton and I set up an orbit high over the valley. The nurses strained to see out the windows. At first there was nothing down there. Then there were a couple of streetlights. And then there was the airport! We spiraled into the valley, staying over the airport and away from the unseen hills, and landed. The crew rushed off to get the patient while I stayed behind, sweeping the snow off the wings, even though it wasn't sticking.

It was VFR when they got back, but it was still dark, too. We loaded the patient, a teenage girl with severe breathing problems, into the airplane. I took off, and followed the departure procedure that I had drilled into my students. I didn't need a hood because there was nothing to see. I put the weather radar into terrain mode; that way it showed me the mountains that I needed to miss. I held the heading and watched the radar and climbed out at full power. While we climbed I could hear the patient laughing in back: Tom had a great sense of humor, and the laughter relaxed her. And me, even though I couldn't hear what he was saying. I felt like I had really done something to make the world a better place.

---

But now it was my turn. I was strapped onto the cath lab table. The cardiologist found the problem quickly, and it was a bad one: My left main coronary artery was 85% blocked. Stent or surgery? I had to decide right now. I got a short reprieve while they fetched my wife and the surgeon.

The cardiologist laid out the facts: it would be a tricky stent. There was a 1 in 200 chance that it would fail. If it failed I would die, immediately.

The surgeon laid out his view: because of my previous bypass and the location of the lesion, surgery had a 10% chance of serious complications: stroke, heart attack, death, infection, and the rest. "If you think your first bypass was a bitch," he said, "this will be a bitch-and-a-half."

"If the surgeon isn't enthusiastic then don't choose surgery." That was my wife.

"Statistics don't apply to individuals," I said.

"Exactly," said the cardiologist.

"It's like Pascal's Wager," I said.

"What's that?" asked the docs.

"Don't explain it to them now," my wife interrupted. Stick a catheter into a mathematics professor's heart and you still have a mathematics professor wanting to seize the teachable moment. Pascal's Wager is a situation with a very small probability of a very bad outcome.

"This is dangerous," the cardiologist said, a slight edge of fear in his voice. "I have a wire right in the lesion. You have to decide."

I realized that the next words I spoke might be my last. I was determined to make them count.

"Tell the kids I love them; let's try the stent."

It worked.

The Medical Certificate (or lack thereof)

My FAA medical is a "Special Issuance" due to my history of heart problems. The FAA makes me get a treadmill test every year in order to keep it. That was Wednesday. It was a disaster! As you might imagine, I have studied cardiology as intensively as I study flying, so I was watching the EKG tracings on the screen and saw them getting worse and worse. I had the PA doing the test check my blood pressure, which was starting to go down, not up. We stopped the test, by mutual agreement, before I was even breathing hard. The EKG got even worse during the "recovery."

I met with my cardiologist this afternoon to go over the results, and we scheduled a catheterization (angiogram) for Thursday morning with the area's best-regarded interventionist. If he says "stent?" I'll say "yes, please."

Angiograms can be dangerous but this is my fifth.

This ain't my first rodeo, so I know I can handle six months of restricting my flying to doing checkouts and BFRs with rated/current pilots, and staying current myself with a safety pilot. Medical or no, I won't feel like a real pilot unless I am instrument and night current! I'll do some glider flying when I'm sure that I am safe.

Facing my mortality justifies being a little philosophical. I've had this disease for 12 years. I should have died then. Instead, I've watched my twins grow up, completed two triathlons, flown dozens of single-pilot air ambulance flights in King Airs and a Cessna 414, made lots of friends, taken friends and family and customers on flying adventures, taught some things both to flying and to university students, directed a doctoral dissertation, written some good mathematical papers, impressed the instructors at Flight Safety, written a book, biked hundreds of miles, traveled in Europe and Asia, cooked some great meals and enjoyed those cooked by others, and generally made the most of every day.

I suggest that you all do the same.

Columns

Although I have been reading the New York Review of Books for many years, I can't think of a single other pilot who does so, and I'm betting that none of you read Michael Massing's recent article about newspapers. I was surprised at a tiny editorial decision: while I grew up thinking of my hometown newspaper as the Boston Globe, the article called it the Boston Globe. Similar choices were made for other newspapers.

[Don't worry, there's aviation to come]

I think this choice is a mistake because it reduces the importance of the city; the Boston Globe is no more about Boston than the Harlem Globetrotters are about Harlem, while the separation of Boston from Globe emphasizes the city connection.

All of these newspapers have had wonderful columnists whose daily ramblings taught us what it meant to be a Bostonian, or an Angelino, or a Chicagoan, or whatever,writers like Mike Barnicle, Jimmy Breslin, Studs Terkel, those kind of guys. I'll even extend the honor to Peter Gzowski, whose distinctive voice on CBC Radio taught a generation what it meant to be a Canadian. All of them were controversial, but that's the nature of being the voice of the city (or, in Gzowski's case, the country).

I once spent a semester on sabbatical in Texas. My first weekend there, I bought the Dallas newspapers, and sat down to learn about being a Texan. (Those days are gone. Now I live in Idaho and read the daily New York Times on my iPhone.) There is no concept of "temporary" Texan, as far as I can tell, so I had to get up to speed quickly. I can't remember which newspaper it was in, but there was a wonderful column about a toothless old lady who ran a cafe and store and still loved life. The story painted a vivid picture of life in rural Texas, and I remember it fondly to this day.

That local newspaper columnist who taught me so much about Texas had already taught me a lot about flying. It was Gordon Baxter, whose monthly column in Flying was one of my favorite features.

Lots of his "Bax Seat" stories came flooding to mind today. Spinning the Mooney. Thinking about landing "one of those pesky 150s" on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico. Busting the Houston TCA, "squawkin' and talkin'." The ride in the Citation: "Jet time!" Barfing in the Stearman "as the coaming came up around me."

Bax wasn't always the good guy, but his heart was always in the right place and he loved the people he wrote about. He taught us what it means to be a pilot. Let's try to keep him in mind.

Bracket

No, not Brackett-LaVerne Field. Bracket, as in "if I stay between the highway and coast I can't miss the airport."

Aviation is in a confused state right now, at least in my part of the world. The pipeline of new pilots has slowed. It was slowing before the financial crisis, so we can't sleaze out of blaming ourselves for not making flying attractive.

But right here at my home airport I see both extremes. On the right, we have the first Eclipse VLJ that I have seen in person. It is an attractive airplane, and only a congressman, or even Kanye West, could find a way to say that it is not an amazing performer. Of course it cost a lot of money. and the company got ahead of itself, and Dayjet got ahead of itself, but those points are all irrelevant. The relevant point is that the Eclipse is an exciting new design. Shouldn't that attract people to aviation?



And on the left we see the other bracket, a magnificent Piper PA-12 Supercruiser. I used to fly one, and it is a fun airplane.

Amazing performance or fun? Which one will attract people to aviation? Both!

The airport manager recently sponsored a booth at the state fair. I was amazed by the number of people who stopped by and said "I would love to fly, but they won't let me." "They" were the Medical Certification Branch of the FAA, or course. So I would ask about their disqualifying condition (unfortunately, I have had the opportunity to become an expert on the Special Issuance process, having about four disqualifying conditions myself). None were all that bad, given modern medicine.

"Do you have a driver's license?"

"Sure."

"Then you can fly!"

Their eyes lit up. This does not mean that they could fly an Eclipse, or even the PA-12 (I think it's too heavy), but there are dozens of airplanes, new and old, fun and beautiful, which they can fly as Sport Pilots.

The FBO where I teach chose to ignore this segment. A CFI friend up the road has a LSA Ercoupe that he's flying an amazing amount.

So I'm looking for an LSA airplane. Maybe a T-Craft, or a Cub of some kind? It won't be an Eclipse, but it sure ill be fun!