The Club

Flying clubs have long been a good way for pilots to reduce expenses and foster fellowship.  But:

• A few weeks ago one of our members, too cheap to take the airplane into a heated hangar for deicing, attacked the wing with a scraper.  I discovered this while deicing the airplane in said hangar. "Nobody ever told me not to do that" was his weak defense.  Then "What do you recommend rather than paying $25 and waiting an hour?"  My angry reply: "Pay $25 and wait an hour, just like I am doing right now!" The damage is cosmetic but...
• A few weeks ago one of the members closed the rear door to the Cherokee Six with his hand on the plexiglas; of course the hand went right through.  Not bothering to see if it was airworthy, he flew it home, and several other members flew it later.  When I saw the damage I grounded the airplane.  He took on the responsibility of repairing it, but he did it on the cheap and it looks like crap.  I hate it when people do this to their own airplanes, but this is my airplane!
• Now the POH in our Archer is missing.  Lots of finger pointing but nobody taking any responsibility.  I grounded the airplane until it is found.  This is an insurance company's dream come true, right?  A legal excuse to deny any claim.

Anybody know a nice four-place single for sale?  There's a rumor of a seldom-flown Tripacer on the field that may be available...

Maneuvers

The maneuvers in the syllabus build the pilot’s essence and finesse.

 Not part of daily flying, they are nonetheless part of daily flying.

 Two Taylors cut this cloth; F. W., the master of efficiency, and C. G., the master of efficiency. The former, F. W., taught railroad firemen to increase the flow of coal, that is, to shovel more, by shovelling less. His acolytes seek to eliminate extra steps, and urge the world to accept pilots whose training addresses only need–to–know. The latter Taylor, C. G., designed the Piper Cub, but unable to follow the piper split away to design the more efficient Taylorcraft.

It is obvious that mastery of the tailwheel is not a skill used in transport flying, except that it is a skill used indirectly in transport flying. So it is with the maneuvers a new pilot tries to master.

Transports never circle a point on the ground, but at some point over the course of a long day a transport pilot must judge the effect of wind on the craft, and those student circles gave practice in every degree of wind.

Transport pilots do not stall, yet a stalled transport carried hundreds to Davy Jones’s locker.

Transport pilots do not land at short grass strips, but to a transport every strip is short, every landing uses the short field technique.

Transport pilots clear the 50 foot tree on every takeoff.

Formation LITE

Lauran Paine, Jr. writes for EAA's Sport Aviation with a distinctive voice.  I don't always agree with him, but I always look forward to his articles.

This month he wrote about formation flying, but the real topic was flight discipline.  He was a military and airline pilot, but has lots of examples of flight discipline from plain old private pilots like you and (in my heart, not on my certificate) me.

But he omitted a few things, so I wrote the following letter to the editor:

I enjoyed Lauren Paine Jr.'s article on formation flying discipline, but want to add a little from my experience as a CFI-G. Towing a glider behind an airplane is a formation flight, and glider pilots take this very seriously. We have pre-arranged signals, procedures, and contingencies. For example, what if the towplane has an engine failure? For us, vertical position is more crucial: if the glider gets too high it might pull the towplane's tail up too high to allow it to recover. Rather than stars and wingtips, we use markers like stabilizer and main gear on the towplane. We practice changing position on the tow, too, all with prearranged signals. That's Lauren's discipline again. Where things get really interesting is when a slick glider starts to catch up to a draggy towplane, causing a loop in the tow rope. Getting the rope tangled around the glider is a very scary idea. If mishandled, the shock of the rope becoming taut again can break the rope. At the end of the tow, the glider goes up and left, while the towplane goes down and right. Discipline, again.

I got a nice note from editor Mac McLellan this morning saying that they would try to get some of my comments into the magazine. Mac is another guy I look forward to reading: his columns in Flying in the 1980s were masterpieces of explaining technical subjects to a wider audience, and really influenced how I think about aircraft.
I also got a nice note from Lauran Paine...what a wonderful magazine to consider comments so nicely!

Flying the Prius

I've been driving a Toyota Prius for a little over a year.

Being a hybrid, it is a quirky car.  And, no, it doesn't fly, although the salesman tried to impress me by talking about its coefficient of drag.  I called his bluff; he didn't really know what a coefficient of drag was, but he knew it sounded good.

But even though this is as close as the Prius comes to flying, it still can teach us a lot about my two favorite aerodynamic parameters, essence and finesse.

First the finesse part: finesse is the ratio of lift to drag, what glider pilots call L/D.  Due to a quirk in the mathematics of aerodynamical forces, when you write L/D as a formula everything cancels except the coefficients: the coefficient of lift, and, Nick the Toyota salesman's favorite, the coefficient of drag.  When the latter is small, the ratio is big.

Now the Prius's coefficient of lift is about zero, and dividing zero by a smaller number still leaves zero, but at least morally the Prius's finesse is increased.

Now for essence, a compendium of the various kinds of energy available to the craft.  As a hybrid, the Prius has a gas motor and an electric motor.  It starts on the electric motor, sounding like a Montréal subway train, but then the gas motor kicks in.  The gas motor is pretty puny, and the thing holds less gas than my 1946 Taylorcraft.  But the Taylorcraft was a 25mpg machine, while the Prius is a 50mpg machine.

What the Prius has instead is a big battery with its own charge meter hidden somewhere in the display menus.  (It's hard to photograph, being a raster scanned projection.)  As you climb the hill, you can watch essence flow through the gas motor and through the traction motor to the front wheels.  As you descend, you can watch the gas motor turn off and the regenerative braking send essence from the front wheels to the battery.

Essence is malleable: chemical essence becomes kinetic essence becomes potential essence which can become kinetic essence again.  In the Prius, potential essence becomes electrical essence and you can watch it happen.

Still, no matter what you do, the gas gauge only goes down.

Asteroid DA14 and Diamond DA20s

As I write, the asteroid DA14 is passing its perigee, its closet approach to Earth.  I am not afraid of it hitting me, nor am I afraid of it actually hitting a GPS or other navigational satellite directly.

I was worried about the perturbation of a satellite's orbit due to a 1.9E8 kg asteroid passing nearby.  As you are aware, GPS depends on having a super-accurate model of the satellite's orbit, and any error in computing the satellite's orbit translates directly into an error in your GPS estimated position.

My first thought about flying today was to make sure that I am prepared to revert to non-GPS navigation.  No, I take that back, not just prepared, but I need to actually make non-GPS navigation primary.

But after a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the gravitational attraction between a 1.9E8 kg asteroid and 2E3 kg GPS satellite I am not so worried.  Still, the lesson remains: many things beyond human control affect the accuracy of GPS navigation, and we as pilots need to maintain our ability to navigate without GPS.

Duck

Here's an interesting story from Skybrary about a Boeing 737 that was given an altitude below the Minimum Vectoring Altitude.  I fly in mountainous terrain, so this is a particularly important topic.

The 73 got a "Pull Up!" warning from whatever terrain system they had.  It was an -800, so presumably they had some kind of visual terrain warning available (my $700 Garmin handheld and my FlightGuide EFB and my SkyCharts EFB all provide this).  Did they not monitor the terrain?

And what if this had been on a cold day?  With an airport elevation of 639', an aircraft indicating 7800' on a -20C day is more than 800' lower; this airplane passed less than 700' above the terrain.

Back before these great terrain awareness tools were available, I used weather radar to provide a terrain picture.  I set the radar in MAP mode with a short scale (10 or 15 miles).  Approaching Salmon, Idaho on the RNAV approach from the North, I could see the mountain to the left of the course, and the valley straight ahead, on the radar set.

And it has happened to me, more than once.  "Cleared as filed, maintain 9,000" didn't make any sense with 12,000' terrain so close, so I asked.  Whoops!  I wasn't cleared as filed, I was cleared on a victor airway that went the other way, over lower terrain.

The pilot (or crew) is always responsible for terrain clearance.  Always!  Use all the tools you have.

Ducks

It has been a tough winter and flying opportunities are scarce.  Once the semester ended I no longer had my weekly commute to our other campus.  Then came exams, which tie up the professor longer than the student.  I was in hot pursuit of a research project (writing some code).  I had a big credit card bill (airline tickets for Spring break), which I pay in full each month, leaving less in the flying budget.  The Archer was in for its annual and the Six seemed too expensive.

The temperatures were ghastly low, the lowest I've seen in Idaho this time of year, lots of -20C or less.  I had the bright idea to go gather data on cold temperature altimeter errors, hoping for dramatic pictures of high terrain and an altimeter reading something higher.  But it was so cold...

I went to a conference in San Diego, riding in the back of an airliner, looking down at the California desert and feeling deep longing in remembering my flights across that area.  But money was tight and the conference would be expensive enough...

And so six weeks passed without turning a prop.  I'm lucky: I've known people for whom six weeks became six years or even six decades.

The mission: night currency.  This was a bit of a joke: the full Moon over snow-covered ground meant that while it was legally night, it was not night.  But it was a chance to fly, and it made me legal.

I wasn't as behind as I thought I might be, but I seemed to have trouble with the landing light.  Usually I would turn it off climbing through 500AGL, but I kept forgetting to do so.  Maybe I was distracted by the way, each pattern, I crossed the departure end of the runway well to the right.  Each time around, I applied more wind correction, but still ended up to the right.  I was frustrated.  Paying more attention, I found some wind shear abeam the terminal, but still couldn't get the crosswind correction.

When the tower closed I switched to left traffic, and really got beat up on downwind and base.  Especially on base.  But the air smoothed out near the runway: wind shear, again.

I checked the ASOS: wind was variable at 3.  On the surface.  Something else was happening aloft.

After 10 landings or so I decided to call it a night and taxied in to the deserted ramp.  I shut down and stepped out to tie the airplane down.

The wind hit me, hard.  Variable at 3 my ass!

As I tied the plane down I heard something: ducks!  There were ducks flying around the airport tonight!  On a dark night, the birds stay on the ground, but it was so bright that they were comfortable flying.

I peered up at the noise - at the noises - but couldn't see anything.  Of course not.  And I wouldn't have seen them from the plane, either.

And then I thought about the landing light.  I was right to leave it on.  That warned the ducks that I was coming.

Maybe I wasn't so behind after all.