ATIS, or Automatic Terminal Information Service, was originally conceived as a time-saving method of disseminating critical, predominately weather-related, information to aircraft interested in arriving or departing from a particular airport.

It’s basically a short recorded message which plays on an endless loop. Remember the days when you had to call a movie theater and listen to a recording to figure out the show times for each film? That’s what we’re talking about here. Pilots listen to the ATIS recording before departing or arriving at an airport in order to learn the wind direction, sky condition, altimeter setting (aka barometric pressure), and runway(s) in use.

ATIS is only available at airports which have an operating control tower. The recording is typically updated every hour and is labeled with a letter. The first ATIS of the day is called “Alpha”. The next hour, when they update it with the current information, it is referred to as “Bravo”. The following hour it becomes “Charlie”. If the weather changes significantly in less than an hour, it will receive a ‘special’ update. When the weather is poor or changing rapidly, updates can happen every few minutes.

In theory, ATIS makes sense. Why require a tower controller to report the weather to every aircraft which contacts them? It’s much easier to simply record that information, and allow the pilot to obtain it on their own time.

Sadly, as with most things in which the government is involved, over time the ATIS broadcasts tend to become bloated with more and more information. The worst example I’ve seen is my home field of John Wayne Airport. If you want to hear it yourself, call (714) 546-2279. I just transcribed the current recording:

John Wayne Airport information Juliet, 1626 Zulu special, wind calm, visibility one-zero, ceiling one thousand five hundred overcast, temperature one eight, dewpoint one three, altimeter two niner niner zero, ILS runway one nine right approach in use, landing and departing runways one niner right and one niner left, caution for a crane three hundred forty one feet MSL two thousand feet right of runway one niner right and a crane one hundred twenty seven feet MSL southwest runway one nine right adjacent to the tower, check Notice to Airmen for any impacts to instrument approach procedures, airport surface detection equipment in use, pilots should operate transponder including mode charlie on all runways and taxiways, all aircraft read back all taxi and hold short instructions, all departing general aviation aircraft contact clearance delivery prior to taxi, IFR aircraft use frequency one one eight point zero, VFR traffic use frequency one two one point eight five, advise on initial contact you have information Juliet.

I’m surprised there’s nothing on there about using caution for birds in the vicinity of the airport. That’s usually part of the ATIS as well.

Anyway, imagine a slow, computerized voice reading all that. Now imagine that it’s happening while you’re operating an aircraft like a spiffy new turbo-normalized Cirrus SR-22 which rents for $350 an hour. The ATIS at John Wayne is currently one minute and thirty seconds long, which means every time you listen to it, it costs $8.75 if the engine is idling.

Oh — did you miss part of it? Then listen to it again. Now the tab is up to $17.50. I’ve had students who had to listen to it three or four times in order to get all the information. And we wonder why flying is so expensive!

It’s even worse if you’re in the air. Sure, you’re already running the engine anyway so it’s not costing you any extra money. But when airborne, your other resources — namely time and attention — are heavily taxed. Your time and attention are critical because you need to be doing other things when you’re approaching an airport. Talking to controllers, running checklists, configuring the aircraft, descending, slowing down, watching for traffic, looking for the airport, and so on. If you’re an instructor, you need to be teaching — and this all happens at a critical transition phase where instruction is important. The length of the ATIS gets in the way of all that.

If you’re flying in instrument conditions, the ATIS is an even bigger obstacle. Not only is the information contained in the ATIS more important to you, but instrument approaches are very high workload environments for the pilot, especially near an airport like John Wayne. The communication frequencies are congested because everyone’s IFR, the controllers are busy, you can least afford to miss a traffic call, you’re being vectored, and are probably setting up radios, GPS, and briefing the approach. This is exactly the wrong time to take a minute and a half out of your day to listen to a pedantic recording with a lot of information you don’t need. If the TRACON controllers were smart, they’d petition to have ATIS broadcasts reduced to the absolute minimum. I guarantee they’d get better responses on the radio from pilots, especially low-time IFR guys and instrument students.

Speaking of controllers, at smaller airports the ATIS is often recorded by a human voice. The problem there is that the recording is made by the tower controller. Yeah, the same guy who’s controlling traffic. If he’s busy and/or there’s a lot of data to put on the recording, he will tend to talk very fast, because the longer they are occupied with making that recording, the longer that guy’s air traffic is not being dealt with. That makes the ATIS hard to understand. Around here, El Monte is well-known for suffering from this issue.

Over time, pilots have developed ways of mitigating the time- and money-sucking effects of a long ATIS:

• listen via phone before engine start
• listen via handheld radio before engine start
• listen to only part of the ATIS
• don’t listen to it at all
• don’t listen to it, but tell the controller you did
• ask the controller to read you the weather portion
• listen to two frequencies at the same time

I have seen these and many other strategies used by pilots. Each of these shortcuts has a drawback. Some are safety issues, others are simply inconvenient. But the larger issue is that these shortcuts shouldn’t be needed at all. The ATIS is simply too long.

Heck, even if you listen to the ATIS, sometimes you haven’t listened to it. How is that possible? Let’s say you just dedicated 90 seconds to listening to the recording (although between asking for a frequency change, tuning radios, etc it’s probably closer to two minutes). You report that you have “information Alpha”. The controller says that information Bravo just came out, so report when you have information Bravo. Great. Now you have to listen to it again. Oh, probably only the weather portion changed and everything else is the same. But what if it’s not? Suppose a navaid is now out of commission, or runway lighting is affected, or there’s a disabled aircraft on a taxiway? I’ve seen all those things happen just at John Wayne.

Yeah, ATIS is a problem. The solution, however, is elegantly simple: shorten it. Not just a little, I mean cut that thing down to the bone. Absolutely vital information only. In most cases, that means weather. Take a look at the bolded portion of the ATIS transcription. If I were king of the world, that’s all you’d hear.

This is not an answer requiring a Ph.D, so you might wonder why someone at the FAA hasn’t seen the light and taken action. First of all, the FAA doesn’t care how much money or time you waste on the ground. If they did… well, let’s just say aviation would be a much different place. Second, as a large government agency, there is a fair bit of “CYA” thinking. If it’s on the ATIS, then the pilot as been advised of it and the FAA is not responsible for non-disclosure. You hit a bird on departure? “Hey we told you about the birds”. Third, the controllers don’t have to listen to the ATIS a dozen times a day, so they aren’t aware of the problem. Fourth, controllers are no longer pilots. In the old days, a high percentage of controllers were also pilots. That was a good thing, because they saw every aspect of air traffic from both sides of the coin. Today, very few controllers are active pilots, and it shows. I can readily identify a controller-pilot just by how they talk on the radio.

There is another reason that the ATIS stays as long as it is, and it’s called “D-ATIS”. Digital ATIS is a transcribed, digitally transmitted version of the ATIS audio broadcast, usually accessed on a computer screen in the cockpit. It’s mainly the airliners, business jets, and other big money operators which have access to D-ATIS. They are the ones with the deep pockets and political clout to have complaints about the ATIS addressed. The problem is they don’t have to listen to it! It’s transmitted to a screen and they simply read it at their leisure. The rest of us simply suffer in 90-second-long silence. Try sitting in silence for 90 seconds. It’s a long time. Now imagine you’re traveling three miles a minute over the ground.

I have campaigned to have the ATIS shortened at John Wayne to no avail. I feel strongly that most of the information should be published elsewhere in writing and obtained as part of a preflight briefing. All that junk about the cranes, approach minimums, ASDE, clearance delivery frequencies, birds in the vicinity, etc. belongs elsewhere. Even the portion about the runways in use should be removed. Pilots are already aware of the runway configuration, and once they have the wind direction they should know which runway is in use. Especially at a Class C airport, the TRACON controller is going to be routing pilots toward the runway in use, and they even tell you which runway it is. “Head to Signal Peak for left traffic, runway 19 left…”

Shortening the ATIS would increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve safety. When something other than weather is added to the ATIS broadcast, it should be because a temporary situation has occurred where vital operational information needs to be disseminated to ALL pilots. Examples:

• stuck mic on the tower frequency, so an alternate is in use
• disabled aircraft on the runway
• runway or taxiway closure (and even then, only until published in a NOTAM)

Reducing non-weather ATIS information to the absolute minimum ensures that the entire recording will be listened to and understood. Critical information will stand out rather than be lost in a stream of unimportant data. And when you miss a piece of the ATIS, you can take comfort in the fact that it will loop around again in 20 seconds, not 90.

So there it is. If you think ATIS is too long at your airport, do something about it. It’s a safety hazard. The longer we stay silent, the longer it’ll get and the longer we’ll stay silent while listening to it. Kind of a vicious circle, isn’t it?

Well, here it is: the long-awaited details of the FAA’s proposed addition of Class C airspace to Long Beach:

I’m not sure this airspace addition will reduce the risk of a midair collision. In fact, I think it might do just the opposite. While ostensibly protecting airplanes on the instrument approaches to runway 30, it will force non-participating aircraft into a smaller chunk of sky.

I’ve heard they are expecting to implement this change without much, if any, increase in staffing at Socal Approach. Considering the volume of traffic in and around Long Beach, I can only assume Socal will be unable to provide services to aircraft in local practice areas. This will force them down below 2400 feet over the harbor, and below 1500 feet off the Huntington Beach coast. At that altitude, they will be mixing it up with banner towers and helicopters. In addition, lower altitudes equate decreased glide distance for single engine airplanes. So they will stick closer to the coast, causing further congestion.

Transiting aircraft will be forced upward and having to live in the airspace between 3500 and 4900 feet. Should training aircraft elect to fly above the Class C airspace, that will add to the logjam as well.

It’s also worth noting that these are the aircraft which are most likely to be flying without traffic detection equipment.

There are a few other odd things about this proposal. The Los Alamitos class D airspace appears to be reduced to a pie-shaped slice. I’ve not seen that before. The west side of the field will be class C while the east side remains class D.

Speaking of Los Alamitos, I can’t help but wonder how this will affect the Medfly operations in and out of that airfield. Our operations probably contribute to the perceived need for this airspace. We routinely fly in and out of Los Al to the south at 1000′ MSL. We have north/south regions over that area which we fly at 1000′ and/or 2100′. These are standard procedures for us, all of which were designed with ATC’s input and which we fly while talking to them and with their full assent. It may give the airliners an occasional RA (resolution advisory) or two, but I’ve never felt it was in any way unsafe.

There are certainly times when adding airspace is necessary. For example, I wouldn’t mind seeing a class D tower added at Corona. But I’m not sure this Long Beach thing is such a good idea.

I’d be interested to hear from other Socal pilots. What’s your take on this proposal?

Finally. An airline with a sense of humor!

I’d never heard of South African carrier Kulula Airlines until today. And odds are, you hadn’t either. Given the chance, though, I’d fly with them in a heartbeat just based on what’s in these pictures. Typical male response, eh? Only concerned with exterior appearances!

Seriously though, it speaks volumes about Kulula that they set aside the laws of corporate branding long enough to acknowledge the oddity of the aviation lexicon. To the average passenger, it’s undoubtedly an off-putting jumble of terms, acronyms, and abbreviations. They acknowledge this, and do it with a sense of humor which will bring a smile to neophytes and veterans alike.

Most American carriers wouldn’t have the chutzpah to green light this sort of thing. They tend see the exterior spaces of an airliner fuselage as a place to sell advertising to the highest bidder. I’ve seen theme parks, NBA basketball franchises, states, magazines, and other entities advertised. Perhaps it’s part of the financial equation and simply a necessity to keep the airline profitable.

Whatever the reason, I salute Kulula. Perhaps there’s a moral here: putting the fun and enjoyment back into aviation can help the bottom line, too. Here’s hoping “Flying 101″ is viral enough to bring some of that thinking up to our hemisphere.

Flying 101, indeed!

Look, it's a flying aviation dictionary...

The introduction of computerized displays (also known as “glass panels”, or in the FAA’s parlance, Technologically Advanced Aircraft or “TAA”) into general aviation cockpits can mean serious consequences for those unprepared to deal with the complexities involved.

Sure, there’s a lot of power and capability present in those computers. They can provide you with wind speed and direction, beautiful color moving maps, an entire continent worth of aeronautical data, and so much more. Terrain databases, traffic alerts, sophisticated autopilots, GPS roll steering, highway-in-the-sky, and so much more. Things we probably haven’t even though of yet.

Amazing stuff. Of course, it can be a bit daunting for those who haven’t reached a particular skill level with the glass. Information overload is common, even in experienced pilots. I see this a lot in the latest generation of G1000 panels; there is so much information on the Primary Flight Display that it can get overwhelming.

As always, the weakest link in the cockpit is usually the guy flying the plane. One thing pilots of all experience levels have to watch for is what I call the “junk in, junk out” syndrome. The computers will do exactly what you tell them to do. If, for example, you input SLI as a waypoint and aren’t careful, you can end up going to South American instead of Seal Beach, because there is an identically named navaid on that continent. All it takes is a wrong button push and poof!, you’re on your way.

This kind of thing is common with intersections because they use five letters. Key in DRIFT instead of DRIFY and you’ll end up east of Philadelphia instead of south of Long Beach, CA.

I’ve done this several times myself. The only way to prevent it is to double check that the courses and distances make sense.

Computers have the ability to smooth and simplify our lives. They also have the ability to cause major problems. Anyone who has ever cc:’d an email to the wrong person(s) can tell you about that.

In aviation, they can cause funny things to happen even outside the cockpit. Here’s one such example: a friend of mine runs a well-known aviation weather site, and his system choked on an odd identifier. Turns out someone at the FAA cut-and-paste into the wrong window, and his laundry list of personal tasks ended up in the FAA’s international NOTAM system.

You’ve gotta see this NOTAM that popped up a couple of weeks ago, and it just tripped up our decoder today…

This is for ICAO identifier “MIKE” — which as far as I can tell is just a guy named Mike!!

Wish this was just a joke, but it’s actually in the FAA’s international NOTAM system!!!!!

0014/09 – 0014 NOTAMR 0009 0013 A) MIKE PART 1 OF 2 B) WIE C) UFN E)

THINGS TO DO LIST IN NOVEMBER 2009 AT:
1607 JAMES ISLAND AVE., N.M.B.
BRING: MESUREMENTS OF: OUR BEDROOM SET, ETC.
TURN ON THE HEAT VICE A/C.
MASTER BATHROOM/KITCHEN PAINT: CLOSET/WINDOW MOULDING.

I OWE JOE/JOE FOR PALM FERTILIZER/TRIMMING, IF DONE??
BUY: GRILL, PRESSURE WASHER AT LOWE’S (NMB), NEXT SPRING (2010).
10 AZALEAS, OR FLOWERS (NMB), NEXT SPRING (2010).
CURTAIN ROD FOR UP-STAIRS BATHROOM??

TO DO: ME, HANDY-ANDY, PAINTER??
STAIN/OR WAX BANNISTER?
SPARE BEDROOM: PAINT INSIDE TRIM IN CLOSET.
CLEAN UP THE PLANT IN THE GARAGE, NEXT SPRING (2010).
FERTILIZE LAWN/PLANTS, NEXT SPRING (2010).
HANDY ANDY, NEXT SPRING (2010).

(ED) CAULK/PAINT OUTSIDE WHERE NEEDED.
INSTALL SHELVING IN ALL UPSTAIRS CLOSETS.
RE-HANG BALCONY DOOR LIGHT FIXTURES.
LAUNDRY ROOM: INSTALL CABINET/SHELF ABOVE.
CLEAN OUT THE GARAGE DOORS: BRAD/BRADY, CHRIS DOORMAN.

(AUGUST 09)
CALL EXTERMINATOR FOR APPMT: 843-365-5120 (CONWAY PEST CONTROL)
CALL A/C TECHNICAN FOR SEPT. CK ON HEAT PUMPS, NEXT SPRING (2010).

You’ve gotta admire the guy’s level of organization. His home sounds lovely. Now if he could just do something about those “fat fingers”…

As I mentioned in my last post, some captain upgrades and new hires are finally appearing at Dynamic.

For the past year and a half, things had been completely static. I was one of the last people to upgrade to the left seat, and those who were stuck as first officers eventually started to get discouraged. It’s hard to blame them. They work extremely hard for $11 an hour (yeah, you read that right) day in and day out. Thankfully, for those who stuck around, their patience has begun to pay off. And for those who haven’t upgraded yet, at least they see some light at the end of the tunnel.

The down side to this is that I have lost some of my favorite first officers. I’m glad they’ve upgraded, but today I started to realize how much I’d come to rely on their experience, not to mention the fun factor of flying with them. Then again, I get to play a part in the training of some upcoming pilots, and that’s pretty neat too.

Today I was flying with one of the “new guys”. It was an atypical day because I clocked in at 6:00 a.m. I normally get an early start, but not THAT early. We were cranking at that hour because a ceremony would be taking place later in the day to honor a soldier whose body was being returned home from Afghanistan. During the ceremony, which was to occur in the middle of our work day, the base would be on “quiet hours”, meaning no aircraft operations were permitted.

My first officer and I had taxied out to the runway for our second flight. We lined up, completed our final checks, set power, and released the brakes. Everything was normal for a few seconds. Then, as we accelerated down the runway, a very large hawk came into view. He was sitting in the middle of the runway with his back to us, wings folded majestically. He didn’t seem to be doing anything special, just sitting there.

My FO (who has only a few flights under his belt in the BE90) asked if he should abort. I said no. My feeling about birds is that they generally get out of the way. Those that don’t are not going to be avoided by maneuvering, especially in something the size of a King Air. It’s akin to a scuba diver trying to out-swim a sea lion under water. We move at a comparatively glacial pace, and if they want to avoid us, they can jink and jank in ways we can only dream of.

And in this case, I don’t think we could have stopped in time anyway, even with full reverse and hard braking. I’d rather hit the bird than try and steer around it in a 10,000 lb. King Air and end up veering off the runway.

We seem to hit birds fairly frequently at Los Alamitos. The base — along with the adjacent Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station — is some of the last open space in the area, and it attracts a lot of wildlife. Now as to why the wildlife that flies seems to enjoy hanging out around the runway, you got me.

So as I mentioned, the hawk was sitting on the runway centerline with his back to us. I’m sure he knew we were coming. A King Air with the props turning at 2200 RPM is pretty loud. Plus we have two alternating flashing landing lights on each wingtip and another one on the nose gear. In fact, I know the bird saw us coming, because he actually turned his head 90 degrees and looked at us as we approached!

By now you’ve probably guessed the hawk elected to make a stand against the five-ton turboprop, and in the words of the Knight Templar, he chose… poorly. We heard a distinctive thump as the half of the hawk which wasn’t left on the runway hit the right main landing gear leg.

We rotated, the FO called for gear retraction, and I selected… nothing. The gear handle wouldn’t move. So I pushed the downlock override, selected gear up, and was rewarded with red lights, warning horn, and no gear movement. Mmm-hmmm. I lowered the gear handle and immediately got three green lights. Down and locked.

Remembering rule #1 (always fly the plane), I elected to monitor the FO as he flew and ignore the gear until we could get to a higher altitude. Once off the coast, I briefed the FO: he would focus on flying the airplane and look for traffic; I would troubleshoot the gear and handle the radios.

There were no indications of blown circuit breakers or other failures. No reason to pump the gear manually, it was already down. There is a checklist for failure to extend, but nothing for a failure to retract. I suspected that the bird strike had done something to the squat switch, because the aircraft was reacting like I had raised the landing gear lever with the plane sitting on the ground.

I called our maintenance shop and after a few queries, they said that if it was definitely down and locked, leave it that way and return. So that’s what we did. I elected to make a fly-by of the tower just to have them look at that right gear leg and see if there was any obvious sign of damage, flat tire, or other abnormality. They didn’t see anything amiss, so we returned and landed uneventfully. Well, aside from the trail of emergency vehicles which followed us to the ramp.

We moved our load to another aircraft and had an uneventful flight. At the end of the day, I got with the mechanic who put our broken bird up on jacks, and what they found was that the hawk had bent part of the squat switch — a device which detects when the airplane’s weight comes off the wheels — in such a way that it was locked in place and always thought the plane was on the ground. An easy fix. And they also found the hawk on the runway. Or should I say, half of it. Apparently our prop cut the bird cleanly in half.

What I learned today (or should I say, re-learned) is that rule #1 really works. Fly the airplane, no matter what. When something goes wrong, there’s often an irresistible urge to do something, fix something, check for that breaker, try the gear retraction juuuuust one more time. In a busy terminal area when you’re low to the ground with the extra drag of the landing gear reducing your climb rate and a brand new low-time first officer flying the airplane, the best course of action is frequently to ignore the problem and just fly.

Hello there. Yeah — you. The one who thought I was MIA/AWOL/just plain dead.

I will be the first to admit that I’ve been remiss in keeping my site up to date. As a former professional web developer, the kiss of death for any site in my bookmark list was always when a site was no longer updated on a timely basis. Sort of the way this one has been of late. After all, why should I pay more attention to a site than the owner does?

So who knows what sort of readership I still have left for the House of Rapp — if any.

In my defense, however, I’ve got a great excuse. I went from being unattached to dating to engaged to married in a little over a year. If you know anything about me, you’ll know I’m very methodical about important matters, and this sort of thing is uncharacteristic, to say the least. However, it’s definitely the best thing that’s ever happened, too.

My fiancee — er, I mean “wife” (I’m still getting used to that!) — and I just returned from a fantastic ten day honeymoon in Hawaii. My only experience with the 50th state had come from a few visits I’d made to Honolulu when I was a kid. And Kristi had never been to Hawaii at all. I explained that Honolulu was basically a major metropolitan area and might not impart the romantic solitude we were seeking. So we ended up honeymooning on Maui, and what a great decision that was! Not nearly as sleepy as Kauai, but far less urban than Oahu.

Anyway, the past months have involved working, planning a destination wedding in San Luis Obispo, registering, the honeymoon, and of course the process of combining two households. My routine has been anything but normal, so finding time to write has been scarce. I aim to change that, however.

OK, you’re probably here because of an interest in aviation. So, on the flying front, I’m still flying King Airs for Dynamic Aviation. For the past 18 months or so, there really hasn’t been any movement in the pilot ranks. No upgrades, no new hires. But over the past few weeks we’ve had three upgrades, an announcement of a new base manager, and other developments.

I’m not sure this portends any sort of upswing in the overall aviation sector, however. These are mainly replacements for existing King Air captains who are moving on to other bases or jobs within the company. Nobody I’m aware of is being hired by airlines, fractionals, or charters. In fact, Netjets, the 500 pound gorilla of the Subpart K world, just announced it was laying off about 500 pilots. So the pain continues. The Netjets news was particularly disheartening to me, because flying for them is my ultimate career goal.

Aerobatic competition has been nil for the past year. Sad, but with the move to the Advanced category, I really don’t feel good about just jumping into things. I want to ensure I can fly the sequences safely and be competitive. Do it right or don’t do it at all. That’s my philosophy. I’ve done some judging, coaching, and instruction, just not much competing.

The RV transition training has been picking up nicely. I think I’m starting to get a stronger reputation as a Socal guy that knows RVs. The next step is really for me to get a side-by-side model — probably an RV-6 — that I can use for transitions. The problem with using the student’s aircraft is that often it’s not available. It either hasn’t been purchased, or the builder hasn’t made the first flight yet. I’ve started to delve into what’s required for an FAA training exemption so that I can hire the aircraft out for these flights. Without that exemption, it is not permissible to rent an Experimental airplane.

So that’s the story. Thanks for sticking with me and being patient. I’ll leave you with a link to a web site I created for the wedding. It’s got quite a few photos, stories, and other stuff on there. Our wedding was aviation-themed, so you’ll at least want to get a look at the photo of the cake.

The fine folks at Applemoon have put together a lovely slide show of photos from our shoot earlier this month. As a Sinatra fan, I thought the sound track was a nice touch. It’s also the title of our wedding web site.

http://applemoonphotography.myshowit.com/krisitronengagementslideshow

We’ve gotta narrow it down to about 20 pictures for our album, and that’s not going to be easy! So many of them turned out beautifully that it’ll be a shame to pick only 20. Oh well — that’s certainly better than the alternative!

I thought I was creative with a camera, but even after 4500 hours of flying, I never came up with any of the stuff they thought of. The photographers commented many times on how they could have spent all day out there on the ramp because airplanes present so many interesting photographic possibilities.

You can see from the slide show that they took advantage of many of these options. Wings, struts, cabanes, flying wires, chromed spinners, gull-wing doors, and all sorts of funky curves throughout the fuselage. We ran out of time long before they ran out of ideas. The fact that they don’t spend all their time around aircraft probably let them come to the shoot with a fresh perspective, whereas I see the aircraft every day, so I overlook many of the details they immediately noticed.

The beauty of digital photography is that you can shoot to your hearts content without driving up the cost of the photos since there’s no film to purchase, process, develop, store, etc. I’m not sure how many pictures they took in total, but it may have been over a thousand. Both of them were shooting all day long.

Again, many thanks to Michael & Maren for the great work!

Kristi and I recently had the opportunity to work with the very talented duo of Michael and Maren Brajkovich on our engagement photos.

We really wanted to do something special, something that reflected our passion and history together. So it goes without saying that aviation would be a part of it.

We originally had the idea to shoot over at Chino Airport, where we’d have access to not only my Pitts S-2B, but also the many amazing warbirds at the Planes of Fame. Imagine it: Mustangs, P-38s, Spitfires, Corsairs. Ah, the possibilities!

Unfortunately, we found ourselves with a few time constraints. In addition, it turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year — nearly 105 degrees at SNA, which is only a mile from the ocean. So we regrouped and ended up doing the photos at John Wayne Airport with Sunrise Aviation‘s recently acquired S-2B standing in for good o’l 1191. Aside from the three-blade MT composite propeller, the two aircraft look virtually identical from the outside. And to be honest, the metal two-blade Hartzell prop probably evokes a more vintage feel anyway.

Kristi, ever the creative soul, put together a 1930′s-era wardrobe to accompany the biplane, and off we went! Snap snap snap…. and before we knew it, two hours had gone by. Despite the searing heat, we had a blast.

After finishing with the Pitts, we switched into some casual contemporary clothes and flew to Catalina Island in a Cirrus SR-22. This also happens to have re-created our first date! If you can believe it, it was even hotter on the island.

We returned a few hours later and, after a break, met up with Michael and Maren in Old Town Orange where we took advantage of the late-afternoon light for some fun shots around one of our favorite weekend hangouts, Byblos Cafe.

We can’t say enough good things about Michael & Maren (aka “Applemoon Photography“). They were fun, energetic, creative, talented, and open to ideas other photographers might have laughed at. In addition, they came all the way down from San Luis Obispo to spend the entire day working with us.

So, have a look at the pictures. What do you think??

Aviation is a fascinating, almost secret world. To those on the outside, it basically consists of airliners and… uh, more airliners, I guess.

When people learn that I’m a professional pilot, they invariably ask which airline I fly for. When I tell them I don’t fly for an airline, they say “ohhh” in that sad empathetic tone reserved for downtrodden, second class citizens.

Little do they know there’s an entire world of flying out there, much of which does not involve an endless series of occupied gates, surly passengers, overcrowded airports, corporate mergers, pay cuts, bankruptcies, and nights spent away from home.

One of the things I’m most frequently asked about by those who dig a little deeper into my flying career is my work for the “Medfly program” here in Southern California. What is it? Why is it needed? And what the heck is a Medfly, anyway?

The short version: the program is a cooperative effort between the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to control the Mediterranean Fruit Fly population here in the state.

Medflies are not native to the state of California. On the contrary, they are highly destructive to more than 400 varieties of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and other crops. Keep in mind that agriculture is California’s largest industry and California is by far the largest economic engine in the country, and you can understand how these little insects could cause some serious damage. I’ve heard that our program, which costs about $25 million per year, saves more than a billion dollars in crop damage.

In the early 80′s, the Medfly problem even cost the state’s governor his job. Medfly eradication in those days was done with malathion, a controversial pesticide which was sprayed over populated areas by a fleet of helicopters. Then-Governor Jerry Brown claimed the pesticide was not harmful, but the public was skeptical, and at the very least, it damaged the finish on cars left outside during spraying operations.

Rather than run for a third term, Governor Brown ran for U.S. Senate but was defeated by Pete Wilson, in part due to extremely poor public opinion of the way he handled the Medfly outbreak.

Most people who lived in southern California during that period assume I must be spraying malathion, but that practice ended a long time ago. Today, we use a non-pesticide method called the “sterilized insect technique”. Basically, male flies are raised in captivity and irradiated to sterilize them. Then they are released from aircraft, and these sterile males mix with any wild female population. Their attempts to breed are futile, and without any reproductive capability, that generation of flies dies off. The program releases flies in the southern California area as a preventative measure even when there are no major outbreaks.

One of the earliest questions I had about the program was why it was necessary here in the L.A. basin. There’s very little agriculture left in this area due to the high population density. Wouldn’t it be better to drop flies in the San Joaquin Valley where most of the farms are located? I was told that although there’s little agriculture in the Los Angeles basin, there are a lot of immigrants and cargo coming into California via the roads, ships, and airports, and that’s how most of the wild Medflies find their way into our fair state. It’s also why there are agricultural inspection stations on the way into California.

If you’d like to read the California Department of Food & Agriculture’s official explanation of the program, they have a detailed breakdown of how it all works on their web site. Rather than re-hash that, I’ll give you a photographic look at the program from a pilot’s perspective.

By the way, I should note that I don’t work for the CDFA. I work for a company called Dynamic Aviation, which is contracted by CDFA to handle the actual flying. The pilots, mechanics, and aircraft are Dynamic assets. It’s a fascinating company to work for, but I’ll save the company details for a future post.

OK, here we go! The day starts at 4:45 a.m. Yes, you read that right. I get up, take a shower, eat breakfast, make a brown bag lunch, check weather, and head out the door by 6:00 a.m. But when that alarm goes off at 4:45, I always wonder what the hell I’m doing up at that hour.

It used to be a lot harder to work this schedule when I was also singing for Opera Pacific. Every now and then I’d have a rehearsal or performance the night before which wouldn’t allow me to get to bed before midnight at the earliest, and then have to get up at 4:45 the next morning. Ugh.

I don’t have any photos from the next thing, but I arrived on base at about 6:30 a.m. to start the dispatching tasks for the day: checking & printing weather, issuing flight assignments, coordinating with the CDFA personnel, filing flight plans, and basically doing a lot of paperwork. That’s the one constant in aviation: paperwork.

After that, I proceed to the flight line and join the other guys in performing the kind of mundane task you don’t see in Top Gun: washing an aircraft. Everyone pitches in, pilots, mechanics, etc. I don’t mind it, because it’s a chance to watch the sun rise, joke around with the other crews, and stretch out a bit before the 6-7 hours of flying which follow. Hours of sitting in a seat fairly motionless, I might add:

After the wash, the aircraft is towed back to the flight line and the crews start pre-flighting their aircraft. We typically send out four or five aircraft per day. Each aircraft will fly two or three flights totaling five to seven hours of flight time. So that’s 25-35 hours of flying for our fleet each day, and we do it seven days a week.

This is Tim, my first officer for the day, doing the towing duties. Like many of the pilots at Dynamic, Tim is also an A&P mechanic, meaning he can fix the planes as well as break them. I can only break them… but in my defense, I do it very well.

We operate out of a military base which sits on some prime real estate near the ocean right on the border between L.A. and Orange counties. It’s a “Joint Forces Training Base”, whatever that means. We just call it “Los Alamitos”.

For a military airfield, it has remarkably little flying activity. There are some helicopters based here, and occasionally the President, F-18s, or other aircraft will fly in for a while. Sometimes a civilian 737 will fly in to drop of soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. During the annual fire season, military Blackhawks are sometimes pressed into service to fight the fires.

But for the most part, we are the main users of the base’s runways. In 800 hours of flying off this air base, I’ve yet to see another non-Dynamic aircraft taxiing at the same time as me anywhere on the airfield.

Here’s a pair of T-45A Goshawk jets near the wash rack:

Within about 15 minutes, our aircraft is prepared for departure. Fuel and oil checked, chocks and covers removed, dispersal equipment checked, cockpit setup complete, and we’re hooked up to an external generator to keep the refrigeration equipment cold. The flies are kept at about 40 degrees so that they don’t try to escape from the box. At this point, we’re just waiting for the CDFA personnel to arrive with our cargo.

You’ll notice the interior has been stripped out of this aircraft. These airplanes are ex-military U-21A turboprops — basically an unpressurized King Air 90. The passenger seats are replaced with a refrigeration and auger system used to distribute the flies. We also have upgraded avionics, wig-wag landing lights, traffic detection systems, and other modifications.

The “Restricted” placard indicates that this aircraft is certified in the Restricted category (due to our installing non-aviation equipment) and cannot be used to carry passengers or non-essential personnel.

In these photos we have the cargo door open and are waiting for our load. Notice the fly chutes hanging down from the belly of the aircraft in the second photo. Also, note the power cord which is providing electricity to the refrigeration unit.

Here the CDFA guys have arrived with our box. This thing contains several million flies. The sterilized ones we drop have an orange dye on them for ease of identification when they show up in the little fly traps placed around Southern California. We load the box, fill out some paperwork to confirm the load weight and the regions we’re headed to, as well as an ETA for our second flight, close the door, run some checklists, and off we go!

According to my watch in the photo below, it’s about 9:45 a.m. and we’ve probably been in the air for about an hour and forty-five minutes. The fuel panel shows the tanks are still fairly full. I don’t know why I took this picture, except perhaps to show some part of the aircraft for a reason I’ve long since forgotten.

Here’s the front office. The panel is fairly standard, with flight instruments in front, two rows of engine gauges to the right of them. And in the center a stack of Garmin radios. We have two transponders, so as per Murphy’s Law, we will never, EVER have a transponder failure.

The equipment which probably looks most foreign to the pilots among you are the camera and the red LED-thingie above the annunciator panel. The camera is so we don’t miss any breaking news from CNN about new TFRs. And the LEDs are for the laser light show which accompanies the flying music on our iPods.

Um, or not. Actually, the camera allows is to verify that flies are actually dropping from the aircraft. The light bar on top of the glareshield is part of the AGNAV system. This system was originally designed for cropdusting. It indicates how far off the desired flight path we are at any given moment.

In the photo below, it indicates our ground track is 181 degrees true, and that we’re 64 feet to the right of the course centerline. The LEDs in the middle are a form of Course Deviation Indicator. Cropdusters need this because they can’t be looking down at a computer screen when they’re flying 10′ off the ground.

Here’s a wider photo of the entire panel, which I undoubtedly took on my way back from the ‘loo. Yeah, if only. We don’t have a bathroom onboard this aircraft. I was probably checking the fly box to get an idea of how much longer we’d be in the region dropping flies.

Anyway, the light bar now indicates we’re flying a true ground track of 3 degrees and are 41 feet right of the desired course line.

We are required to keep the aircraft within 150′ of the course line, 100′ of the desired altitude, and maintain 140 knots indicated airspeed +0/-5 knots. That’s not hard to do… for a while. But try doing it when you’ve been in the air for seven hours already. Fatigue? Yeah, it gets tiring.

Thankfully, we have two pilots on board and can switch off. That’s not to say the PNF (pilot-not-flying) can just sit around. The PNF has to operate the radios, scan for traffic, operate the dispersal equipment, monitor the pilot who is doing the flying, and do the required paperwork for each pass.

Here Tim is flying the aircraft while I’m… well, apparently taking a photograph. Keep in mind most of our operations take place in the Los Angeles basin, the most highly congested airspace in the world. We operate close to terrain, at low altitudes under the LAX localizer, and in all sorts of odd places you don’t normally find airplanes. We need to do that to ensure a proper coverage of medflies. I believe we drop them at the rate of something like 32,500 flies per linear mile.

The system works well, but it does require a high level of vigilance from the pilots. The Los Angeles airspace was not designed to accommodate our kind of flying, but what we do is important enough that the controllers have maps of our regions and we have an excellent working relationship with them, often operating in Bravo airspace where other aircraft would not be allowed entry.

When we reach the end of a line (or “pass”, as we call it), we reverse course and fly the next line according to the data provided by the CDFA. Most of our regions are flown on north/south or east/west courses, but occasionally terrain will dictate an oddball course, such as out by Lake Elsinore.

Anyway, here we are in the middle of a right turn. Notice the attitude indicator, which shows about a 50 degree bank. Pretty steep for a King Air. We are allowed up to 60 degrees of bank by company policy. It’s hard on the airplanes, and they’re old. And we fly in heavy turbulence at times. So the aircraft get frequent spar inspections.

I don’t know the details, but General Electric apparently has a division that does this type of inspection using some high tech equipment. I’ve seen the van come out and do something to the airplanes, but I’ve never paid enough attention to really know all the details. However, I take comfort in knowing that the same mechanics who turn wrenches on these aircraft also fly them.

Well, after a couple of hours on station, I go back and check the fly box to see what’s left. In this photo you can just see some residual flies clinging to the side of the box. They don’t fly around — remember, it’s 40 degrees in that box. They just sit there, even when the box is opened up. Looks like we’re out of flies, so it’s time to head back to base to refuel, take a 20 minute lunch break, and then do it all over again.

At the end of the day, the aircraft has to be refueled, post-flight inspection completed, cockpit secured, the augers cleaned out, paperwork completed, and more. When we’re done, the ramp looks neat and tidy:

It’s worth noting that not everyone at Dynamic gets to fly every day. There are two types of pilots: those who are mechanics, and those who aren’t. I’m a part-time, non-A&P captain, which means I fly all the time I’m there. Full-time mechanic/pilots split their work week, half the time in the air, and half on the ground doing maintenance work on the fleet:

Anyway, we’re pretty much done with work by 4:00 p.m. or so. Sometimes bad weather will cause us to work later than scheduled and we won’t get out of there until 5:00 or so, but that’s a rarity. We clock out, and voilia! The day is done.

These photos were taken by the crane operator during salvage of the US Airways Flight 1549 aircraft.

It’s remarkable how little damage there was to the fuselage of this Airbus A320. Obviously the aircraft will never fly again — even minor damage incidents can cost millions of dollars to repair — but I think these images are important for us to examine. They illustrate not just how skillful the pilots were during the landing, but also just how much punishment these aircraft are built to take.

Airliners are tough. They endure year after year of constant use, often 16 hours a day or more. They travail the -60 degree flight levels, then bake in 110 degree summer heat. They are pressurized and de-pressurized tens of thousands of times. They fly through punishing turbulence, endure lightning strikes, and even the occasional bird strike. Amazing, isn’t it?

The radome damage (on the nose of the aircraft) was probably a bird strike from the same flock that took out the engines. The right engine cowling is pretty mangled, but that could also have been at least partly from the birds.

In several of the photos you can even see one of the checklists, flight plans, or other crew documents still sitting on the glareshield. It’s almost as if the aircraft is saying, “hey, we’ve still got one more leg to fly, guys!”.

[View with PicLens]

My attempt at a spot landing during the 2005 West Coast Cub Fly-In

Sunrise has something like 30 aircraft on the line, ranging from 200+ knot turbo Cirrus SR22 to an Extra 300 to plane-jane Skyhawks.  And I fly them all.  But for my money, there’s nothing better than cruising down the Orange County coastline at sunset in that little J-3 at 45 mph, sipping fuel at maybe 3 or 4 gallons an hour.

You’re 500′ above the water, door and window wide open, just breathing in the fresh ocean air and watching the sun work its way ever lower on the horizon.  I love that time of day, with shadows creeping across the rolling hills of Laguna Beach and city lights from the beachfront homes and restaurants lighting up one by one.

I recently had a chance to take Kristi for an early evening flight in this simple, yet classic aircraft. For the price, nothing else comes close. The wet rate is only $89/hr. And with those clipped wings, the aircraft is far more maneuverable and sporty than traditional Cubs.

On occasion I’ll even take it up solo and just bomb around the pattern for half an hour — it’s that much fun! The engine puts out 100 hp, so it climbs out quite nicely when only one person is aboard.

Anyway, here are some photos from our flight. Enjoy!

[View with PicLens]

So, the plane-in-the-Hudson thing.

At the risk of tempting fate — because as more than one person has noted, many a captain has been hailed as a hero on Sunday only to be hung out to dry on Monday — it looks like Cactus 1549 was one of those rare cases where an airliner gets totaled and the flight crew’s careers don’t.

Hundreds of articles have already been written about this incident — some by people who actually know what they’re talking about. So I’d like to focus on two things which really piqued my curiosity.

Glider Training: Did It Make a Difference?

Much has been made of the Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s years of experience in the cockpit, but one thing on his resume stands out: he holds a commercial glider rating. Not only that, but according to the FAA Airmen Registry, he is also a rated glider instructor.

Glider pilots are intimately familiar with the concept of “speed-to-fly”, something power pilots never concern themselves with. But perhaps they should. For you power pilots out there, speed-to-fly can best be thought of as a variable “best glide” speed which varies depending on the kind of performance you are seeking. Do you want to stay in the air as long as possible? They your speed-to-fly is the “minimum sink” speed. Want to extract maximum energy from rising air? They you want to fly the “best L/D” speed.

Power pilots are taught that when the powerplant(s) fail and the aircraft becomes a glider, they must immediately fly a predetermined speed which results in the best possible lift-to-drag (L/D) ratio. This is often referred to as the “best glide” speed and is notated as Vg.

The problem is, a fixed Vg speed isn’t always going to extract maximum performance from the aircraft in a power-off situation. An example: assume an aircraft has a Vg speed to 70 knots. But let’s say it’s also flying into a 70 knot headwind. The resulting groundspeed is zero knots. The glide ratio at “best glide” speed is literally zero in this case. In the heat of battle, a power pilot wouldn’t likely notice this, especially at altitude. But a glider pilot would instantly recognize the need to increase the indicated airspeed by 50%, giving a ground speed of about 35 knots. Now this might not produce a spectacular glide ratio, but it’d certainly be a hell of a lot better than zero.

Glider gurus account for the effect of wind on a powerless aircraft in other situations, too. A good example of how this might save your bacon can be illustrated by considering an overwater flight from Long Beach to Catalina Island. Many pilots I’ve trained simply look at the geographic mid-point as the place where, in the event of an engine failure, they’d opt to go toward one place or the other. If the distance between Long Beach and Catalina is 40 miles, they’d turn around until their GPS said 20 nm. After that point they’d continue toward Catalina.

A glider pilot, on the other hand, would have already considered the winds aloft (both forecast and actual), the altitude burned during a 180 degree turn, as well as the terrain on Catalina Island (inhospitable to say the least) as well as the off-airport landing options on the mainland.

Glider pilots also become familiar with what we call “look down” angles. Just by looking out the window, we can tell if we’ll make it to a specific point at our current sink rate. Power pilots do this as well, but usually only on final approach and not always power-off.

Did Captain Sullenberger’s glider experience make the difference in this case? Did it even help? Perhaps not. As I recall, the elapsed time from liftoff to touchdown was only 3 minutes. But his glider experience certainly didn’t hurt. And it may have assisted him in ways even he is not fully cognizant of. When an emergency presents itself to a flight crew, they tend to fall back on their training and experience.

Inadequate Multi-Engine Training?

The most surprising thing about multi-engine training is that it doesn’t really consider the possibility of multi-engine failure. Think about it: most multi-engine aircraft don’t even have a Vg speed listed in the Approved Flight Manual. Most type rating programs, even those for airlines, don’t include all-engines-out scenarios. Thousands of Boeings and Airbuses are flying around with flight crews who don’t even know what the best glide speed for their aircraft is.

I understand this is starting to change, but I’m still surprised it isn’t a major part of initial and recurrent training on any multi-engine aircraft. I can think of quite a few incidents in recent years where an airliner lost all engines. Just off the top of my head:

• a British Airways 747 lost all 4 engines after encountering volcanic ash.  Engines were restarted at lower altitude.  Major engine damage.
• a KLM 747 lost all engines after encountering another ash cloud.  Same result.
• an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel after a conversion error while fueling.  Landed on a closed runway.
• a Pinnacle CRJ lost both engines after the flight crew exceeded the aircraft’s limitations.  Engines core-locked and plane crashed.
• an Air Transat Airbus A330 lost both engines after a fuel leak.  Landed safely on an island.
• an Ethiopian Airlines 767 was hijacked and forced to an alternate destination without sufficient fuel to fly that far.  Crashed in the water.
• this week’s US Airways Airbus landing in the Hudson River

A more complete list of unpowered jet airliner accidents is available here.  Keep in mind, that list does not include the many turboprops, bizjets, military aircraft, and other planes which have lost all engines in flight.  There are so many ways this can happen:  fuel contamination, fuel leak , fuel mismanagement, mechanical failure, sabotage, pilot error, bird strikes, hijacking, and the list goes on.  It’s baffles my mind that these scenarios aren’t considered during every multi-engine training program.

At Dynamic, we fly out of a large military base here in Southern California which also happens to be home to some of the last undeveloped land in the area.  As a result, there are a lot of birds around, and bird strikes on our King Airs are fairly common.  More than once I’ve been taxiing out in the morning only to find thousands of large geese wandering all over the field.  Thus far I’ve yet to encounter one in flight, but this US Airways accident is a reminder that it’s a possibility with every takeoff and landing.

Well, my friends, it’s 2009, and with it I’ve made a few changes to the House of Rapp.

For one thing, you’ll notice a new theme. Let me know how you like it!

I wanted something a little more up-to-date than the 2005-era code I had cobbled together before integrated themes became popular for WordPress. The background image I’m currently using is a photo of my Pitts S-2B on a vertical upline over the old El Toro MCAS base here in Orange County.

Second, I’ve password-protected the photos section. For some reason, a lot of my site statistics and referral logs were showing huge traffic coming from sites like Myspace. Thousands of hits per day! Turns out people there were using my photos as background images. While I’m glad they enjoy my photography, they were also using a lot of bandwidth by simply linking to my files. It’s considered rude to use another person’s bandwidth to serve images to your own web site, and my requests to stop doing that were met with silence. So, a password, a few changes to the .htaccess file, and problem solved.

I also got to thinking that there are a lot of other people in my photos, and they might not want every Tom, Dick, and Harry looking at their mug on my web site. But the photos are all there, and if you’re someone I know, drop me a line and I’ll give you the username/password combo.

I hope your holidays were safe and restful, because I have a feeling we’ll be needing all the strength we can muster to endure the goodies that 2009 has to offer.

Eh — I’ll write more about that in a future post. This isn’t an economics/finance blog, of course, but that happens to be one of my interests — money also comes in handy when your aviation is your avocation! — and I don’t mind saying that I predicted the fall of the housing market right here on this blog back in 2003. So the way I see it, I should be running the Fed, Treasury, or Council of Economic Advisers!

Alas, life is not fair. So until the phone rings with that Big Offer from the Obama administration, I’ll just have to make due with the great flying, perfect weather, and unbeatable friends and family I have here in Southern California.

More evidence we’re living in a world gone crazy. And I’m not just talking about Wall Street, my friends. The TFRs have truly reached a level which can only be described as insanity.

You know, I remember a time when it was possible to fly across this country of ours much the way we drive across it: just get in and go. Oh, sure, you had to check the weather, compute landing and takeoff distances, fuel load, weight & balance, etc. But aside from the usual due diligence, nobody was stopping you from using the airspace around your own country. Grab a chart and go fly.

That shouldn’t sound foreign. It’s called “freedom”.

Remember? There was no need to get the government’s permission to fly, submit a passenger manifest to the TSA for their approval, or wonder if someone’s wedding might require a diversion in your flight plan.

Alas, it’s 2009, and the FAA apparently now issues Temporary Flight Restrictions for weddings. Check this one out. I think it qualifies as a new low in the standards for issuing a TFR, and since the page will probably be gone in a few days, I’ll archive the NOTAM text here:

FDC 9/0803 ZLA CA.. FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS MALIBU, CA. EFFECTIVE 0901102230 UTC UNTIL 0901110230 UTC. PURSUANT TO 14 CFR SECTION 91.137(A)(3) TEMPORARY FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS ARE IN EFFECT FOR MEDIA COVERAGE OF WEDDING WITHIN A 2 NAUTICAL MILE RADIUS OF 340050N/1184916W OR THE LOS ANGELES /LAX/ VORTAC 269.0 DEGREE RADIAL AT 20.0 NAUTICAL MILES AT AND BELOW 3000 FEET MSL.

What’s next? TFRs for the first day of school? Flight restrictions because someone on the ground got a hangnail? Since they’re publishing flight restrictions for weddings, why not add them for divorces, too?

You know what would be fun? Invisible TFRs! Oh wait — we already have those. Yes, there are unpublished TFRs over professional and college sporting events which pilots have to magically know about. We have to figure out where the stadium is, when the event starts, and when it ends. Oh, and we must somehow figure out the elevation of the uncharted stadium in order to stay 3000′ above it.

Anyway, I’m not sure who’s getting married this weekend, but I can’t imagine anyone whose nuptials should ban air traffic. It makes about as much sense as shutting down a freeway because someone’s bar mitzvah is taking place in the neighborhood.

We already have a permanent flight restriction over Disneyland, and as I’ve stated previously, either there is no threat to the theme park (in which case the TFR is a needless infringement on air traffic in the L.A. basin), or there IS a threat to Disneyland, in which case they owe it to visitors to let them know about it. Of course, they won’t do that because it might hurt ticket sales. And the bottom line on the Disney TFR is that it exists because Disney doesn’t want any noise over their theme park, so they had it declared a security risk for people like me to fly near it.

But wait. It gets better! The entire Washington, D.C. area is already a no-fly zone unless you’ve jumped through enough hoops to qualify you as a Cirque du Soleil stand-in. Yet the government felt that wasn’t enough, so they issued a flight restriction on top of the existing flight restriction for the Obama inauguration on January 20th.

It leaves me wondering what it would take to raise enough hackles on this issue to force a reversal in the ever-larger list of mundane events which receive TFRs. Frankly, if the entire country were declared a no-fly zone (just like Baghdad before the war) and general aviation was permanently grounded, I don’t think it’d even show up as a blip on the average American’s radar.

But it should. Even if you’re not a pilot, it should. Because today they’re coming for my freedom, but tomorrow they’ll be coming for yours. You may not realize it because it happens so insidiously. But slowly, one piece at a time, we’re being ground down to the point where exercising our freedoms is so difficult that we simply give up.

John over at Aviation Mentor recently posted an excellent article on the whole pitch vs. power debate.

I’ve never understood the dogmatic attitudes you’ll find among some pilots on this issue, although I’ve definitely seen those vociferous arguments out in the real world.

You can’t say it’s JUST power which determines altitude, because let’s face it, some aircraft don’t even have engines. And those aircraft happen to fly higher than aircraft which do have engines.

And it can’t always be pitch which determines altitude. One look at Sean Tucker flying the Oracle Challenger in level flight with a 45 degrees of pitch is enough to demonstrate that.

John’s longer and more detailed analysis came to the same conclusion I did. I’ve been saying forever that it’s not one or the other. It’s both. The pilot is simply managing the aircraft’s energy state. Those who insist it’s one or the other are taking a narrow-minded view, to say the least.

It pains me to see students get so mixed up in this debate, because it’s pointless, and it places so much emphasis on the topic that a more important element is left by the wayside: trim.

Students tend to think of trim as a secondary control, something relatively minor which is used for pitch. In fact, the control is even referred to as “pitch trim”. But unless you’re behind the power curve, it’s more directly related to airspeed than pitch.

Example: you’re cruising along at 160 knots in level flight and drop 10″ of manifold pressure. The airplane will begin slowing almost immediately. Less air over the wings means less lift. Since it’s trimmed for 160 knots, it’ll start to descend in an effort to maintain 160 knots. You didn’t change the trim, yet the pitch angle did change. What the airplane tried to do was maintain the same airspeed.

Oh, it’ll hunt around a while, but eventually, if the airplane is dynamically stable, it will return to the trimmed airspeed.

The same thing is true of climbs. The airplane is in level flight at 160 knots and you add 10″ of manifold pressure, the airplane will accelerate. This added airflow creates additional lift and the airplane starts to climb. The airspeed drops off again, the airplane’s climb rate decays a bit, the airspeed builds slightly, and the cycle repeats until the aircraft is established in a stable 160 knot climb.

This is an eye-opening event for many students. Yet even among those who “get it”, the importance of trim isn’t always fully apparent until it comes time for instrument training, because precision instrument flying requires pilots to be capable of climbs and descents at constant airspeeds. Without exception, they always have a much easier time of it once they ensure the aircraft is trimmed for the desired airspeed and let the inherent stability of the aircraft work on their behalf.

From where I sit, this tends to relegate this whole pitch/power debate to its proper place: an obscure message forum thread somewhere on the internet.

Do you fully understand the famous “turning tendencies” which act on propeller-driven aircraft?

It’s one of the first things primary students are taught when flight training commences. And the concepts are not all that complicated. Yet I’ve found that even long-time instructors often lack a proper understanding of at least one of these forces, specifically gyroscopic precession.

Here’s an excerpt from one of Bob Miller’s Over the Airwaves newsletters:

“An unexpected stall, coupled with four powerful left-turning tendencies of a single engine airplane in a steep climb and insufficient right rudder, could easily produce a left hand spin.”

I wrote Bob to tell him that I only count three “left” turning tendencies and ask him to identify the fourth one.

He replied to my question by asking which three I was counting. I said slipstream, torque, and p-factor (propeller factor).

Bob responded by saying I was missing “gyroscopic effect of the spinning propeller. Pull it up, a force will be exerted to the left.”

Really?

Nope. That’s literally 180 degrees off. Rotate a tricycle gear aircraft and the aircraft will yaw to the right. Gyroscopic force is expressed 90 degrees ahead in the plane of rotation. The prop spins right (as seen from the cockpit). That means the force will act as if you pressed on the propeller disc from the LEFT side, and the plane will yaw about the vertical axis to the RIGHT.

In a tailwheel aircraft it MAY be opposite, but the gyroscopic force is dependent upon how the airplane is rotated. Or should I say, whether it is rotated at all. In a Super Decathlon, I allow it to fly off in the three-point attitude. Since I’m not pushing the nose down (or up, for that matter), there is no gyroscopic effect. In the Pitts, on the other hand, I often rotate more to a level flight attitude before leaving the ground, so I get some left yaw.

But gyroscopic effect is not a “left turning tendency”. We (aerobatic pilots) use gyroscopic effect all the time to yaw the plane left, right, up, down, flatten spins, accelerate spins, tumble the airplane end-over-end, and do many other things.

Assuming you’re flying a SE aircraft with clockwise engine rotation, torque always wants to roll the plane left, p-factor always wants to yaw it left (ok, unless you’re flying with zero or negative AOA), and slipstream always goes around the fuselage the same way. But gyroscopic effect does not remain constant. It depends where the force is applied to that propeller disk.

I believe this concept is poorly understood because most pilots don’t generate pitch or yaw rates with enough acceleration to really see the effect of gyroscopic precession. It’s also another example of how the training and knowledge of even experienced pilots are frequently incomplete without the benefit of that flying laboratory we call “aerobatics”.

My life can be a little complicated at times, even by time zone-hopping pilot standards. You see, at the present time, I have six employers: Sunrise Aviation, Dynamic Aviation, Skytypers, Opera Pacific, and two individual clients.

As you might imagine, keeping my schedule straight isn’t easy, especially since each of my employers uses a different system. One of them sends out the schedules as Excel spreadsheets. Another has a proprietary web-based system. Still another does everything via text message. Then there are rehearsal calendars from Opera Pacific, which are in constant flux. Those are only available in paper format. Then there are benefit performances, Angel Flights, family affairs, birthdays, anniversaries, SCR performances, and more.

Currently, I use Microsoft Outlook as the master calendar and transcribe everything manually into that application. At one time, I simply synchronized Outlook with a Palm Pilot and carried that with me. However, I quickly got sick of lugging a PDA all over the place. It doesn’t sound like much of a burden to carry a small handheld device in my pocket, but when combined with the cell phone, iPod, keys, wallet, and other sundry items, it was just too much.

Thankfully, Google has a Calendar Sync applet which will automatically upload your Outlook data to Google Calendar as often as you wish. Between that, LogMeIn.com, and the easy availability of internet connections these days, I can usually get access to my schedule when required.

That’s the long way of saying that I show up where I’m supposed to, when I’m supposed to be there.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

This morning I got up at the usual hour of 4:45 a.m. for a day of King Air flying out of Los Alamitos JFTB. I made my typical brown-bag lunch, drove to the base, parked my car, and sat in for the Monday morning staff meeting before the pilots disperse to preflight their aircraft.

I just happened to glance at the dispatch sheet for today and noticed that, for some odd reason, my name wasn’t on it. Weird. I assumed that it was a typo and the name “Ross” in Medfly 3 was actually supposed to be “Rapp”. I did notice that Bill Ross was at work that day, but he also works sometimes as an A&P in addition to being a pilot, so perhaps that was it.

I questioned the dispatcher, and as you’ve probably figured out by now, there was no typo. At least, not on the dispatch sheet. More like a gigantic typo on my Outlook calendar, because I wasn’t even supposed to be at work today! As if that wasn’t enough, I was right in the middle of the meeting, so not only did I show up on the wrong day, but now everyone at work knows it.

Nice, eh?

On the plus side, I did get to sit in 60 minutes of rush hour traffic on the way home, which gave me ample time to consider how blessedly rare this kind of snafu is. And it certainly could have been worse: I could have failed to show up when I was scheduled to fly instead of the opposite.

I asked my boss how often something like this happens, and he said, “More often than you might think.” It must really hurt when one of the guys who lives far away from the base does this. One of our pilots drives in to Los Alamitos from Pacific Palisades. One comes from Santa Monica. But the all-time winner commutes from Redlands — it takes as long as two hours each way. Ironically, when I fly with that first officer, we always seem to be assigned Region 25, which is over Redlands. Oh, the irony of getting up at 4 a.m. and driving 100 miles across Southern California only to get in an airplane and fly right back to your house…

Now if I can only get over the fact that I’ll be getting up before the sun tomorrow instead of sleeping in. Ugh.

There are many types of “special use” airspace out there. One of the most prevalent is a Military Operations Area, or MOA. According to the Aeronautical Information Manual (Sec. 3-4-5):

a. MOAs consist of airspace of defined vertical and lateral limits established for the purpose of separating certain military training activities from IFR traffic. Whenever a MOA is being used, nonparticipating IFR traffic may be cleared through a MOA if IFR separation can be provided by ATC. Otherwise, ATC will reroute or restrict nonparticipating IFR traffic.

b. Examples of activities conducted in MOAs include, but are not limited to: air combat tactics, air intercepts, aerobatics, formation training, and low-altitude tactics. Military pilots flying in an active MOA are exempted from the provisions of 14 CFR Section 91.303(c) and (d) which prohibits aerobatic flight within Class D and Class E surface areas, and within Federal airways. Additionally, the Department of Defense has been issued an authorization to operate aircraft at indicated airspeeds in excess of 250 knots below 10,000 feet MSL within active MOAs.

c. Pilots operating under VFR should exercise extreme caution while flying within a MOA when military activity is being conducted. The activity status (active/inactive) of MOAs may change frequently. Therefore, pilots should contact any FSS within 100 miles of the area to obtain accurate real-time information concerning the MOA hours of operation. Prior to entering an active MOA, pilots should contact the controlling agency for traffic advisories.

d. MOAs are depicted on sectional, VFR Terminal Area, and Enroute Low Altitude charts.

One of my pet peeves is a misunderstanding about Military Operations Areas which leads many pilots and air traffic controllers to believe that any VFR aircraft flying inside one must be a “knucklehead” (a controller’s description!). From an ATC or military pilot perspective, perhaps this is the case. After all, what possible justification could a non-military pilot have for going into one of these MOAs when it’s active? Just go around it! Right?

Wrong.

As I said in a reply to this Jetwhine article, I fly a lot of high performance aerobatics in a south Orange County (Calif.) area known as the Blockhouse. There is no protective MOA on the chart for us, and we often have climb and descent rates which exceed 15,000 fpm. Consider: an Extra 300 pulling into a vertical upline at 180 knots TAS is traveling straight up at 18,228 fpm.

We’re out there with minimal fuel flying very high performance maneuvers while trying to teach students. I’ve seen as much as +10G on the accelerometer, and as low as -6G. Inverted flat spins. Tumbles. Rolling turns. And I’ve given and received formation and aerial interception training. So I’m quite familiar with the sort of high performance maneuvers which make it hard to watch for other traffic.

Those who say non-military pilots should simply “always stay well clear” of an active MOA irk me because it ignores many practical matters regarding this special use airspace.

First, what if I’m trying to get to Inyokern, Tehachapi, or Kern Vally airports, all of which lie in the middle of the Isabella MOA? You literally cannot get there without flying through a MOA.

Half the high desert airports around my neck of the woods are in the middle of MOAs. Pull out a sectional and look at them.

Second, what if weather dictates a deviation which takes me through a MOA? I’ve encountered this scenario several times. I’m ferrying a Pitts S-2B which has a 23 gallon fuel tank and burns ~13 gph. Should I deviate another 75 nm out of the way to go around it? Many of these MOAs are in hot, high desert areas here in the southwest, and often thunderstorms, terrain, fuel, turbulence, wind, or other factors come into play, depending on the aircraft in question.

Finally, if the activity is dangerous enough to non-participating aircraft (a gunnery range, etc.), it should be a restricted area. Now that’s an airspace I wouldn’t want to fly into if it was hot, even if I legally could. I’ve seen active restricted areas at night and the tracers were bright enough to light up the sky. The sound of the artillery could be heard even above the noise of the aircraft’s engines! But MOAs are not restricted areas. And there’s a reason for that.

Having said that, I don’t take flying into a MOA lightly. I know there are high performance military aircraft out there doing their thing. I know budgets are tight, their flying time is minimal, and I don’t want to be the cause of their having to break off some training exercise simply because I was in the way. But keep in mind, the airspace is JOINT-USE. We do have a right to be there, and there might be a darn good reason for our presence as well.

Talk about art imitating life.

I snapped this photo today while Sunrise’s chief mechanic worked on the Becker com radio in our Extra 300. I had taxied out to the non-movement boundary and been attempting to contact clearance delivery (and ground, and tower, and company, and…. you get the picture) to no avail.

It was curious. We seemed to receive transmissions perfectly well. There was side-tone. The radio indicated that it was transmitting.

Now on the one hand, if a radio is the weakest part of your airplane, life can’t be too bad. On the other hand, it costs about $6 per minute to operate this aircraft, and the only other person on board the plane is the guy footing the bill. And he came all the way from Thailand to get some professional aerobatic training, not pay for me to idle there in the taxi lane. So we shut down the aircraft.

I knew the camera system processor had just been reinstalled. Perhaps something was loose or got bumped during that maintenance? Nothing looked amiss, but I double checked the antenna connections, tried a different helmet, checked the front seat headset jack connection, circuit breakers, etc.

Nothing.

Eventually, I called our mechanic, who knew enough to come over with a replacement radio. You see, this wasn’t the first problem we’ve had with this piece of equipment. Maybe it’s the 15 years worth of 10G pulls, but that radio has been back to the manufacturer more often than Joan Rivers has been to the botox clinic. Every time, Becker fixes it, certifies it, sends it back, and it works great.

For a while.

So when Matt pulled out the old radio and set it down on the pilot’s seat, I got the impulse to find a baseball bat and re-enact that classic Office Space scene where they take their frustrations out on a recalcitrant printer. Oooh, that would be so satisfying. The radio frequency knob shattered into a thousand tiny black pieces. The rectangular LCD screen leaking black fluid onto the ramp. Vengeance!!

I suggested this to Matt, who said he’d already tried that tactic and it hadn’t worked. From the tone of his voice, I got the impression that, unlike the printer, this thing fights back. “You want a piece ‘a me??”

Don’t tempt me, punk.

With the new radio installed, we were able to complete the flight without any light gun drama. And I will admit, at least the radio had the decency to fail on the ground and not in mid-air. Still, that Becker better hope I don’t find it just sitting on a shelf one day. I might have to steal something from work…

With the advent of the Glass Age, I’ve been seeing more and more pilots question the need for traditional needle/ball/airspeed instrument skills. Why bother to learn the technology of yesterday, they ask?

On the surface, this question makes sense. After all, who even manufactures aircraft with non-glass panels anymore? Heck, even the venerable Legend Cub is being built with a Dynon D10A these days. At my home field, we have a Waco UPF-7 (a 1930′s era open-cockpit biplane) with a Garmin glass panel. It looks more like you’re sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise than in a barnstormer ready to dust crops.

There’s no doubt that glass panels have fewer insidious failure modes than analog instruments. Instead of an attitude indicator that slowly rolls over (possibly taking the pilot with it), you get a giant red “X” leaving no doubt about the quality of the AHRS data.

And, lest we forget, many of the pilots who balk at an six-pack instrument panel probably don’t see one that often. They fly newer airframes, experimentals, turbines, and read industry publications that rarely even show a non-glass instrument panel. Out of sight, out of mind. So the question is a good one, but my answer may surprise you.

In my opinion, the traditional analog instruments are not obsolete, if only by virtue of the fact that out of the 200,000+ GA aircraft in existence, probably 90% of them have the older style panel. These airplanes are mostly certificated in the Normal category, and it would be neither cost effective or legally possible to put newer style instrument panels into those aircraft at the present time.

Of course, if you have an RV-X and only plan on flying that airplane and it’s got glass and you can fly it proficiently (including partial-panel, whatever that may look like in your ship), then there is no need to be able to fly with a turn coordinator, altimeter, and airspeed indicator.

On the other hand, when I train students to fly IFR in glass airplanes like the SR22 and Columbia, I ensure they can fly a traditional six pack as well via simulator training. There are several reasons for this:

• I want them to be a complete instrument pilot able to fly more than just an Avidyne or G1000
• Second, I want them to understand the way analog instruments work since there are analog instruments even in those glass aircraft, and they have different failure modes and different scans than an AHRS-based system
• Third, it’s harder to go “back” to analog instruments than it is to go “forward” to glass panels if you’re already a rated and experienced pilot, so I want the heavy lifting to be done while we’re already doing the heavy lifting: during primary instrument training.

I disagree with those who feel instructors are anti-GPS, anti-glass, attached to older technology, or provide unrealistic failure modes for no good reason. I know none who have that attitude. On the other hand, we often turn those devices off or direct a student’s focus elsewhere because it’s necessary for training. If we don’t push your workload to the breaking point, fail instruments and radios, etc. then we’re not doing our job.

Anyone can fly IFR when everything’s working. I’ve seen pilots who aren’t even instrument trained do it. But when you’re on one engine or partial panel in the clouds, a passenger is airsick, you need a bathroom break, the fuel is getting low, it’s night, and you’re tired, that’s not the time to find out how well you perform when stress is high. That’s why we push you hard. If you ever have a bad day and come out the other side in one piece, you’ll understand that.

“Riding the range once more, toting my old Pitts S-2B…”

Doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? No matter. It was so nice taking the Pitts up today — I made two practice flights at the Blockhouse, concentrating on the Intermediate Known sequence for the upcoming season. It’s a bit tougher than last season’s sequence. The total K value (difficulty) is about the same, but this year it’s front loaded with harder figures, while at the end of the sequence the K values drop off significantly.

My practice strategy seems to differ from most aerobatic pilots. For whatever reason, most pilots begin by working with individual figures. On the surface this seems like a logical building-block approach. However, I prefer to run the new sequences all the way through until I can do them without any hard zeros. My reasoning is that a beautifully flown sequence is of little value if you zero most of it because you end up going the wrong direction or misread the card. Also, by the time the sequence can be flown properly, it should be clear which figures need the most work.

Let’s just say I have a long way to go before this is ready for public consumption. I’m trying to get ready for the Copperstate contest in Arizona, which will hopefully tune me up enough to benefit from a training camp in Borrego so that when the California season begins at Apple Valley, I will at least have a fighting chance. Last year, I didn’t fly for the whole season. Then I had one practice flight to prepare for the AcroFest. In case you were wondering, I do not recommend that training regime.

Anyway, back to the present. As usual, my 45s are shallow going up, steep going down, and I have to recalibrate my sense of the aircraft’s energy state going vertical. In other words, I keep torquing out of push humpties and other such maneuvers because I’m spending too long on the upline and running out of energy. I’m sure my rolls aren’t centered on the appropriate lines, either.

These things always happen in the off season. It’s almost as if I have an internal mechanism which falls out of adjustment after a period of inactivity. The frustrating thing is, I’ve been flying every day, and flying the Pitts a lot, too. But it’s primarily been demo flights, checkouts, advanced spin training, rides, and other non-competition stuff.

I haven’t even started working on rolling turns or getting my snap rolls back in order. All day long my snap rolls had an extra 200 degrees of rotation before I could get them stopped. But that’s okay. I’m glad just to be up there, zooming through the sky without a care in the world.

In honor of my new focus on not sucking this season, here are a group of pilots who definitely don’t stink: The Four Horsemen. This team still flies, but now it’s down to two Mustangs and they’re simply called “The Horsemen”. This video clip is well edited, and best of all, there’s no narration from an air show announcer. I’m not a big fan of announcers in general, but in this case it would be outright sacrilege. When a quartet of Mustangs is in the air, an announcer — whoever he may be — should just be quiet and let the sound of those Merlin engines speak for itself.

But that’s just my opinion.

Now is this a sweet looking pair of machines or what? A 1993 Pitts S-2B and a 2008 Honda Accord Coupe in matching paint:

I had the opportunity to get back into the Pitts yesterday and when I saw the two of them together I had to take a picture. It’s so rare that both the car and the plane are clean at the same time.

I was out at CNO to take Dan for a flight. His flight review (an FAA-mandated recurrent training requirement) was due and I owed him a favor for ferrying me out to Borrego last fall. I had needed to get out there to retrieve the Pitts after the Acrofest. I was the Contest Director for that competition. And a competitor. And a judge. And… I’ll never do that again. It was a crazy time, even by my standards.

Anyway, Dan wanted to try some advanced spin training as part of his flight review, so we focused on flat and accerated spins modes. After that, I went up for a solo flight to work on the 2007 intermediate known sequence. I’m trying to get an early start on preparing for the upcoming competition season.

The 2007 season was basically missed by all of us at Cloud Dancers because the airplane was undergoing a particularly heavy maintenance interval which lasted for most of the spring and summer. The timing was unfortunate, but after the aircraft came off leaseback it only made sense to get it into good working order. The wings were off, the prop was overhauled, fabric & paint were touched up, the top end was overhauled, and she was cleaned, rigged, inspected, and so on.

When I got back to Chino, I spent some time just shooting landings in the pattern. It’s such a blast to go from 1300′ AGL to zero in about 15 seconds. The airplane pretty much climbs at the same rate. I had forgotten how much sprightlier the S-2B is when flown solo vs. with two people on board. Losing that 200 lbs up front really makes a difference!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of Pitts flying lately, but most of it has been dual in an S-2C owned by one of my recent Part 61 private pilot grads. This airplane was originally owned by a good friend from the aerobatic competition circuit named Reinaldo. The person Reinaldo sold it to installed a wicked six-camera video system and sold it again shortly thereafter, leaving my student as the lucky beneficiary of this upgrade. Here we are preparing to start up during a recent flight:

Today, a bit of a rant — for which I will apologize in advance, my friends.

Flying is just about the only avocation I can think of where people can be found spending their free time at work by choice.

Think about that. In an office environment, folks typically get to work no earlier than necessary. Likewise, they leave as soon as possible when their work day is over and would never even entertain the idea of hanging out at the office on their day off.

But in aviation? It’s the polar opposite. At the end of a long week spent at the airport, they’ll spend their day off… at the airport. This is a major shift in motivation from the average workplace, and it contributes to a positive attitude and happy demeanor there.

Imagine an office building where everyone inside couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning. It would be a much different place, wouldn’t it?

Perhaps that’s why I don’t understand the disparaging attitude many people harbor toward instructing. It is widely viewed within the aviation industry as a bottom-rung starter job which must be endured in order to get to a “real” flying gig. And I suppose if that’s all you make of it, if that’s all you put into it, then that’s what it’ll be.

Here’s one instructor’s take on it:

Here’s the way a flying career works.

1) A person wants to become a captain of a big airliner and make lots of money
2) To do that, s/he need to be the first officer of a big airliner
3) To be hired into a major airline, s/he needs to build a bunch of jet time, so s/he works for a regional airline for a painfully low salary
4) To be hired at the regional airline, s/he needs a bunch of flying hours
5) To get those flying hours without paying for them, s/he becomes a flight instructor – that way the student pays for the hours
6a) Because the purpose is to build hours and not to make real money, flight instructors, in general, don’t get paid much at all (e.g. $11/hr in many places)
6b) Because most flight instructors actually want to work for an airline, they leave instruction as quickly as possible, so there are very few truly experienced flight instructors around
6c) Because these flight instructors don’t care what they make, they depress the entire instruction industry – it’s hard for anyone to charge more

Keep in mind this was written by a CFI. He goes on to wonder if the change in Part 121 mandatory retirement age will “destroy the short-lived increase in pay that I’ve seen for CFIs, now that the existing CFIs won’t be able to find airline jobs and will probably be stuck being instructors”.

Stuck? Please. Life is what you make of it. Just because instructing is a low-cost way to build hours doesn’t mean that’s all you can get out of it. There are float planes, glass panels, helicopters, turboprops, and a hundred other specialties out there to be mastered. If you want to be just another guy teaching primary students in a beat up Skyhawk, be my guest. But there’s so much more out there if you just have the vision, work ethic, and patience to pursue it.

I’ve got news for you, buddy: some of us actually enjoy instructing. Some instructors specialize in high performance aerobatics, formation flying, experimentals, warbird transitions, antiques, biplanes, tailwheels, and other such interesting airplanes. That’s what I do. I might fly a Pitts one day, a Columbia 400 the next, then a 1928 TravelAir, then an Extra 300, then an RV-6 or a Harmon Rocket. I coach aerobatic competitors, ferry aircraft, fly formation, and get paid for all of it.

I get to be home at night. I set my own schedule. And I charge whatever I want. There are very few instructors with the hours and credentials to gain insurance approval on these aircraft, so for the most part I’m in the driver’s seat.

It’s really a shame that those who teach primary students (poorly) for a couple hundred hours and simply look at their CFI time as some trial they must endure to get a “real job” are considered to be in the same category as CFIs who’ve spent many years honing their craft.

I’ve cleaned up the messes left by countless CFIs whose instruction was criminally poor, unprofessional, and incomplete. I say good riddance to those CFIs. As far as I’m concerned, the airlines can have them.

The ironic thing is that aviators with that attitude aren’t going to be happy when they reach that Part 121 job. They’ll decry the pay, the hours, the equipment, and look ahead to the next thing. The next plane, the upgrade to the left seat, the move to a “major” airline. We’ve all met people like that. The challenges of instructing don’t sit well with these types.

Make no mistake about it. The starting pay can be poor, the conditions rough, the hours long. In many ways instructing is like flying for a regional, come to think of it. The difference is that instruction allows you to play a pivotal role in a life-changing event for a person; you get to shepherd them toward the fulfillment of a dream which probably hearkens back to their childhood. How many jobs let you do that?

One final note about primary instructors, as they are probably the least respected of the CFI ilk. The longer I instruct, the more I’m convinced that primary instruction is one of the most difficult (and potentially rewarding) jobs a CFI can pursue. It’s a major undertaking to transform a civilian who doesn’t even know how to open the door of an aircraft into a pilot with sufficient knowledge of aerodynamics, navigation, aircraft systems, emergency procedures, airspace, meteorology, aviation law, aeromedical factors, etc. to safely operate that aircraft with passengers aboard.

I think it’s high time that CFIs — especially the career instructors — got the respect and recognition they deserve.

It’s so rare to get true winter weather here in Southern California. But as Lesley always says, it never fails to rain on opening night, and last night was no exception. Boy did it pour!

I nearly broke into a Gene Kelly-esque dance all the way down Avenue of the Arts as I made my way to OCPAC for the opening night performance of Die Zauberflöte. Ave. of the Arts even has the right kind of street lights for it! But there’s something about the ultra-modern look of the theaters which kept me from indulging myself. (Note: I may also have been concerned about looking stupid, although that’s never stopped me before).

I’ve been making quite a few flights to northern California lately, and this weather has certainly made that part of my day job interesting. I’m not used to seeing low pressure systems around here, but California has been surrounded by them for the past week. Several cold fronts have blown through, bringing lower snow levels and higher concerns about in-flight icing. It’s the one thing that really worries me when flying, and it must be approached with extreme caution. This is especially true in fast composite ships with so-called “laminar flow” airfoils, as contaminating this kind of wing leads to an especially dramatic loss of performance.

The last two round trips have been in a TKS-equipped SR22. Despite low freezing levels and airmets for icing, IFR conditions, mountain obscuration, and turbulence, I was comfortable flying the route because I knew the tops were 10-12,000′. There were plenty of alternate airports nearby, and the deicing fluid was topped off to give me some time to get out of any ice which did build. As it turns out, there was only one bit of ice worth noting, right as I climbed out of the top of a cloud layer. The worst icing is often found at the tops of clouds, so that wasn’t a surprise. For the most part, between ATC and PIREPS I was able to stay out of the precip most of the time when I was above the freezing level.

The TKS system works much better when you prime it properly. The first time I ever tried using TKS, it seemed to be useless. It was a summer flight across the Dakotas a few years ago. No one had ever told me that it can take several minutes for the fluid to make its way to the outboard panels, and by that time the ice could have covered the panels so thoroughly that they’d be unable to protect the wing.

Now, my standard preflight procedure on the system is to top off the TKS tank (the only way you’ll know how much fluid is on board), turn on the pump to ensure it works, and wait for fluid to come out of each panel before turning it off. Then, when you enable the system in flight, you’ll get immediate protection. I’ve standardized on coating the wings and tail surfaces with deice fluid (“normal” setting) before entering precip when it’s below freezing, and using the “maximum” setting at the first sign of ice.

Of course, the airplane is not approved for known-icing, so the TKS is just one tool to buy you time to change altitudes, turn around, find VMC, get to warmer air, or something else which will stop the accumulation.

The worse thing about ice is that it’s unpredictable. We don’t really understand why it occurs in some places and not in others, even when the conditions seem to be ripe for it in both places. It might be light icing for one pilot and severe for another one who flies through the same piece of sky only minutes later.

Pilots hate the unknown more than anything else. We strive for complete control over the flight, and that means being able to predict with certainty every critical aspect of our aircraft’s performance. Ice robs us of that capability. Our climb rates, airspeeds, handling, and other characteristics change. The airplane takes on a new personality, and the only thing you know for sure is that it won’t be as friendly as the one you’re used to.

Whoever said ice belongs in your drink and not on your airplane was right.

On the ground, though, all this rain has been a welcome sight after years of drought here in the Southland. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I hear a Gene Kelly song calling my name…

To those of you who said I’d never get a new car — and I know there are a lot of you out there — feast your eyes on this:

Yeah baby! It’s a 2008 Honda Accord LX-S Coupe. I’ve been waiting for this car to hit the showroom floor since I first saw photos of the concept vehicle at the auto shows last year. In my opinion, it’s one of the best looking automobiles on the market today, and you can get them for around $21,000. Mine’s a base model four-cylinder with 190 hp. Any more horsepower and I’d be getting speeding tickets right and left. Now I’ll just be getting them left.

The navigation system, leather seats, moonroof and XM radio push the price closer to $30,000, so I went with the base model and certainly haven’t been disappointed with what I got for the money. Vehicle stability control, dynamic braking, drive-by-wire throttle, side curtain airbags, active head restraint, active noise cancellation (yes, aviators, you read that right — an ANR system for the entire car!), 17″ wheels, cruise control, tire pressure monitoring system, 6 disc CD changer, automatic transmission, power windows/doors, remote keyless entry, heated windows.

Hell, I was excited just to have power steering.

The buying experience was not exactly painless, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I have the internet to thank for that. These days you’d be crazy to deal with a retail salesman; get internet quotes via the web and ensure you work with the internet department at the dealership. That’s what I did, and my negotiations started off at invoice price. Keep in mind this is on a new model, too. The 2008 Accord is completely redesigned, so I was going after a brand new generation, not some design which has been around for years. This is a relatively hot item.

I don’t begrudge the dealership making a few dollars, but the spread between invoice and MSRP was about $2500. There’s no way I was going to wade through that chasm.

The worst part about the buying experience was dealing with the exasperating finance person. You think you’re done with the sales department and they hand you off to a smiling person who is ostensibly not a salesman. Yet before you know it this guy — who is supposed to be getting your paperwork in order — is trying to sell you an alarm system, Lojack, extended warranties, and more.

What the heck?

I said no to each and every item. If you look closely at the terms of the extended warranties, they usually exclude most of the big ticket items. Timing belts, catalytic converters, exhaust systems, etc. And none of them cover preventative maintenance, so you’d be lucky to get any coverage at all in the event of car trouble. Plus, if you don’t keep the car in tip-top shape, they’ll deny your claim right off the bat. I know this because I actually read the warranty! When I asked the finance guru if he’d mind my doing that, the look on his face told me I was the first one that had ever asked to read the thing. How sad is that?

They do their best to confuse you with semantics. “Oh, this is a six year warranty!” Uh, no it’s not. The factory bumper-to-bumper warranty covers me for the first three years, so it’s really only a three year extension of the already-included warranty. And the powertrain is warrantied for five years, so it’s only a one year addition there. And then only on items for which the warranty administrator (aka not you) approves coverage. All this for only $1800! No thanks.

I couldn’t help but laugh at how the salesman insisted Hondas are the epitome of reliability, yet the guy trying to sell the warranty will scare you with tales of expensive computer components which are sure to fail. Which is it guys? Is this a reliable car or isn’t it?

Anyway, I arrived at the dealership around 12:30 p.m. It was 6:30 p.m. and completely dark by the time I drove away from the Honda dealership. As my trusty 1993 Eclipse faded in the rear-view mirror of the shiny new Accord, I couldn’t help but feel sad about leaving my old friend behind.

The most surprising thing about the car buying experience was how incredibly sad it was to say goodbye to the Eclipse That Would Not Die. As I unloaded my personal belongings from the old gal, I was thinking about all the adventures we’d seen together. Sliding sideways into snow drifts while skating down Mammoth Mountain. Road trips to Las Vegas. Shuttling students back and forth at the airport. Literally thousands of trips to/from various rehearsals and performances all over Southern California. The marathon runs to Hollywood.

When I bought the Eclipse, the world was a different place. For one thing, we’d just elected a new president, some guy named Clinton. There was no World Wide Web. Most people didn’t have email, and only a few had cell phones. It was 1993, and I was still in college. The $10,000 cost of the car seemed enormous. How would I ever pay that off?

Over the past few years, the age of my Eclipse became somewhat of a joke, even to me. I think it was hard to let it go because it marks the end of an era. I’m not sure what that era is, but there’s no denying a lot of memories are wrapped up in that vehicle. I kept the car washed, waxed, and maintained for 15 years. And now it’s going to end up being crushed by some guy named Joe at a junk yard. How sad!

I suppose I’ll one day feel that way about the Accord. If I get the same life out of the Honda that I did from my old warhorse, I’ll be satisfied. Speaking of life, I snapped a photo of the odometer after unloading all my personal stuff from the car. The final tally: 215,724 miles.

The new car does have a lot of similarities to the old one. They are both base models. Both coupes. And both of them are red. In fact, every car I’ve ever owned has been red. I suppose I could have branched out with a new color, but the palette offered by most car manufacturers is just not very compelling. Most people seem to favor silver, gray, black, white, or some beige variation. Take a look around the parking lot next time you’re out and about. It’s a sea of non-descript bland looking vehicles! The only stand-out colors offered for the Accord coupe are blue and red, so there was really no choice to be made. I’m not driving a minivan here, folks. It’s a sporty coupe — it’s supposed to be red. The coup de grâce was when I realized that the Pitts S-2B is the same color as the Accord. Now that’s just cool!

I’m a little concerned about keeping the ivory interior clean, especially in light of the dirt and grease filled environments in which I work. Not to mention a hyper sensitivity to door dings and other road rash which can only come from buying a new vehicle. The saving grace is that most of the cars at SNA cost a lot more than mine. There are countless Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Aston Martins in the parking lot, so they’re probably more worried about my doors than I am about theirs.

The Accord seems to be a hit everywhere I go. I’ve been stopped by pilots, sheriff deputies, car aficionados, and random folks on the street who just want to get a look it. People take photos of it at stop lights. The guy who tinted the windows asked if he could take some pictures for his web site. And just the other day, a woman came in to Gelson’s (a local grocery store) while I was there. She didn’t come in to shop, but just to say how much she liked the car and to ask who made it.

Every time someone asks me why, with all my flight time and qualifications, I haven’t gone on to an airline job, I just think about stories like this one. Keep in mind, Sam left behind a city he loved, picked up his whole life and moved across the country for this job. All I can say is, I would not have handled the day’s events as diplomatically as he did.

I’ve always said that life is too short to do something you hate all day long. No offense to those of you working in the trenches at a regional or major, because I have the utmost respect for the hard life you folks are leading, but a Part 121 flying job is just about the perfect definition of “something I’d hate”. I swear, if Dante Alighieri was alive today, the Inferno would be set at a domestic airline.

To add insult to injury, the everyday risks to one’s career at a Part 121 airline are not insignificant. Medical certification. FAA enforcement action. Bankruptcy and mergers are but two of the ways one’s seniority (and paycheck) can go from 60 to zero in a heartbeat through no fault of your own. Ugh. The airlines even have their own version of purgatory. It’s called “furlough” and can last what feels like an eternity.

Most of the former instructors I’ve met over the years look back on their teaching days as something they simply had to endure in order to get a “real” job in the aviation world. I am tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to the repetition of working with one primary student after another. But the truth is, many of those folks were simply not any good as instructors. They got out of it what they put into it: not much. I feel bad for them, because they’re always looking toward the “next thing” to make them happy. When they’re at an airline, they’ll look toward that upgrade, or the next aircraft, never satisfied with where they are.

I don’t mean to suggest that Sam falls into this category. He seems to be taking the bumps and bruises with a lot more grace than I could ever hope to have in that position. But I have a hard time getting past the fact that, without exception, every single retired airline pilot I’ve ever met has given me the same piece of advice: stay away from the airlines. In what other field would one get such an overwhelming vote of no-confidence from the industry’s most successful veterans?

Come to think of it, I’m not sure why CFIs are so looked down upon. I probably made twice as much money as Sam did in 2007, and worked fewer hours flying more interesting aircraft to boot. The highest performance aerobatic airplanes in the world. Historical, fully restored open cockpit biplanes. The latest in composite glass-panel aircraft. Warbirds. Experimentals. Turbines. Formation flying. The list of aviation jobs out there is pretty long, and I’ve had the good fortune of working many of them. And I choose when and where I work, as well as who I fly with.

The allure of the airlines is a mystery to me. It’s like the ninth circle of hell, except in this version everybody is clamoring to get there.

I think there was a mix-up somewhere and I got this guy’s fortune by mistake.

Bob Miller at Over the Airwaves frequently touts the fact that ‘nobody’ provides spin training anymore. Perhaps my perspective is not typical, but I don’t find this to be the case.

At Sunrise Aviation (KSNA), we have the largest aerobatic program on the west coast. Not only that, but our private pilot students are all required to experience spins in a Decathlon before they solo. We’ve taught thousands of people to fly over the past quarter century using this philosophy. I was trained this way myself.

I can think of several other large operations which provide quality spin training just here in California. CP Aviation in Santa Paula, Attitude Aviation in Livermore, and Tutima Academy in King City.

I rarely have any problem getting pre-solo students to do multi-turn spins on their own (and recover on a specified heading). It’s simply a matter of proper technique when teaching this to students. Easier said than done. Most CFIs learn from instructors who have never done spins. There is no way they will effectively be able to teach it without proper spin training of their own.

Many pilots and instructors who do expose students (and perhaps even more egregiously, non-pilots) to spins introduce them by simply doing one unannounced. That is the worst possible idea. It guarantees the maneuver will simply blur by for the student, resulting in spatial disorientation and motion sickness. It also ensures they won’t learn anything other than to be afraid of flying.

More than any other maneuver, spins come with a long litany of baggage. Horror stories from other pilots. Tall tales of spins that swallow the aircraft whole like Moby Dick. Apprehensiveness about motion sickness. This requires delicate handling by the CFI, but instead it’s often approached with blunt force. “Just do it”.

Wrong approach.

Teaching spins must begin with a thorough understanding of the aerodynamics involved. That means ground training. I start with a review of how lift is developed. Then progress to a discussion of stalls, coordination, wing drops, and finally the aerodynamics of the spin itself. When teaching spins, the best advice for a CFI is: assume nothing. I’ve seen some really weird explanations from spin students about basic aerodynamics. One of the most common errors is a belief that aircraft stall at a specific speed rather than a specific angle of attack. The ground training is the place to get all that stuff taken care of.

In the air, it’s vital that the spins are worked up to slowly, beginning with stalls of various types. Falling leaf stalls are particularly valuable. The student must be comfortable with high angles of attack. Then, spin “drills” are introduced were the spin is started, then stopped within a quarter turn. Once the student’s technique and comfort have reached the requisite levels, a one turn spin can be introduced with appropriate ground reference. From that point it’s simply a matter of allowing the spin to develop through two and three turns while ensuring the student maintains situational awareness.

For the really apprehensive students, I begin the actual spins by having them work only one control, usually the rudder. Once they’re comfortable with that, I switch them to the stick. Then I have them do both, and eventually give them the throttle as well.

I also teach students the difference between a spin and a spiral dive. They are easy to confuse with one another if you don’t know what to look for. For students who take to the spins with more alacrity, I will sometimes introduce aggravated spin modes. Keep in mind these are all pre-solo students with maybe 20 hours of total flight time.

I’ve taught spins to countless students using this method. I’ve never had one get sick. I’ve never had one who didn’t feel more comfortable and confident with spins, stalls, high deck angles, high AOAs, and unusual attitudes afterward.

The importance of practical spin training doesn’t stem from the likelihood of encountering one inadvertently. If proper coordination is maintained (and it’s often not — that is why we have these stall-spin accidents), pilots are not likely to ever encounter one in the heat of battle. No, the best reason for teaching spins is to eliminate the “fear of the unknown”. Once they’ve completed the spin training, students uniformly feel that spins are “not nearly as scary as I thought”.

Personally, I think a lot of landing accidents are caused by a lack of spin training. Students who are afraid of spins will be afraid of deep stalls. It’s only natural to fear the unknown. Those wing drops can be scary if you don’t understand what’s causing them, what will happen if you don’t correct properly, and how the resulting spin entry should be handled. A fear of stalls means they’ll be apprehensive about high angles of attack and low airspeeds. So they approach the runway with too much energy just to be on the safe side, with predictable results.

There are many excellent reasons for practical spin training, but it’s hard to make any headway with those arguments when the FAA proclaims said training as unnecessary. To me, the proof is in the pudding. I see people every day who have had no spin training. It’s usually accompanied by poor rudder skills, limited understanding of the related aerodynamics, and a lack of appreciation for the importance of coordination. The low quality of basic airmanship skills can be quite dramatic.

And besides, just think about all the fun they’re missing out on!

Have you had spin training? If not, find a good aerobatic instructor and get the lead out. You won’t regret it.

From the “you learn something every day” file comes a fascinating Air Safety Foundation quiz on RNAV approaches.

For the non-pilots and/or non-instrument rated among us, RNAV is short for “random area navigation” and for the most part refers to satellite navigation — in other words, GPS. It’s not called GPS because there are other area navigation methods such as loran, omega, inertial navigation, and so on.

But they all do the same basic thing, which is to allow a pilot to fly from any random point in the world to any other point. Prior to RNAV, radio navigation consisted of flying from one ground-based station to another. A highway in the sky, if you will, but one firmly tied to the ground. These ground-based stations are housed in little buildings scattered around the country which transmit signals the aircraft’s navigation receiver can follow. The problem is, these buildings are not movable. They’re expensive to build, maintain, and monitor.

With RNAV, pilots can create virtual waypoints anywhere. RNAV systems therefore have more capability than the older ground-based navaids. If you’ve ever used a GPS, then you’re part of the RNAV revolution.

Of course, there has to be a down-side, right? Nothing is free in aviation, and so it is with RNAV. RNAV systems tend to be computerized and therefore more complex. They also tend to fly in the face of thing we’ve learned about IFR navigation. Curving approach paths, precision approaches without an ILS, etc.

For example, every instrument-rated pilot knows that in order to proceed below the published minimums for an Instrument Approach Procedure, three criteria must be met. In general terms, they are:

1. The flight visibility must meet the published minimums for that procedure
2. The aircraft must be in a position from which the pilot can make a normal landing using normal rates of descent
3. The runway environment (pavement, lights, paint, etc) must be in sight

Aside from an esoteric 100′ rule dealing with a specific part of the approach lighting system, there are no exceptions. Or at least, that’s what I thought until the RNAV quiz taught me about “fly visual” segments.

“Fly visual” segments are typically seen on approaches to airports in mountainous areas. Treat them as red flags: If you see one, take some extra time and give the procedure a closer look.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, as discussed in the main portion of the course, the visibility required for the approach is sometimes less than the length of the “fly visual” segment-meaning that the pilot can legally continue beyond the DA/MAP without the runway environment in sight, provided he/she has the required flight visibility. Obviously, this leaves a certain amount of room for interpretation. If you find yourself in such a situation, and there’s any doubt about whether to proceed (particularly if you’re not familiar with the local terrain and landmarks), it’s best to opt for the missed approach.

It’s also worth thinking about why the “fly visual” segment exists in the first place. Why did the designers of the approach essentially choose to “slide” the entire approach away from the airport by the distance of the visual segment? In many cases, the underlying reason is that terrain in the missed approach area would necessitate unreasonably high minimums if the MAP were in its normal position. By displacing the MAP a few miles, the designers can build a missed approach segment that doesn’t have terrain problems (a situation well illustrated by the NDB/DME or GPS-A approach at Hailey, Idaho).

Of course, the terrain is still out there, and the danger for pilots flying such procedures is that the unanticipated need to initiate a missed approach beyond the MAP can lead to obstruction conflicts (or, to put it more bluntly: a collision with a mountain).

The bottom line? For procedures like the one at Hailey, never continue the approach past the MAP unless there’s absolutely no doubt about the outcome.

Sounds like fun. Not! Imagine having 1/2 mile visibility and coming to the end of your RNAV highway in the sky, yet being permitted to continue flying visually without the having the airport in sight. TLAR (“that looks about right”) navigation at its best.

The scary thing about these approaches is that they occur in mountainous areas. By definition, these areas having high density altitudes in the summer and are prone to icing in the winter. A mountainous approach is one time I would want to start my missed approach segment earlier rather than later in order to assure adequate terrain clearance during the climb.

The RNAV Approach Quiz is free, and it was far more informative than I had anticipated. Normally I breeze through these things with nary a thought, but I really had to stop and think about some of the questions. And I must admit there were some things in there I didn’t know.

Reason #438 to avoid the iPhone: that smug Applesque feeling of superiority you get from owning one could backfire.

We push back from the gate and get advised of a ground stop in MEM due to storms in the area. My Captain informs the passengers over the PA. Not one minute later, we get chimed from the flight attendant. “Some guy with an IPhone says the weather is good, and wants to know what the REAL reason is for the delay. Is something wrong with the plane?”

Read the rest. Apparently Mr. iPhone doesn’t realize that he flies on that aircraft at the behest of the very person whose judgment and/or integrity he’s questioning.

I wish I knew which company employed that pilot! I’d like to give them some business next time I’m forced to subject myself to the depraved masquerade of modern airline travel.