Bass ackwards

The planes are tied down facing south, into the prevailing wind.  To help the TSA, they are within sight of the FBO front desk.  It's been that way for years.

But when the large jet arrived the winds were from the north, at least briefly.  The peak wind for the week was only 36 knots, which is a lot for a Cessna 152 or a DA-20 but not so bad for a jet (I've landed a King Air at 55 knots so this is not just blowing smoke).  So the jet was parked facing north.

After a few days the jet was ready to leave.  Other jets had asked to be towed to face away, but this jet started the engines and applied breakaway thrust while tail-to-tail with a Cessna 172.

Crunch one Cessna 172.

The tail slammed down onto the pavement, bending the rudder and the elevators.  This is the shop's busiest season, so the airplane is grounded until...whenever.

 

The owner's company makes a product I use.  Would it be fair to ask for a few free cases as compensation for lost revenue?

That's not fair.  The crew probably doesn't know that they did this; they could not see or hear it from the cockpit. Besides, it happened behind them. They have "plausible deniability" because there were no witnesses.  But there was only one jet parked tail-to-tail with this 172 all week, and nobody had flown or even started the 172 in the meantime.

They might say "We didn't do it on purpose" but follow Dave English's reasoning to see that there is no such thing as an accident.

You have to "On purpose not do it."  Or as the Navy puts it, "Beware of jet blast."



I have been in similar situations in the King Air.  The solution is easy, if you think of it: you can start a PT-6 engine in feather, so there is no jet blast.  That's "on purpose not doing it."

Or you can have the plane towed so its jet blast won't hurt anything.

But that means looking behind you to see what your jet blast will hit.  I do this in everything except gliders.

We instructors often say "Never put an airplane anyplace you haven't put your brain first."  Now we have another saying to pass on:

Never put an airplane anyplace you haven't put your butt first.

2016 Air-to-air

Thursday afternoon I was ferrying an aircraft home, VFR at 7500ft.  By habit, I was listening to Air Traffic Control even though there is no requirement to do so. Salt Lake Center is one of the few that does not separate high and low altitudes on separate frequencies, so it was no surprise to hear "Speedbird 282" check in. Speedbird, by the way, is the radio call sign for British Airways, headquartered at Speedbird House, London.

Curious, I looked them up on a flight tracker (maybe the same one you use?) and saw that Speedbird 282 was an Airbus 380 going from Los Angeles to London. I looked around a little bit and spotted them, well above me.

Oh, how nice. 

Air France 50 (LAX - CDG) was also on the frequency but I could not see them.  I spent some time thinking about when their paths would cross, since AF50 was north of BAW282.  I thought that would be the end of it.

The next morning my twitter feed featured a photo from a British Airways pilot of sunset over Greenland, "on my way home from LA." After a couple of tweets we pretty well established that he was crew on Speedbird 282 and that we had been flying many hours before within sight of each other.

I posted this story to facebook and got a comment from our local tower chief.  He had been sitting on his front porch (with a beer?  Who knows, but that makes for a good story) and saw "something large" going over so checked on flightaware: Speedbird 282!

You don't have to be very old to remember how difficult it used be to come into contact with people at such far remove. This is one of the things I like about this era.

Foolin' Around

April 1 is a special day in aviation history, at least at my house, because it is the anniversary of Flight Lesson 1.  My first instructor -- I remember his name but won't mention it -- quit sometime before Flight Lesson 2 (I heard he went to United Air Lines), so I did the rest of my training with a man named Tom Carroll at Palomar Airport.  Tom claimed that a pilot would hear his first flight instructor's voice for the rest of his or her career, and he was right (Tom died a few years, but in the hospital, not an airplane).

Maybe he got to teach me at a vulnerable or receptive age (late 20s), but his lessons really stuck, and I often quote him word-for-word with my students.  Sometimes it even works!

But not always.

I was reminded about this the other day when I gave a BFR to a pilot who started flying just a few years before I did.  Why did he appear so old?  But no matter: it was clear that he was the master of this airplane and based on our talk he had mastered many others.  He'd even survived a double engine failure (induction icing with a faulty alternate air design).

As we started maneuvering I almost instinctively gave him my "flaps down trim down" speech (this was in a 182; other airplanes are "flaps up trim down") but if I have learned something as an instructor it is that, at a safe altitude, you can wait and see.  Sure enough, as the flaps went down the trim went down, even as he continued to slightly bawdy story about a pilot we both knew.

I trained in Archers and Warriors.  Tom taught me to jam my elbow into my pelvis when lowering flaps; this enabled me to keep the nose from rising until I had a free hand to retrim.  The seats in a 172 don't quite allow most people to get into a good position to do this, so I have to chant, over and over, "flaps down trim down."

I take students out and do the demonstration stalls.  Near the top of the white arc, I lower full flaps all at once, and the nose rises to about as high an angle as a student ever sees, or wants to see.  "If you don't do something you'll stall, and since you usually go to full flaps at low altitude, you won't recover."  Or a hundred other things.

Maybe I should try to attract Tom back from the dead and have him run a flap clinic?

Or what about this: one of my friends told me that his primary instructor did not teach the use of flaps until after solo: "That's for the short- and soft-field stuff," he'd say.  Then there's no worry of watching a solo student's nose rise just before turning final.  Maybe he could teach us a thing or two.

So the point is that on this anniversary of a flying lesson, I think I need a flying lesson.  It never ends.

Transferability

It is difficult to predict what kind of knowledge is transferable, whether in aviation or in any other realm.  Sometimes it's obvious one way or the other: a Course Deviation Indicator reads the same in a helicopter as it does in an airplane, and you can't bring an airplane to a hover except in the most unusual circumstances.

But I have also written about using the no-rudder-pedal Ercoupe to teach some stick-and-rudder skills.

Yesterday was to be my first helicopter training flight in a month, and when we last left our hero he was wondering how to smooth out his approaches and noticing that his airplane approaches had become sloppy, too.

Was holding a constant glide path a transferable skill?  If so, shouldn't I practice in a $75/hr airplane rather than a $300/hour helicopter?  And isn't practice part of the reportoire of a craftsman?

So before my helicopter flight I took an airplane and spent nearly an hour flying extremely precise approaches.  Let me rephrase that: I took an airplane and spent nearly an hour trying to fly extremely precise approaches.  I was most concerned with the portion from 500AGL to 30AGL, because you can't hover an airplane.

I told my instructor what I had done, saying it was really smart or really stupid and we would have to see which.

After an hour in the helicopter he concluded that it had worked and my approaches were much better despite a month's worth of rust.  A few more autorotations and it will soon be time to solo.

The Last Leg

The IFR system is not kind to the unprepared.  And I suspected that I was one of the unprepared: I can count on one hand the number of times I've filed IFR in the last few years.  I have been scrupulous about staying instrument current, and have regularly spent time reviewing charts and procedures and regulations.  But not in the system is not in the system.

Until this week.  Regular readers may recall me writing about a Cessna 414 that we would be operating for the owner (ie, under Part 91, rather than Part 135, for those savvy about US regulations).  I had been training other pilots to fly it, but with the university in session I had not taken an actual trip.  It had been so long that I needed 3 landings to be legal to carry passengers.

But now school was out and I was scheduled for my first 414 trip in 9 years.

Pick a day 3 weeks in advance and you know the weather's gonna suck, right?  The morning of the trip arrived with marginal VFR conditions and a pretty significant chance of icing based on the icing tools at aviationweather.gov.  I hadn't blown a boot since 2009, but icing was an important part of the training package I had prepared.  But the system is not kind to the unprepared.

I flew a short leg to pick up the owner and his colleagues, mostly IMC, and was waiting for them in the FBO lobby when they drove up (this is very important in the charter/corporate world).  He had some concerns about the weather but I reassured him that the airplane could handle it.  Could I?

The departure was a little bumpy and I was in IMC for almost an hour.  The system is not kind to the unprepared.

Luckily I had played with the radar during training and it showed safe air ahead.  Still, the system is not kind to the unprepared.

I was at 16,000 and did not think FL180 was available because of the low altimeter setting, and Center confirmed that.  But maybe I could get on top?  I had to try to get to FL200, which the airplane could do, but I spent a lot of time staring at the pressurization controller, because the system is not kind to the unprepared.

After 15 minutes at FL200 we were in the clear.  Actually, we would have been in the clear at the same time at 16,000, but who's counting?  We were going to the KPDX area and the whole Presidential range was in view.

But the system is not kind to the unprepared.  "I have an amendment to your clearance, advise when ready to copy."  I had not heard those words from any mouth other than mine, in training, for years.  It seems I had picked the wrong IAF for the approach in use, and the new clearance involved an intersection that I couldn't find.  With a crossing restriction.  You see, the system is not kind to the unprepared.

This 414 has a good pressurization controller, but I didn't have any way of knowing that until I had to descend from FL200 to Sea Level.  (Other 414s I've flown had touchy controllers.)  I spotted the airport about 12 miles out and made a competent landing.  (For that I was prepared.)

Oh, one more thing: this was my first actual trip flying a Garmin 530.  The system is not kind to the unprepared.

OK, flight levels, radar, reroutes. Garmin 530, crossing restrictions.  Nice trip.

The next day dawned with a weather inversion: Idaho weather in Oregon, Oregon weather in Idaho.  Time to see if I remembered how to dodge thunderstorms in IMC.

But the system is not kind to the unprepared.  I fired up and called for a clearance and of course it was nothing like what I had filed, so I quick had to program a DP into the Garmin and into the VORs just as a backup.  And Foreflight as a backup to the backup.

The takeoff and climbout went well.  I have family in the Portland area and I think I flew right over their house on the departure but my hands were full with altitudes and reroutes and traffic.  ATC knows when you are single pilot and wait until you start the level off before clearing you higher, as usual.

The air smoothed out climbing through 7,500' and I spent a fair amount of time just watching the time tick down on the Garmin FPL page.  There was a cloud deck ahead and it looked like we would be higher (we were) but a big thunderstorm was also in sight and on the radar.  Everybody was deviating and I told Center about my plans, but the thunderstorm was actually moving away from the destination.  I did some step-down descents trying to stay out of the clouds but eventually had to go through with both radar and stormscope showing that I had picked a good route.

Approach control at the destination told me to expect a visual to 26, but the tower put me on left base to 8.  The system is not kind to the unprepared.

---

Just one more leg home, and the last leg is special.  No passengers.  No schedule.  Airline pilots don't know this pleasure, and most people flying for themselves miss out, too.  It happens when the passengers go to an airport other than the home base, or you are returning empty.  Sure, we'll fly a King Air home VFR from Salt Lake City, indicating 199 knots under the Class B, or across the desert at 1,000AGL.

I decided to finish the trip VFR, dodging thunderstorms, and hand flying.  There is a difference between eluding (what you do with passengers) and dodging.  It was time to dodge.

There were two big ones straddling the course.  With passengers I would pick a single heading, but in an empty airplane it's much more fun to turn the airplane at the storm and see what it looks like on radar.  And take a picture.  And then turn away.

And, of course, the best landing of the trip is in an empty airplane at a deserted airport.  Sometimes, the system is kind to the unprepared.

It creeps up on you

I am the world's worst helicopter student: my full-time job and my other flying obligations have me flying helicopters once a week or so.  This was just like my glider transition, only with the gliders I had a 3 hour drive each way so flew even less than once a month until I decided to knuckle down and go to a big commercial operation and finish the darned thing.

But the helicopter school is on the field, and the helicopter itself is in our hangar, so I have spent a lot of time sitting in the thing working on my scan and procedures.

And like all bad students, I fly better when the conditions are more difficult, like a beach landing with a maximum performance takeoff.  Try that in an airplane!

But when I come back to the airport my patterns suck.  Worse, I don't think they suck, which means that I am not perceiving something.  You've seen your students do this...now so can you!

Then one day last week I was returning from a photo flight in an airplane and decided for once to pay attention to my approach, since I was flying rather than a student.  You know what?  It sucked!

And now I realize that after a few years of flying focused on Something Else (and maybe a few friendly BFRs from CFI buddies who know that I can fly) I have gotten sloppy.  Sloppiness creeps up on you, through some mixture of complacency and ego.  I fly great!  Why should I pay attention to my approach angle!  

Yeah, right.

The sloppiness wasn't visible until I pushed myself into the helicopter, where someone paid attention and critiqued me.

So here's the plan: I'm going to take my helicopter CFI flying in an airplane while I work on flying a constant approach angle.  The airplane costs 1/4 of what the helicopter does and we're working on an eye problem, not a hand problem, so this seems like a practical approach.

I'll fill you in on the results.

Harder Than They Make It Sound

Lots of people have lots of things to say about aviation safety, myself included, and it might surprise you to hear me say that I am sick of it.  No, I'm not sick of the message, but I am sick of saying and hearing the same things but not seeing any effect in the safety record.

(Today the internet is awash in horrifying pictures of a large turboprop with only one engine turning hitting a bridge in what appears to be a Vmc rollover.  Are we spending enough money on training? How often has this question been asked?  And how often answered: the lack of effectiveness of training programs is addressed in 14CFR135.225, which specifies that low-time (ie, just out of training) captains of turbine-powered airplanes must use higher approach minima.)

My recent forays into helicopter flying have reinforced how difficult training is.  Despite nearly 6,000 hours of flight time in fixed-wing aircraft I am an 8 hour helicopter student: the R-22 pre-landing check (carb air temp, engine gauges, rotor RPM, and warning lights) sometimes costs me 10 knots of airspeed.

One of the big ideas in safety is "Situational Awareness," a phrase old enough to be nearly a cliché. Those rather dry manuals urge students to practice "SA", but actions are more than words. A recent SA situation illustrates how difficult SA really is. (BTW, despite my struggles with the aircraft I perceive that my helicopter SA is about where my airplane or glider SA is. But I could be wrong...)

Here's the set-up: I was getting ready to fly with a student who needed some pattern work, but the field was IFR at 900 overcast.  I told him that I was willing to wait, since the TAF suggested clearing, and had him get the airplane ready so we could have our fingers on the start button when the field went VFR.

I thought about asking for a Special VFR, but hesitated for two reasons: first, Special VFR is usually a tool for getting into the airport, and should only be used to get out of the airport with extreme stupidity, or at least caution.  I hesitated (Law of Primacy) to have my student's first exposure to SVFR be backwards.  Second, there were inbounds fairly close (I checked this on flightaware), so we wouldn't get the SVFR clearance even if we asked.

Soon enough, the clouds began to part, and we walked out to the airplane.  The beacon was winking at us from the tower, but it was clearing rapidly so I called the tower on the phone to suggest a tower observation of 900 scattered.  "We were just looking at that," the controller said, and I said "From here, and I'll swear on a stack of meteorology texts, it's only 45% coverage.  I swear!"

He wasn't buying it right away, but pretty soon the beacon stopped and we heard "Attention all aircraft, Pocatello is now VFR, ATIS Bravo is current."  Oddly enough the ATIS said runway 3 was in use, even though 21 is the calm-wind runway, so we taxied to the hold short line of runway 3.

For some reason I got curious about the location of the inbound and monitored Salt Lake Center while we did the runup.  Sure enough, a SkyWest CRJ checked in, with ATIS bravo, and asking for the runway 21 ILS instead of using runway 3.

Pause.

"SkyWest 7429, Salt Lake, the tower says there's a Cessna in the pattern for runway 3, expect the VOR-3 approach."

That didn't sound right, so I called ground and offered to depart runway 3 and maneuver to use runway 21 for landing.

Pause.

"SkyWest 7429, Salt Lake, the Cessna is willing to work with you if you still want runway 21."

"7429 thanks, but it looks like it's clearing quickly and we'll be able to do a visual."

Ground relayed the same message to us a few seconds later.

---

Look back over this event: the situational awareness involved the internet, face-to-face communication, telephones, and the radio.  Throw in some lights, because I turned all of ours on to help the inbound see us.  And the transponder, which is now permanently on ALT since the recent change in the Aeronautical Information Manual.  And the eyeballs.  (I will omit sixth sense, ESP, and synchronicity as contributing factors.  Or should I?)

This is all in addition to flying the airplane!

This is all in addition to flying the airplane!

The moral is simple: SA is hard, it takes a lot of knowledge, and it takes a lot of practice and experience.