Starting off on the wrong foot

I'm confident that I will fly again, so I've started to review. Instrument flying really demands review, because the regulations are complex and changes happen quickly. (I've written about this before; see this post or this one.)

I found something interesting right away: a new departure procedure for Pocatello, the pictured above. It's called the
KNURL ONE (OBSTACLE) departure.

A great way to improve your understanding of IFR flight, as well as your chart-reading skills, is to spend a lot of time asking "Why?" Why is there a new departure? Why does it use that radial? Why does it use that altitude? And the like.

The FAA uses two classes of departure procedure, SIDs (Standard Instrument Departures) and ODPs (Obstacle Departure Procedures). Wait, isn't the term SID deprecated? No; now it is undeprecated, or is that repricated, or maybe vindicated? Whatever you want to call it, see the preamble to the TAKEOFF MINIMUMS AND (OBSTACLE) DEPARTURE PROCEDURES section of any approach chart book. SIDs are back.

The first thing to notice is that it is an Obstacle Departure Procedure. The obvious clue is the word (OBSTACLE) in the procedure title, but there's a subtler clue as well, which is easy to miss because it is often, well, missing. SIDs generally do not include altitudes, and many that include altitudes use the notation (ATC) to indicate that the reason for the altitude restriction is for the convenience of Air Traffic Control; see for example the WHAMY ONE departure out of Portland, Oregon. You also see this with climb gradients, when ATC wants you to climb like crazy to get above the inbound traffic.

With IFR procedures the first consideration is altitude, so if you don't see one there's a reason. And ODPs, because of their nature, always include lots of altitudes. So, in the KNURL departure from runway 3, you read "Climb heading 028 to 5500, then..." That's to get you over the grain elevator.

After maneuvering away from the obstacles, the departure has you fly outbound on the PIH R-269 to KNURL, which is at 17DME. Ouch! That's a long way in a 172 or even an Archer, but it makes sense if you are headed west on V-500, which uses R-269. But that makes no sense in a 172 or Archer, since the MEA on V-500 between REAPS and DERSO is 17,000 MSL!

ODPs are optional and may be flown without a clearance, although I would consider it good form to inform ATC if you decide to fly it. So why would you follow an optional departure procedure that takes you down the radial you want to fly?

Worse, the ODP altitude is 7,500MSL. This leaves higher altitudes available for ATC, which is good. But it has you flying westbound at an eastbound VFR altitude, which would make me very uncomfortable on a marginal VFR day. If I had the equipment to get to 17,000 I would rather file for that altitude (or even higher) rather than fly head-to-head with the VFRs, nice folks though they are, down low.


Now let's look at how this DP fits with the enroute structure. There are six airways at Pocatello VOR, and because of terrain most departures are on one. Starting at north, V-21 goes northeast to Idaho Falls. Pocatello departures are unlikely to fly 17 miles west before turning northeast, especially since there is nothing to hit in that direction. Departing runway 21? Turning right at 400AGL will put you on the 016 radial? Departing runway 3? Just turn a little to the left. (Virtually no aircraft depart runways 17 or 35 except under extreme conditions, which would require some careful thought.)

The next airway is V-21 southeast bound. There is a crossing restriction at the VOR, so maybe a little jaunt down the 260 radial would be comforting. But all the way to KNURL? Plus, if you are on the ODP you are restricted to 7500, and the crossing altitude is 8000.

V-269 southeastbound follows the 235 radial, and the MEA is lower. If you're going that way, just fly V-269.

We've already discussed V-500.

V-269 northbound goes toward Salmon (LKT) over relatively low terrain for the first 50 miles. You are perfectly safe just turning to intercept, except perhaps departing runway 17. The same applies to V-257, toward DBS.

The other departure direction is toward Jackson Hole, WY. The heading is about 045, so one might be tempted to make a left turn departing runway 21, but that throws you toward high terrain. I always flew the right downwind departure, passing over the airport.

The conclusion?

Nobody will ever request the KNURL ODP!.

It is still possible that ATC will assign the departure in order to get an airplane moving. Shoot the departure to 7500, keep the inbound at 9000, and everybody is happy. Once the departure is in radar contact they can vector it to where it wants to go. And if there's lost comm? Well, the departure is stuck down at 7500 for 10 minutes.

Still, you would interpret that as starting off on the wrong foot.

Testing Yourself

The doctor gave me a definitive diagnosis: it's Rheumatoid Arthritis. He said that it looked to him like my body would respond well to treatment, and he was right: every week I am a little stronger, and with rare exceptions I don't need to take anything for pain.

The recovery has an eery nick-of-time precision. And it's a good thing, too. First came the snow; I was strong enough to handle it, barely. It felt good to be outside working.

Friday night, my wife and I were watching a DVRed episode of Law and Order, one with an exquisitely complex plot. She had a glass of wine, but I was settling for the contact high, having given up alcohol because I am taking too many drugs that are hard on the liver. This was an easy decision, especially for a moderate drinker, about as easy as "no more winter IFR over the Cascades in singles." But that's another story.

An odd background noise caught my attention. Not a helicopter, not a truck, maybe something from the rail yard? No. A neighbor doing something? No, not at 11pm.

I went down to the basement. Is it the water softener? No. The noise was coming from the furnace.

I got some tools and started poking around, and pretty quickly decided that it was the exhaust blower fan. I fooled around with it, but the disassembly was more than I felt like tackling at 1am, and, besides, I didn't have any spare parts, so what was the point? We shut the whole thing down. We shut the furnace down. The night's predicted low was 20F.

But we have a backup or two. This is one of my big lessons to my flying students (I had to get to flying somehow, right?). I remembered the time I was shooting the GPS approach into Jackson Hole, WY [KJAC], night IMC. At that time, the GPS approach was an overlay for the VOR/DME approach, and I had written in the company training manual that in such cases, workload permitting, the pilot should set up both. Which I had. When the RAIM failure came, all I had to do was punch one button tand keep flying.

My wife and I got down to work lighting the fireplaces and the wood stove. I had turned off the gas to the gas fireplace, and went down to the garage to turn it back on. When I came back, she had stacked some half-split logs on the back porch. "I'm not too good at splitting these," she said.

They were way too big for either the fireplace or the wood stove. So I went out to split some logs. Being a good Yankee, I kept saying, "Best thing about a wood fiyah is that it wahms you twice!" Which it did. While I was outside I made not of a broken gutter, which I fixed this afternoon. If I recover much more I might put on a new roof or something.

The furnace guy came out in the morning and confirmed my blower fan diagnosis. He disassembled it, and found three broken impeller blades. We tried to run it with the missing blades, but the wheel was too imbalanced. Kind of like United 232, but way less deadly.

"We don't carry this part," he said, "We'll have to order it." So I went out to split some more logs. Not bad, considering that 6 weeks ago I couldn't erase the blackboard.

But we had some luck; he found a blower fan, and came back to install it. The furnace is running nicely, everyone is warm, and the bill is in the mail.

Still, it would have been nicer to fix it by pushing one button...

0.8

The students had finished today's exams, and I had a week to grade them...

My wife was back from Australia, so I didn't have to worry about the kids...

The METAR? 10SM CLR, but the weather was even better...

Besides, it was my birthday. So...

I went flying!

[Fine Print: since I do not have a medical certificate I had a friend with me who could act as Pilot-in-Command.]

It was just a proficiency run, nothing special. Steep turns (within ATP standards), an approach-to-landing stall, a little sighseeing to do a touch-and-go at an airport down the road, and then a couple of times around the pattern at home. I feel obliged to draw a pithy moral conclusion, the only one that comes to mind was that we had fun.

Why look for more?

Day 84

This was my 84th day on the ground, so let's focus on the future.

I am on our airport's General Aviation Improvement Committee, and it is so gratifying to see people working with the support of the powers that be to promote aviation. We are planning an Open House/Fly-In for late June, which is coming together nicely. We'll have a few warbirds on static display, and my club will have its planes cleaned up and ready ("YOU can fly this airplane!"). The local EAA Chapter will run a Young Eagles rally, giving airplane rides to kids [and, I should have a medical certificate by then, so I'll do some of the flying!]. Someone is working on military fly-bys, and someone else is working on a static display of a fire bomber, and someone else is working on the local regional carrier putting an RJ on display. People are getting fired up about flying.

I wish I had some nice slick LSA trainer to put on display. There's a big unfilled demand for Light Sport training in the area.

But that raises the question: where is flight instruction going? The November 30, 2009 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology outlines the debate about training of professional pilots. Some feel, especially after last winter's Colgan Air icing accident, that regional pilots need more experience, and have proposed that new-hire first officers have an ATP certificate.

But Tim Brady, dean at Embry-Riddle's Daytona Beach campus, claims that this will force aspiring professional pilots to build time by instructing for 1,000 hours, "and repeating the same hour 1,000 times."

Brady was an Air Force pilot, so presumably never had the pleasure of 1,000 hours of instruction in singles and light twins (One might question whether lack of instructor experience qualifies one to head a campus devoted to flight training, but 40 years hanging around universities has taught me that there is no relationship between teaching experience or ability and administrative responsibilities.}

I have well over 1,000 hours of dual given, in everything from gliders to King Airs. Every hour is different. Those of you who are flight instructors (not just holders of instructor certificates) know what I mean. Here are a few of my every-one-is-different hours. Students have turned a routine stall demonstration into a spin. Instrument students have lost control in IMC. Students have keyed the mic to say something that should not have been said. They have lowered the landing gear early in icing conditions, and flown the ILS at cruise speed, trying to lower the gear while flying 30 knots faster than the maximum gear speed. They have achieved faster-than-gravity descent rates trying to catch the glideslope from above. Glider students have forgotten to turn right at tow release, leading to an up-close look at the towplane. That's a lot of recoveries and preventions.

Brady claims that ERAU students learn airline-style procedures from day one. This means SOPs, things like "At Skyburst Airlines, after an engine failure we climb to 400AGL without touching anything," or "At Aluminum Air we use QFE," or, most important of all, "Payday is Friday and we contribute 1% to your 401K." New-hires have successfully learned this stuff in three week ground school courses since the time of E. K. Gann.

What airline pilots are not learning is what to do when all of the screens go black. There have been more and more incidents like this lately. In 2008, two separate QANTAS A330s had dangerous uncommanded pitch changes after air data system anomalies. Air France 447 crashed into the Atlantic last summer, sending ACARS reports of airspeed problems. The captain of Colgan 3407 pulled back when there were stall indications. Nor are these accidents a new trend. Birgen Air lost a 757 in 1996 when the static ports were taped over; the crew couldn't handle the spurious airspeed indications. Northwest lost a 727 in 1974 due to pitot icing. These accidents led to hundreds - hundreds! - of passenger deaths.

Thinking about these accidents convinces me: when the screens go dark while I'm in back, I want the folks up front to have spent 1,000 hours in an underpowered aircraft with an airspeed indicator too far away to read and an unpredictable student at the controls. I'd like my crew to have crossed the Donner Pass in a 65hp Taylorcraft (Horrors! VFR!?!) or something like that. Four years in a simulator reading checklists isn't reading 1,000 checklists, it's reading the same checklist 1,000 times.

Day 62

It took a while to find my logbook. The last entry was on September 13, 2009. A little over an hour in the Cherokee Six, doing practice approaches with a buddy (and aspiring instrument instructor) as safety pilot. As I recall it was a rough afternoon, and it was good practice.

September 16 was the treadmill test. No flying after that one.

September 24 was the stent: The FAA says that I may reapply for a medical on March 24, 2010.

A stent is absurdly easy on the patient. One day, your life is hanging by a thread, and less than a week later you are out running. The only difficult part is the money. This was my second stent, too. After the first, I went right back to flying, working with a CFI candidate. He was always Pilot-in-Command, of course.

I didn't know that I had it so lucky. I am fully confident in my heart; the problem is my hands. A couple of Saturdays ago the soaring conditions looked promising (locals have been climbing to 18K in strong wave, and running 300K in strong ridge), and I was feeling up to doing the drive (it's hard to sit still for too long). But I woke up in the middle of the night with excruciating hand pain. "Oh no," I though, " I can't hold the stick and I'm too weak to pull the dive brakes." I didn't fly.

The week before had gone the same way. I had been suffering from extreme fatigue; I fell asleep at my desk every afternoon that week. And I had been taking narcotics for pain, although i stopped. The National Transportation safety Board [NTSB] report would have been very unfavorable:

"The pilot in command held an Airline Transport Pilot Certificate with multi-engine rating, and commercial privileges in single-engine landplanes and gliders. [So far, so good.] A recent major medical procedure had made his 14CFR67 second-class medical certificate invalid, but no medical certificate is required to be PIC of a glider. [Still nothing to get upset about.] PIC also suffered from an as-yet-undiagnosed condition. Pilot complained frequently of fatigue and inability to sleep at night, and family and friends remarked that they had found him asleep during the day several times. PIC also complained of loss of appetite, and had lost 10 pounds in the past month. PIC had been taking narcotics for pain."

The NTSB bureaucratese falls short of "What the blankety-blank-blank was the PIC doing trying to fly a glider?"

[It's not as bad as all that, but I'm sure that would be the NTSB's spin on the situation.]

Anyway, I'm seeing the rheumatologist again tomorrow, and am hoping for a definitive diagnosis and the beginning of treatment. The treatments are supposed to be well-tolerated with quick relief. Of course he'll have a definitive diagnosis: my insurance denied the claim for a $106 blood test. They'd only do that for something useful.

So please cross your fingers; I can barely cross mine.

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.