Innehållsförteckning för June/July 2020 från Flying

The final en route minutes of a long cross-country flight stretch indeterminately at times—the closer you get to the destination, the harder it can be to fight your latent get-there-itis. I’m feeling a similar kind of anxiousness at the moment, and it’s only been two months since the stayat-home orders have affected most of the US and much of the world. While our team at Flying has managed to get airborne in limited amounts, there’s no escaping the knowledge that aviation is operating on a different level right now, and no one’s quite sure how long that will last. The good news? General aviation has risen to meet the challenges presented to us in so many ways. Our team stepped up to create the issue you’re holding now—doubled as a…

Until the recent slowdown in travel because of the COVID-19 virus, Branson, Missouri, was a top destination in the Ozarks for families with kids, boasting a host of live shows, restaurants, golf courses, museums, hiking trails and much more. While everyone hopes the lull in flying to getaways such as Branson will be short, the current downtime offers pilots a perfect opportunity to tune up their IFR chart-reading skills. This time, we offer up the RNAV (GPS) Runway 32 approach into Branson’s privately owned, public-use airport (KBBG), sporting a 7,140-foot runway where most of the traffic is itinerant, not local flight training. A. ALIGNING WITH THE FINAL APPROACH COURSE Most pilots generally expect vectors to the approach when transitioning from the en route environment, but this isn’t always the most…

ACessna 210L left Bozeman, Montana, with five men aboard and full tanks for a 700-nautical-mile flight to San Carlos, California. Four hours and 48 minutes later, the airplane crashed near Lodi, California, 60 nm short of its destination. The 1,200-hour pilot, 60 years old, died two weeks later of his injuries; the four passengers, also seriously injured, survived. One of them told the National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators that they were about 30 minutes short of the destination when the pilot said that they were getting low on fuel, and he was going to turn around and land at an airport they had just passed. Shortly thereafter, he announced that they needed to find a road to land on. The engine then quit. The pilot switched tanks and tried…

In “When to Give Up,” an article from several years ago, I recommended giving serious thought before every takeoff about how to handle an emergency. Rather than trying for a “mira- cle save,” it was usually better to accept the unpleasant certainty of bending some metal but probably surviving. The classic example is losing an engine on takeoff in a light twin at max gross weight at a high-density-altitude airport. While the book says it’ll fly, you aren’t the uber-proficient test pilot who generated those numbers—and your airplane ain’t what it used to be when it came off the assembly line. So, it’s statistically better to chop the good engine and put it down off the end of the runway but into relatively benign terrain. In a single, the decision…

PAPA’S PLACE Thank you for the Papa’s Place article. It was basic camping, and if you did not bring it with you, you did without. I went there several times by four-wheel-drive car with my father and grandfather. I got to fly only once—an hour flight from Calexico [California]. My father and grandfather remember the “development” of the place as you describe. They started going there in the mid-1950s. Each time was an approximately eight-hour drive each way. They always went with at least three other four-wheel-drive vehicles [because] the “roads” were really paths. If Peter landed in Calexico on a weekend in the 1960s, I probably refueled his aircraft; I worked most weekends at the airport. I earned my pilot’s license at Calexico in 1969. I have been flying…

The aviation support system in the US has grown steadily over the past 60 years, and it is the worldwide standard for its breadth of pilot services across the National Airspace System. Notably, these services are provided as a government-funded resource without additional fees as you may experience in other parts of the world. Change is afoot, though, with the methods for accessing these resources evolving considerably in recent years. This is in large part because of the FAA’s Flight Service NAS Efficient Streamlined Services plan, which has three primary goals: • Expand the use of existing and developing technologies for functions that support the FAA’s critical safety mission. • Redesign processes to optimize service delivery. • Eliminate redundancies and underutilized activities. This is good news because it leads to…

In 1958, Ozires Silva entered the aeronautical engineering program at the newly founded Institute of Aeronautical Technology (ITA) in São Jose dos Campos, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, that had opened in 1950. He was already 27 years old—and he clearly wasted no time in finally pursuing his childhood dreams. At work on what would become the EMB 110 Bandeirante project—launched in 1965, code name IPD-6504—after graduation, at the Technical Center for Aeronautics (CTA), Silva saw the twin-engine turboprop first fly on October 22, 1968, powered by Pratt & Whitney PT6A engines. A chance one-on-one meeting with the president of Brazil at the time, Artur da Costa e Silva, led to the go-ahead to produce the aircraft under the government’s direction. Ozires Silva was 39 years old when…

“HURRICANES ARE THE MOST VIOLENT STORMS ON EARTH.”—NASA In the early hours of August 19, 2019, a tropical wave appeared off the west coast of Africa. A few days later, it began showing signs of organization and cyclonic movement inside a small low-pressure area. By August 24, the system had grown large enough to qualify as an official tropical depression centered about 700 nm southeast of Barbados. That depression, now known as tropical storm Dorian, made landfall over Barbados with sustained winds of 45 knots. Dorian continued to intensify as it approached St. Croix later that day with increased winds of 65 knots, and by August 30, Dorian was labeled a Category 3 hurricane with winds of 115 knots. By the time Dorian reached the Bahamas’ Elbow Cay in Great…

The sun and haze cast a warm orange backdrop to the massive silver machine, the outline of which dominated the view out the taxicab window. Though huge, it looked somehow stubby. The sun was going down, but we were just heading out. It was my second airplane flight. I was 8 years old. First flights can come in several varieties. Was it the first time you saw an airplane in the air? Was it the first time you went up into the air in an airplane? Or was it the first time you pulled back on the yoke and felt the wheels gently rise off the runway? Let’s call them all first moments of wonder. My first flight had been a few months earlier, and I remember almost nothing about…

I was quite young when I first fell in love with gliding. It may have been even before I fell in love with Cecilia Revilla, who sat in front of me in the fourth grade. When I say gliding, I don’t mean flying a sailplane; I was much too young for that. I mean just the fact of something gliding—a butterfly, amodel airplane, a folded-up sheet of paper. That a balsa-and-tissue model my father had made would sail out, bobbing on the ripples of the air, circling, swooping or even merely tracing a long, straight, gently descending line from the brow of a hill as if it were rolling on invisible wheels down an invisible road – that was sweet, magical and, as it turned out, life-shaping. It was a…

It was a bright spring day at Flight Level 350, far above the Chesapeake Bay, as we cruised up the Eastern Seaboard en route to Newark, New Jersey. This was my first time flying a jet in more than a month—really flying, not playacting in a giant video game on hydraulic stilts ensconced in the antiseptic cloisters of the training center. This return to the flight levels, the escape from late-winter gloom, the warm sunshine bathing my lofty perch in the Boeing 737’s left seat: all of this felt wonderful, yet I couldn’t escape the dead, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was my first day of Initial Operating Experience—my first day as a major airline captain—with shiny new commander’s wings and four-stripe epaulets so pristine that…

The runway overrun accident class drives the impetus behind the ROASS now available on the Phenom 300E—and this category of pilot error continues to induce more than its fair share of mishaps. The National Business Aviation Association offers a complete study on runway excursions (nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/safety/in-flight-safety/runway-safety/runway-excursions) on its website, pointing out that “most business aviation accidents occur in the landing phase,” for which it references a Business Aviation Safety Brief published by the International Business Aviation Committee in 2013. One-third of the studied accidents were runway excursions. “Despite efforts to improve it, the worldwide business aviation excursion accident rate has changed little over the last decade, hovering around 3.6 per million flights, or some 60 percent higher than the corresponding commercial aviation rate,” according to the brief. A common scenario occurred…

During World War II, a host of automobile manufacturers changed course to build airplanes, in order to create the “Arsenal of Democracy” required to effectively fight the Axis powers. Over the course of its 80-year history, Piper has surfed the cyclical waves of the industry and considers itself a part of the community, especially during times when the nation must band together. In March 2020, Piper Aircraft joined other aerospace OEMs in producing medical and protective equipment to join the defense against the global COVID-19 outbreak. The company’s engineering teams have designed face shields for use by medical personnel in Florida and Ohio, and the production team quickly went to work to produce them in short order. Piper Aircraft president and CEO Simon Caldecott says: “This is an extraordinary crisis…

I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, this past winter to direct a TV series about Evel Knievel’s life. The script has some fun aviation moments in it. In the 1970s, Knievel had a pair of matching Learjets. We were re-creating his livery on the exteriors of two older—but still working—medevac Lears. We were going to shoot another scene inside a Beechcraft King Air. The plan was to pull it to-and-fro on the ramp at Atlantic Aviation at KABQ to simulate taxiing. As the director, I’m typically the guy who marshals the people who have all the answers. On this production, I really enjoyed being the one with all the answers to the crew’s multiple questions about regulations, such as who could legally remove a seat inside the King Air. Had…

One of the most common questions asked of me as an airline pilot—and now as a former one—is, “Did you ever have any really close calls?” My coy response is usually, “The espresso maker on the Triple Seven quit just as we reached our North Atlantic oceanic entry point after departing from London.” The inquiries emanate from a respectful and innocent perception that my “always” glamorous career was mostly routine but sometimes fraught with the perils of flying a potentially flawed monster jet airliner through the stratosphere. The question really involves threat-and-error management, a term that most of us had never really defined until the airlines and the FAA directed that the concept be included in our training. For the most part, my colleagues and I thought we were doing…