Stick in the Mud

Everyone knows that a "stick in the mud" is someone who is completely resistant to change. That's not me: I'm resistant to useless change.

An Ameriflight pilot who also flew a Cessna 120 once pointed to the Beech 99 that made his living, saying, "That's not flying, it's airplane pointing." Flight training is developing into training in airplane pointing. This development has proceeded to the point that loss of control is the largest cause of transport-category airplane accidents.

Loss of control is the largest cause of transport-category airplane accidents!

I've written about this problem before (see here and here, among other places; the former appeared as a letter to the Editor of Aviation Week. But I'm old enough to remain unsurprised when nobody listens to me.

But I hope people listen to Rod Machado, or at least they should. Rod is an engaging speaker and a funny writer, but always with a serious message.

He writes a column for AOPA Pilot. While I appreciate AOPA, I find their magazines to be poorly written and jingoistic; generally, the article impacts terrain in a nose-high, right-wing-low attitude. The writing is competent, but I'd rather read poetry.

But this month's issue was worth reading because of Rod's column, which got it right: In defense of stick-and-rudder training. He uses the FAA's (and flight training industry's) own logic to puncture itself. "There's no law of psychology - not one - supporting the idea that presolo students learn the basics of flying more effectively...when they are distracted by the burden of simultaneously having to learn higher-order flight skills. The concept is antithetical to the building-block principle of learning."

Well said, Rod!

We have to remember, as Rod writes elsewhere, that "that your objective when teaching someone how to fly is to 'teach them to fly.' " In our rush to be efficient we have lost sight of the goal.

Conversely, right now I am working with a Commercial Pilot candidate who has done most of his flying from uncontrolled fields, and his radio work needs work. But he can fly: he keeps the ball centered, he handles crosswinds well, he's aware of the weather and traffic. So the radio work becomes an add-on.

It's not the primary goal.

Over, and out.

42

Fans of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy recognize the number 42. It's one of our cultural memes, like the crash of the Hindenburg or King's "I have a dream" speech. It's the answer to "Life, the universe, and everything."

The fictional Hitchhiker's Guide... had two words on the cover: Don't Panic. The kind of solid but generic advice a hitchhiker needs.

And a pilot.

I was in the glider with a new student. He already has a commercial power license, and although this was our first day of real training he was making fast progress. On his second takeoff, I gave him the flight controls, and he tracked the towplane pretty well. (That may sound like an insult, but it's not. New students, even transition students, even yours truly, find following the towplane to be Very Hard.)

Our first landing had been on the runway but without enough energy to reach the launch point, but the second had us stopped exactly on the line. Cool! (And it was his landing, by the way, I only offered encouragement.) So we turned the glider around and got ready to launch again. I got in, redid my belt and shoulder harness, and locked and checked the canopy. Check. Check. Check. I wiggled the rudders, called "ready" to to the tow pilot, and started my stop watch.

We started to move, but something didn't feel right, and didn't sound right. Did the the tail come up a little too easily?

"Oh, no, we still have the tail dolly attached!" The tail dolly is a large fiberglass cuff with a large castering wheel that fits over the tail. It makes ground handling easier. Taking off with it attached would give us an aft CG, perhaps aft enough to negate or even reverse the glider's natural pitch stability. It would also hurt our glide ratio, in an unknown amount. Bad idea!

So I aborted. I was surprised how surely my eyes focused on the release handle and I pulled. The rope went with the towplane.

"Glider goes to the right, towplane goes to the left," I told Bill, steering rather gingerly toward the right side of the runway. I was really working the stick, keeping the wings level and the nose at the right attitude. We slowed, so I reached for the wheel brake and braked gently. With this much speed dragging a wingtip could lead to a groundloop, and pulling the brake too hard would dump the glider on its delicate nose.

But we stayed poised, balancing on that one big wheel, and came to a gentle stop at the side of the runway. I stopped the clock. The tail came down, on the tail wheel. The tail dolly was still at the launch point, where it belonged.

True confession: in all of my glider training (remember that I am still a newby) I had never done an abort on the runway. Oh, we talked about it, we prepared for it, we had low altitude "rope breaks" and landed straight ahead, we had "rope breaks" at 200' and turned around to land downwind, we had "rope breaks" on downwind and landed. In twins an "engine failure" on takeoff is a standard maneuver, so I've done it or taught it or evaluated it hundreds of times. But I had never actually aborted on the runway in a glider.

A glider on the runway is different from an airplane: there is only one point of contact, so there is less wheel drag, and the glider is more aerodynamically efficient, too. It takes more flying to stay in control. (I know; I tried it in a Cessna 172 this morning.)

I had done the right thing: decided to abort at a reasonable time, pulled the handle, made sure that the rope really released, and maintained control of the glider. The last one is the most important; losing control bends metal and breaks bones. So, following Douglas Adams's advice, don't panic!.

OK, "don't panic," there's the Douglas Adams connection. But where does 42 fit it?

I looked at my stopwatch. The elapsed time, in seconds, was...

...42.

Rudder and Stick

We all know that the "good old days" when you flew instruments using needle, ball, airspeed, and altitude are long gone. The "good old days" of flying by the seat of your pants and feeling the slipstream on your face are even longer gone. Oh, there may be a few wackos, myself included, who have spent some time flying sideways in a tube-and-fabric airplane in order to stay over the road they're following in a strong crosswind, feeling the wind through the open window (or, in may case, the bad door seal), but the trend in aviation these days is to deploy a simulator-and-classroom trained crew in a highly automated airplane. Some countries have already implemented the MPL, or Multi-Crew Pilot License, whose privileges do not include solo flight. MPL holders may fly as part of a crew, but may not be PIC in a single pilot airplane.

So now we come to the saga of 9M-MRG, a Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines. In 2005, it left Perth, Australia, headed for Kuala Lumpur. Climbing through FL360, things went very wrong. You can find the Australian Transportation Safety Board report here.

Modern aircraft have pitot-static systems, just like my old Taylorcraft, but blend the data with data from accelerometers, GPS, and the like. In many cases, the magnetic compass display is actually computed from the true heading, using a mathematical model of the Earth's magnetic field. So an in instrument is no longer just an instrument; it is a summary of a lot of data, much of it hidden from the crew. Furthermore, a flight control is no longer just a flight control. Autothrottles mean that a crew asks for, say 65% power, and the computers do the rest.

That day, an accelerometer (#6, to be exact) failed. Accelerometer #5 had previously failed, and a software error combined with the two failures led to chaos. The crew got simultaneous overspeed and underspeed warnings, and the airplane pitched up nearly 20 degrees. Airspeed decayed rapidly, but the autothrottles kicked in. The crew disconnected the autopilots and autothrottles and hand-flew back to Perth, where there was a 25 knot gusty crosswind. The bureaucratic jargon for "sweet" is "uneventful landing."

The highest that I have hand-flown is FL 310, where the air density is about 35% of its density at sea level. Even at that relatively low altitude the air is noticeably thin, and hand-flying takes a deft touch. Perversely, with so little air hitting the control surfaces, it is very easy to overcontrol; I have watched a lot of guys try to handfly in the high 20s and spend the afternoon chasing their tail. So I admire the crew that got this airplane on the ground safely.

The reports say nothing about the experience of the crew, but I would like to think that at least one of them had spent a few hours on a sunny morning chasing his or her shadow in a Taylorcraft, or squeaking the maximum performance out of a glider, or shooting touch-and-goes in a Champ, or even flying a Cessna 152 for a $100 hamburger. Because whether you are at 1000 feet and 60 knots, or 38,000 feet and 360 knots, when all else fails you can stick the nose at the right place relative to the horizon and spend the rest of the day enjoying the scenery rather than glued to the gauges.

I love instrument flying, the mental visualization of my position, the getting ready at the right time and no sooner, the precise descent, and the perfectly timed turn to intersect a DME arc. And I love visual flying, trying to make the perfect pull on a chandelle or crabbing along the ridge in a glider. I would like to think that when I am watching the world go by in seat 26A someone up front feels like I do.