Innehållsförteckning för May 2018 från Flying

“Stalls and spins represent the largest single factor in fatal general aviation accidents.” Surprisingly, this quote wasn’t pulled from the latest FAA news release, but rather from a NASA Langley Research Center newsletter dated April 1977. Forty years later, stall-spins and loss of control remain pinned to the top of the National Transportation Safety Board’s Most Wanted List of safety improvements. That doesn’t mean no one has tried to reduce the number of LOC-I fatalities. In this month’s How It Works, we look at the leading-edge wing cuff, a relatively simple concept designed to improve stall-spin resistance and take a bite out of GA accident numbers. The wing cuff is a low-cost modification that causes the wing to behave like two separate spanwise sections, each having vastly different aerodynamic characteristics.…

It was a beautiful Sunday morning, and nobody was flying. My open-cockpit biplane, a Great Lakes 2T-1A-1, was just the answer for a relaxing start to the day. It’s a great airplane for sightseeing. It flies low and slow, and turns on a dime. I departed Montgomery Airport (KMYF) in San Diego and put down at nearby Gillespie Field (KSEE) for a delicious cheese omelet. When I departed, it was still a ghost town; the Gillespie controller even offered an intersection departure on the perpendicular runway, just for fun. I departed into the clear, gorgeous empty sky. What could possibly go wrong? I let my instincts take me where they wanted, and I found myself exploring East County and the wide, smooth rocks surrounding Loveland Reservoir. I circled an intriguing…

I can’t really say I know Sarah Rovner, because we’ve never actually met. We’re both airline pilots, we have a bunch of mutual friends in common, we presented at the same aviation conference (one day apart) and we’ve chatted online and on the telephone. But mostly I “know” Sarah because we’re Facebook friends and she shows up in my News Feed on a regular basis, usually with a photo of an interesting airplane in some cool out-of-the-way place. I’ve followed along as Sarah built her aircraft-ferrying business from a one-woman show into a multi-pilot international operation, and it’s been a fascinating window into a world I knew very little about. I tend to write about segments of the aviation industry in which I have personal experience, but there’s a whole…

To those unfamiliar with formation flying, flight within a wingspan’s distance of another airplane looks eerily similar to an imminent collision. And collisions in airplanes generally don’t end well. But, in some cases, formation flying actually presents a lower risk than flying alone. And besides that, it is some of the most fun and rewarding flying a pilot will ever experience. Like all flying, formation flight was invented by birds. During a bird migration, these long-distance travelers generally form an organized pattern; I assume they do so for support and to protect each other from potential enemies, just as military pilots who fly in formation do. In studies of what motivates people to keep flying once they get their private pilot certificates, one of the biggest factors is a sense…

Here’s a perspective of the U.S. military’s preeminent fighter jet that you don’t get to see every day. This Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II was captured above Naval Air Station Kingsville for the Wings Over South Texas Air Show, held March 24-25. The shot is even more unusual for what’s parked on the ramp below. Six Navy Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornets await their turn to take to the skies for a practice routine before the show’s official start. Several of the Blue Angels pilots are no strangers to the area. Blue Angels flight leader Cmdr. Eric Doyle received his wings nearly two decades ago at NAS Kingsville. The Blue Angels are preparing to switch to an all-Super Hornet squadron soon. The Navy gets its F-35s next year. There’s no word…

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK, LES I am a colleague of Les Abend’s, and his is the first column I read when the magazine arrives. I was a Fokker F28 captain with USAir at the time of this accident [Jumpseat, “Fighting Mother Nature’s Wintertime Fury,” March], and Les’ description of the events and the subsequent primary cause is spot on. For us though, the secondary cause was just as important. It was determined that, for whatever reason, the first officer called out the V1 and VR speeds too low. This caused the captain to rotate much too early. It was surmised that the airplane stalled shortly after takeoff and rolled left, impacting the berm that protects the runways from the bay. This accident had a dramatic effect on all of…

When Dassault last year canceled the Falcon 5X program amid engine supplier issues, observers knew it would be only a matter of time before a replacement was announced. That move came perhaps sooner than some expected with the unveiling in February of the Falcon 6X, a full flyby-wire business twinjet that builds upon engineering work completed for the 5X program but improves on the original in some important ways. The two most noticeable changes are a larger cabin and more range. While Dassault confirms that the Falcon 6X is “largely based” on the 5X design, it is optimized to take advantage of its new engines — the Pratt & Whitney Canada PW800 series, which also powers the new Gulfstream G500 and G600. The previous choice of power for the 5X…

RELEVANT DISCUSSION: FAR PART 107, AC 107-2 OPERATING REQUIREMENTS: 1. Avoid manned aircraft, and never operate in a careless or reckless manner. 2. The drone must remain within sight. Alternatively, if you use first-person view or similar technology, you must have a visual observer always keep your aircraft within unaided sight (for example, no binoculars are allowed). 3. Neither you nor a visual observer can be responsible for more than one unmanned aircraft operation at a time. 4. You can fly only during daylight or civil twilight (30 minutes before official sunrise to 30 minutes after official sunset, local time). Operations during civil twilight require appropriate anti-collision lighting. 5. Minimum weather visibility is 3 miles from the control station, 500 feet below clouds and 2,000 feet horizontally from clouds. 6.…

Eight of us had flown into Borrego Springs, California, for lunch. As Martha and I helped the folks from Australia back into the airplane and gave them our preflight briefing for the return trip, I explained, “We are about to challenge the air traffic control system a bit. We will pop up in this small jet and accelerate to 350 knots indicated airspeed. We will then request an ILS clearance for landing at Montgomery Field in San Diego, and see how ATC handles it.” It was an extraordinary group of passengers. There were the chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (the Australian equivalent of the policy and rule-making part of the FAA), the chairman of Airservices Australia (the country’s air traffic control organization) and the heads of various departments…

ANY number of experts can help you buy a jet. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. But I did buy a jet — my first — recently, and the experience taught me some lessons. It is entirely possible that you and your company will employ an expert or two to help you find a turbofan-powered airplane and that my experience will seem bush league to you. It did not seem bush league to me. Since buying the jet, I’ve spent several hours listening to recorded messages when looking for information from Rockwell Collins (FMS database), CAMP (maintenance tracking) and Williams International (engines). These phone calls include a lot of “press 1 for this,” “press 2 for that” instructions. So, picture my imaginary phone interactions with the Jet Buying Gurus…

If you have a desire to fly formation but own a Cessna 172 and don’t think you can do it in your airplane, guess again. While a tandem-seat airplane is ideal for formation flying because it has great lateral visibility, you can fly formation in any airplane as long as you have good stick-and-rudder skills and know your airplane well. Mass formation arrivals to AirVenture are organized not only by the Mooney Caravan group but also by other type-groups, such as the B2Osh (Bonanzas), C2A (Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association), AirVenture Cessnas 2 Oshkosh and others. If a mass formation flight into Oshkosh is not for you, you can still hook up with these type-specific groups to learn the skill. Surprisingly, the group clinics are not expensive. The cost for all…

It’s hard to believe Cirrus has delivered 7,000 piston airplanes since the first SR20 rolled out of the factory in 1999, but that’s precisely the milestone the manufacturer has reached as it puts the finishing touches on the last of seven very special 7,000th Commemorative Edition SR22s built at the factory in Duluth, Minnesota. I was fortunate to get the opportunity to fly one of these distinct airplanes with Ivy McIver, Cirrus SR product line manager, from my home airport, Morristown Municipal in New Jersey, to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on a cold and windy late winter day in March. It’s safe to say this was probably the nicest SR22T ever to grace the ramp at MMU — and it ought to be, with its eyebrow-raising price tag of $1.1 million.…

TIPS ON FINDING AND OWNING THE MILITARY AIRPLANE OF YOUR DREAMS I have never thought of myself as much of a warbird guy — at least until I went back in time to the summer I was unsuspectingly infected with a love for old military airplanes. It was during a summer volunteer job at the EAA Airshow in Rockford, Illinois, the precursor to AirVenture. I worked the flight line with a pair of painted ping-pong paddles, pointing aircraft that passed in the grass to their parking spots. Hundreds of homebuilts, factory-builts and, of course, warbirds taxied past. I recall meeting a P-51 pilot late one afternoon who said he remembered passing me while taxiing in. “You were the kid with the green hat standing there with his mouth wide open,…

How cool is this: an invitation to the 15th annual Living Legends of Aviation Awards ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, from a friend — himself a living legend — whose lovely wife finds all things airplane a crashing bore (whoops, wrong adjective). Then an offer to bunk with friends in Santa Monica (instead of $300-plus a night at the Beverly Hilton) and a budget airline fare — well, until you add “extras” like a seat, a bag, water and use of the lavatory (just kidding, Allegiant, but not far off). I’m pretty familiar with this kind of event. For 25 years, I’ve been a nominator (certainly not an enshrinee) at the National Aviation Hall of Fame, held, until this year, in Dayton, Ohio. And what an honor when I was…

Writing last month’s Aftermath column about a fatal accident that resulted from the pilot’s mishandling of a balked landing, I reflected that I had never assessed the behavior of my own airplane in that maneuver. As I have said before, my idea of flight testing is to take trips and wait for something strange to happen, and as luck would have it, I have never yet had a balked landing in Melmoth 2. In the Aftermath accident, the pilot selected full flaps, allowed speed to decay to the vicinity of the stall and then, thinking she was still too high to land, decided to go around. She retracted the flaps without first gaining speed. The minimum flying speed went up along with the flaps, and the airplane, a Cirrus, stalled…