A minute later, the departure controller established radio contact with the pilot. Communication did not go smoothly.

Departure controller: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, Fort Meyers, are you up?”

Pilot of 262WS: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra.”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, radar contact, turn right heading one-seven-zero vector, climb, maintain VFR 2,500.”

Pilot: “Continue my climb to—say again?”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, maintain VFR at 2,500.”

Pilot: “Maintain 2,500. Course is now what?”

Departure: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, turn right heading one-seven-zero, maintain VFR at 2,500, vector to get you south of RSW.”

Pilot: “Course one-two-zero, stay at 2,500.”

Departure: “November two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, I don’t have time to talk to you four times per control instruction ‘cause there’s a lot going on. Please listen up. Fly heading one-seven-zero, maintain VFR 2,500, over.”

Pilot: “All right, one-seven—ah, stay at 2,500.”

Departure: “I need a call sign with a control instruction please, two Whiskey Sierra. Verify one-seven-zero heading, 2,500.”

Pilot: “Two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, two-five-zero-zero at one-seven.”

Departure: “Two Whiskey Sierra, sixth time now, heading one-seven-zero.”

Pilot: “Heading is one-seven-zero, Whiskey Sierra, two-six-two Whiskey Sierra.”

Departure: “November two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, your altitude indicates two thousand niner hundred, and you’re restricted to 2,500.”

Pilot: “I’ll [sic] pulling back the power and going down to 2,500.”

Departure: “November two Whiskey Sierra, please use your call sign when you give me the altitude read-back.” Twenty seconds pass. “November two Whiskey Sierra, I need your call sign when you read back the altitude. Verify maintain 2,500.”

Pilot: “I’m at 2,500, two-six-two Whiskey Sierra, one-seven-zero.”

Departure: “Thank you.”

This distracted, fumbling exchange might have passed for an episode of stage fright between a novice pilot and a testy, by-the-book controller. The pilot was not a novice, however. He had been flying for years and had reported 530 hours on his most recent insurance application.

The pilot checked in with approach control. After a few minutes, the controller issued a warning for opposite-direction traffic at 6 miles, and the pilot acknowledged. Six seconds later, he transmitted: “Mayday, mayday!”

The RV went down in a densely wooded area. The wreckage path, through tall trees, was 700 feet long and 100 feet wide, oriented about 60 degrees to the right of course. The first items in the debris field were the left wing and fragments of the cockpit canopy; the wing had folded upward from overstress and shattered the canopy. The rest of the wreckage was fragmented from plowing through numerous trees. The pilot was wearing a five-point safety harness, which separated from the airframe.

• READ MORE FROM PETER GARRISON: Aftermath

A Dynon EFIS recorded several parameters of flight data. It told a strange tale.

For several minutes, the pilot had been gradually descending. When the traffic warning came, he was at 1,700 feet. He acknowledged. There was a slight pitch up, followed by a negative 3-G push over to a 45-degree dive. Manifold pressure dropped toward idle at the moment the pilot called mayday, then returned to full throttle. The airplane rolled inverted, its descent rate approaching 10,000 fpm. The left wing failed two seconds before the end of the recording.

In a criminal proceeding, a judge may determine when testimony about a defendant’s past actions and demeanor is admissible. For the National Transportation Safety Board, it always is, and in this case, there was no lack of it.

The pilot was a lawyer with a checkered history. According to an article in the Portland Oregonian, he had been disbarred in California. He had been denied admission to the bar in Oregon, where he lived, on grounds of his “moral character.” He had been arrested after an altercation with a judge in an elevator and sentenced to probation and anger-management treatment.

Another thread in the pilot’s life was a persistent propensity for claiming military honors that he did not really possess. He had allegedly served decades earlier as an enlisted man on an aircraft carrier—if a long interview he gave to an oral-history collector for the Library of Congress can be believed. But he had carried a pattern of “valor theft” to the extreme of using photo-editing software to insert his face onto the uniformed body of a much-decorated captain. A few days before the fatal accident, he had been released from jail in Virginia, where he had been serving a sentence of several months for violating a protective order with respect to one of the people—he called them “terrorists”—who were investigating his military impostures.

A turbulent personal life is sometimes said to correlate with an elevated propensity for accidents.

But there was still more. The pilot suffered from a host of medical conditions that he had not reported to the FAA, including depression, PTSD (thought to be related to his legal entanglements), an enlarged heart and coronary artery disease, and he was using several psychoactive medicines that bore warnings against driving or operating machinery.

According to the NTSB, the cause of the accident was “the pilot’s unsafe maneuvering and exceedance of the airplane’s operating limitations, which resulted in an in-flight failure of the left wing. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s underlying psychologic or psychiatric disease.”

“Unsafe maneuvering” is a mild description for a negative 3-G, 45-degree dive from an altitude of 1,700 feet. Furthermore, the failure of the left wing, which must have been due to a sudden effort to pull up, was incidental; even if the wing had not failed, the airplane would not have recovered from the dive.

The NTSB struggled to frame its analysis of the accident. The suddenness and violence of the final plunge could suggest a precipitous physical crisis, but the autopsy found no sign of aneurysm, stroke or infarct. To judge from the Dynon’s altitude trace, the airplane was being hand-flown, and so the cause was not a runaway autopilot. “The exact cause,” the NTSB conceded, “could not be determined, given the lack of mechanical anomalies or weather phenomena that could explain the accident sequence.”

One sentence in the accident report, however, contained a hint of an otherwise unelaborated possibility.

“His unreported psychiatric disease,” the Board wrote, “if not well-controlled, could have led to intentionally unsafe maneuvering.” Exactly what sort of “intention” the Board meant, it did not say.

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Puzzling Personality appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Martha and I take turns flying and each can fly from either seat. In this case, I was not particularly eager to declare myself as the pilot. Finally, I “agreed” to be the pilot.

As I exited the airplane, the bullhorn’s voice said: “Pilot, keep your hands high in the air. Face away from the sound of the bullhorn and back very slowly towards it.” Next, “Pilot, put your hands together behind your back.” When they had my hands cuffed, they put me in the back of a squad car.

Next came the instructions to Martha. “Passenger, very slowly open your door. Passenger, very slowly stick both hands out the door and come out very slowly.” As Martha exited the airplane, the bullhorn’s voice said: “Passenger, keep your hands high in the air. Face away from the sound of the bullhorn and back very slowly towards it.” Next, “Passenger, put your hands together behind your back.” From my viewpoint in the squad car, I watched with distress as they cuffed Martha’s hands behind her back. It was very disturbing to see they had their pistols aimed at Martha’s head the entire time, right up until they put her into a separate squad car. It is a sight I will never forget.

What was taking place is referred to as a “high-risk” traffic stop. It is designed to prevent the suspect from fleeing and protect the police officers involved.

Later, the Santa Barbara, California, police told us that a “private company” had called to report that N50545 had been stolen and was on its way to Santa Barbara Airport. In fact, the airplane that had been stolen (eight years earlier) was a 1968 C150J, and the registration for that airplane had been canceled in September 2005. The registration number was then reassigned by the FAA to the airplane we were flying, a 2009 Cessna 172S owned by Cessna Aircraft Company.

It would have taken less than 60 seconds on the FAA website to reveal these facts.

The “company” that had called the Santa Barbara police was the Texas-based El Paso Intelligence Center. In reality, this “private company” is shown on the web as an agency of the Drug Enforcement Administration. One of the functions of EPIC is to maintain crime databases and distribute the information to police departments. One of those databases is the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, which is a database of crime information including, among many other things, stolen airplanes. EPIC notified the Santa Barbara police based on the IFR flight plan we had filed on that August morning in 2010—something anyone who had stolen the airplane would have been unlikely to do.

• READ MORE FROM JOHN KING: Sky Kings

It appears there is no system in place to prevent this from happening repeatedly. We’ve had numerous pilots tell us they had the same thing happen to them—including a previous case with the identical airplane. The database had not been corrected even after it became known that a pilot had been detained and put at risk unnecessarily. It is something the pilot and passengers will never forget.

The biggest question that comes to my mind is whether our case really needed to be treated as a “high-risk” traffic stop. It is our belief the situation could have been managed in a way that didn’t require guns being pointed at our heads. If they had allowed us to simply go directly to the FBO, we would have shut down the airplane and then self-disabled it by ensuring it was chocked and tied down. At that point, the police could have approached us and had a calm conversation without guns and with very little risk. The problem is, in most cases, the police don’t know enough about aviation to know the pilot in almost every case would self-disable the airplane. They imagine the pilot somehow fleeing when they realize the police want to talk to them. That is not as likely in an airplane as in a car. But it was more likely to happen in the open area the police chose for the confrontation than in a tight parking area at an FBO.

Our concern about this is that guns induce risk. Martha and I had been impressed by an incident near our home where the police had miscopied a license plate number and followed an innocent teenager home. The mother became upset by the treatment of her son and had been shoved away by the police. When the teenager leapt off the ground in support of his mother, he was shot to death. Martha and I subsequently developed what we called our “interception standard operating procedure”: comply fully, never complain, never explain.

A police interception presents a risk that the subject can best control by using our SOP and keeping their emotions under control. When guns are added to a situation, everyone is more adrenaline-charged, and that risk is heightened by argumentation—or even mere explanation. I remember sitting in the back of the squad car thinking to myself, “Someday, I will have my say about this, but it isn’t now.” Later, in a press release, the police department was quoted as saying, “They were completely OK with it.” At that time, one of the officers said to us, “You know we had to do this, don’t you?” Of course we didn’t believe they had to do it, and we weren’t OK with it. Fortunately, each of us followed our SOP to the letter.

It did give us a great joke line—”Guns, handcuffs… Worst ramp check we’ve ever had.”

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of FLYING Magazine

The post Sky Kings: Innocent Pilots Face Down Guns, Handcuffs appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The Piper M600 at a Glance

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Ten years later, the newest evolution of the PA-46 series—Piper’s M600/SLS Halo—proposes to do both, delivering an envelope of protection readily managed by transitioning pilots while at the same time upping the ante in speed and payload. When the M600 update to the M500 first arrived on the scene in 2016, those dream numbers—the result of 100 more horsepower up front from a flat-rated PT6A-42A engine—really came true.

This year, with the FLYING Innovation Award-winning Autoland from Garmin giving the M600 its Halo, Piper’s quest for an ever-higher level of GA safety got a serious boost. The folks at Garmin will tell you Autoland couldn’t have come to fruition without Piper, and the feeling is mutual. “The M600 SLS and its Halo Safety System with Autoland is the result of an unwavering commitment to safety as well as the desire to evolve our products based on market input,” said Piper president and CEO John Calcagno. “This standard feature brings peace of mind to pilots and their families.”

Chasing the Grail

When FLYING first flew the initial M600 in market-survey mode five years ago—just hours before the FAA signoff on the type—we had a sense the PA-46 series had found its sweet spot, and the type has achieved great success. For the photo shoot for this article, we captured serial No. 173 in flight over the Atlantic Ocean, and I flew my demo flight in serial No. 163, currently in experimental mode, to test out several new goodies on board. Piper delivered 36 of the PA-46-600TP M600/SLS aircraft in 2020 and six in the first quarter of this year, to make a reported total of 161 out the door since its debut—with clearly more in the immediate pipeline.

Handling characteristics and performance make it comparable in some ways to half a Beechcraft King Air 200, according to pilots we talked with for this report. When Piper moved from the M500 to the M600, the extra 100 shp coaxed from the Pratt & Whitney PT6-series engines made all the difference in the world. In this case, they are the same 42s you find on King Air 200s from the early 2000s, but on the King Airs, they’re rated at 850 shp per side, while the M600 offers 600 shp. In the air, the M600′s wing makes it respond like the larger airplane, and the climb rate as high as 3,000 fpm stacks up well against the turboprop twin as well. Add in a range while carrying five passengers with light bags (a total of 1,000 pounds) of up to 800 nm—and the fact that it sips half the gas—this makes the M600/SLS a compelling choice for owners who fit that use case.

A Protective Halo

The Halo-equipped M600/SLS debuted with Garmin’s Autoland as the premier feature in the model’s standard lineup beginning in 2020. But the well-rounded roster of capabilities that Autoland and its accompanying avionics, known collectively as Autonomi, pack onto the turboprop make it just part of an overall “safety system,” as Piper calls it.

To recap, in case you aren’t familiar with Autoland: The orchestrated suite of software and hardware directs the airplane to the nearest suitable airport in the event of pilot incapacitation. It does so by controlling the aircraft’s navigation, descent, weather and terrain avoidance, gear extension, flight-into-known-icing activation, flaps, braking, and all communication with ATC. While it’s designed for passengers to initiate with a guarded button on the panel, the pilot can start the sequence via that same button, or the airplane can initiate Autoland itself if the pilot is unresponsive in certain cases.

Hypoxia recognition incorporated into the emergency descent mode takes it one step further, monitoring the pilot any time they engage the autopilot above 14,000 feet msl. If the pilot is unresponsive to the system’s prompts, EDM will bring the airplane below 14,000 feet. After that descent, the system will initiate the Autoland sequence if no further response comes from the pilot after a set period of time.

Halo also includes Garmin’s electronic stability and protection, synthetic vision, SafeTaxi, TerminalTraffic (which syncs with ADS-B-equipped aircraft and ground vehicles), SurfaceWatch (directing you to the runway before takeoff and to the ramp after landing), Flight Stream 510 to create a Bluetooth connection between the aircraft and your mobile device, and an autothrottle system.

I flew the model Piper currently has in experimental/market-survey status, N163HL, specifically so I could test out the latest update to the Garmin autothrottle that was originally incorporated into the M600 for Autoland. With the upcoming approval, the pilot can use the autothrottle outside of the Autoland sequence. And as tested, the A/T certainly does its part to assist the pilot—but more on that a bit later.

Preflight to Approach

Both models observed for this report feature the optional five-blade Hartzell composite propeller, approved in spring 2017, which—other than looking completely badass on the ramp—delivers an improved vibration signature inside the airplane, as well as likely better takeoff and climb performance, though no concrete numbers have been established by Piper. The steel-shank core is wrapped in carbon composite material and trimmed with a nickel-cobalt leading edge with a mesh erosion screen to protect the blades from foreign-object debris. That’s important because a single nick on the blade renders it unairworthy. As we noted on my preflight walk-around with Piper Aircraft business development director Dan Lewis, a stray drop of rain clinging to the leading edge can look an awful lot like a chip out of that blade. We were both relieved when it wiped off. That said, the propeller carries a lifetime guarantee, the result of a blade strength between five and 10 times that of blades with wood cores. Continuing on the walk-around, a hidey-hole-size compartment under a circular access panel near the horizontal stab can retain towels, testers and other cleaning accoutrements.

The fuselage could do with a few more inches in the cross section—a common refrain from those who will need to sit knee-to-knee with their fellow passengers in the back. I’m a not a large human, but it still took nimble maneuvering to drop myself into the left seat. Once settled into the flight deck, though, the M600 feels like a real front office, with a well-thought-out panel, easy-to-reach circuit breakers, and electrical-system controls on the overhead immediately in front of the pilot.

While taxiing, the rudder pedals remain a bit stiff, but the flight controls improve greatly in feel once you’re airborne. In fact, the relatively moderate pitch force in comparison to the slightly heavier aileron response reminded me of being in a stretched Bonanza with a longer wing. The same nose-heavy profile on landing will also echo that of a front-loaded A36, especially with two or three people placed towrds the front, and light baggage.

My introduction to the stand-alone autothrottle began in its takeoff setting, which comes on line as the powerplant reaches 700 pounds of torque. It felt like we were just getting started down the runway when the autothrottle captured the lever under my guiding hand. I continued steering, but the autothrottle set the Pratt & Whitney out front to the most efficient takeoff power setting and held it there as I came through 85 knots and rotated.

The climb from nearly sea level to 14,500 feet—above the lifting condensation level, its commensurate clouds and bumps, and general coastal fray—zoomed along at a variable rate between 2,500 and 3,000 fpm, with the total climb completed in less than six minutes on the G3000′s clock. With a couple of clearing turns in the last part of the climb, I agreed with the prior assessment that the airplane’s coupling is not unlike that of its larger brethren.

At 14,500 feet, I disconnected the A/T, which had held us at the maximum efficient torque setting throughout the climb, and Lewis walked through the M600′s protective features that predated the Halo version: electronic stability and protection and underspeed protection. Added since we previously flew the M600 in 2016 is overspeed protection, an addition to the emergency-descent-management protocol first installed with the G3000 in the model that year. During the overspeed-protection sequence, I watched and listened as the airspeed approached the top end, and when it rolled past 248 knots, a voice announced, “Autothrottle,”—which was already engaged from the takeoff and climb—and the power lever moved as the system adjusted the torque to a lower setting to keep us from blasting through the invisible speed wall.

With all of the envelope protection baked into the M600, it’s important to note the ability to override all of it in the event an evasive maneuver is required. That tough wing is responsible in part for a green arc (73 kias to 251 kias) on the tape that goes all the way up to the barber pole at 251 kias, the VNO.

• CHECK OUT MORE AIRCRAFT REVIEWS: We Fly

That said, it almost felt like a setup when things played out as they did when we headed back toward the airport. Upon descending down to 4,000 feet to duck below a scattered cumulus layer and line up for an approach into Vero, Lewis called out, “Skydiver!” and gestured out to the front of the airplane. Sure enough, there was a canopy at 12 o’clock and well inside our traffic bubble. I hit a 30-degree bank left to avoid the person hanging in the straps, only to see another canopy come through my field of view. I banked harder and pressed the autopilot-disengage button on the yoke to release the ESP, which would have resisted my momentary bank past 45 degrees to steer clear of the skydiver.

“The autothrottle will catch you a little faster than the system [alone] will,” says product marketing manager Bryant Elliott. “It will start increasing power before that underspeed kicks in. So, if the autothrottle is not engaged, the airspeed at which the underspeed is captured will be a bit lower.” The upshot? The enhanced aircraft flight-control system, launched with the M500 and M350 in 2015, now has another layer of protection.

When you look at what Garmin has been working on all along, they just needed a way to tie all the systems together to create Autoland. The Garmin GFC 700 has been able to fly an approach all the way to the ground the whole time; it just needed a way to extend the gear and flaps and flare and brake correctly.

Angels in the Panel

Up front, you can configure the screens to display any way you want—except maybe the latest Netflix movie—including full-screen PFDs on the left and right with traffic and map insets, as well as a split screen on all three displays featuring large-scale versions of pages such as weather, terrain or the engine-indication system. The big screens are driven by a pair of GTN 850s positioned side by side vertically on the center console above the power quadrant.

The daily summer thunderstorms had yet to kick up along the Treasure Coast during our demo flight, so we couldn’t find much to scope on the onboard radar. The M600 included the standard Garmin GWX 75 with an optional enhancement package—this option is now the newly rebranded Garmin GWX 8000 (previously the GWX 80). When the M600 debuted, its clean-sheet wing streamlined the radar pod into the leading edge of the right wing, improving ground clearance and allowing for a wider gear stance by a couple of inches on each side. The result of the change to the main gear is improved crosswind handling, with a demonstrated limit of 17 knots. “Ground clearance was not really an issue—it was getting the radar away from the fuselage,” Elliott said. The false feedback from the propeller went away with the change.

The GWX 8000 brings large-aircraft radar capability to the owner-flown market. Primary among its features is StormOptix. As Elliott noted: “Piper has offered the ground-clutter suppression and turbulence detection since the launch of the GWX 75, but the additional Auto Mode and volumetric scanning are unique to the GWX 8000. Also, the volumetric scanning provides advanced ground-clutter suppression and advanced turbulence detection, as well as zero blind range,” which means that returns are maintained in the system’s memory, enabling them to be presented on the screen until they are essentially zero nautical miles away.

Placing the GWX 8000 into auto mode activates the three-dimensional volumetric scanning with automatic adjustment of the antenna sweep to create a picture of the scanned volume. Those of us who recall single-color onboard radar (often a ghostly green) will be blown away by the 16-color palette available on the new display. Because of the diameter of the antenna, the wind-shear option is not available in the M600—but other enhancements, such as predictive hail and lightning, will be available with future software loads.

Backup instrumentation is now provided by the Garmin GI 275 integrated flight display, with its smaller, round-dial presentation, taking the place of the Aspen Avionics Evolution PFD.

One area where the M600 shines is in operational cost: That figure runs roughly $750 per hour according to the Aircraft Cost Calculator. How does this compare to other single-engine turboprops in the lineup? Though steep in comparison to piston-powered, high-performance singles, it ranks well among its peers in the single-engine-turboprop class, with the M600 besting the Daher TBM 940 and Pilatus PC-12 NG by nearly $200 per hour—and about $50 less per hour than the Epic E1000. Granted, with each of those competitors, you gain carrying capability and speed in varying amounts.

The new black-and-silver paint schemes manage to look both cool on the ramp and hot in the air. Interiors have had an update as well, with the EXP package now standard in the M600/SLS. But it’s more than an illusion of comfort and protection that the cabin environment provides. With the FLYING Innovation Award-winning Halo quietly standing by, the pilot now has the ability to give their passengers a true safety net of their own.

Piper M600/SLS Halo Statistics

The Right Training

An accident claimed a Piper M600—but fortunately not its pilot—in a runway-excursion event earlier this year. The preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board points to the pilot’s low time in type. Interviews with the broker who sold him the airplane indicate that the pilot’s low total time and laissez-faire approach to the type-specific training offered by Piper may have contributed to the airframe’s demise.

Piper offers a five-day transition course to the M600 through its partner, Legacy Flight Training at Vero Beach and Scottsdale, Arizona. And though the training in type is important, it’s also worth noting that the PA-46 series puts pilots into the midlevels (between FL 160 and FL 300) often for the first time. This means flying a fast, pressurized aircraft above some of the weather, but not all. It means exposure to high-altitude flying above FL 250—and getting the requisite training if you go there. It means more exposure to in-flight icing. These conditions are all straightforward enough to handle while everything is going well, but once a chain of events links up, experience up here can be a swift and harsh teacher. In the nonturbine PA-46s, flight in the midlevels required precise engine management, somewhat ameliorated by the altitude-happy PT6A.

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of FLYING Magazine

The post We Fly: Piper M600/SLS Halo appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

A. Ground-Based ATC Communications

Though the airport is nontowered, the chart lists 133.825 as the frequency for “Great Lakes Approach,” a convenience that could be overlooked. Great Lakes can communicate with pilots on the ground, offering the opportunity to open or close IFR flight plans without using the phone. For clearances, take a look at the airport chart to view the clearance delivery frequency of 123.95.

B. Two DMEs Listed at the Intermediate Fix JAVPO

The ILS Runway 26 approach is commonly joined via the feeder route to JAVPO from the Pullman VOR (PMM) or via radar vectors from Great Lakes Approach. Pilots should, however, pay close attention to what navigational aid they’re using to identify the intermediate fix because it’s defined as both 13.2 nm along the IBIV localizer or 22.4 nm from PMM. Each uses a different frequency.

C. The Hold at JAVPO

The holding pattern depicted at the JAVPO intersection includes notes requiring a minimum holding altitude of 2,700 feet and a maximum holding altitude of 5,100 feet. These kinds of restrictions are most commonly used when there is potential overflight traffic that could conflict with aircraft at other altitudes. Grand Rapids Michigan Airport (KGRR), 27 miles northeast of JAVPO, is a busy commercial facility, for instance.

Check out more charts: Chart Wise

D. Missed Is Anything but Direct

The missed approach procedure to the ZEELE intersection can be a little confusing because the VOR that partially creates the intersection is not used in any other way until the missed approach. That can make the Victory VOR (VIO) frequency easy to miss until the pilot begins that initial climb straight ahead to 1,500 feet before making a right turn to a heading of 020 and climbing to 2,600 feet to intercept the VIO 285 radial, which begins off the chart. If you’re questioned about the hold entry after crossing the 185 radial of Muskegon VOR (MKG) and you chose course reversal back to ZEELE, you’d be correct. A GPS or DME could also be used to identify ZEELE.

E. Checking Notams Is Important

Awareness of current ground-equipment outages is always important, but for this approach, they can often be critical. Pilots who regularly fly to KBIV say the MKG and PMM VORs used to identify cross radials and the approach’s feeder route are often out of service, which means if your aircraft is not GPS-equipped, shooting this approach might at times be impossible.

F. Time Block, but No Time Listed

While a descent-rate box still exists below the approach’s profile view, confirming the need for a 3-degree glideslope, notice there are no times mentioned at the listed groundspeeds. This is because of the requirement to identify the missed approach point using DME—in this case, 1.2 DME from the localizer—or the decision height when flying this approach as an ILS. Hence, timing does not apply, even if the approach is flown as localizer-only.

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Holland, Michigan, ILS or LOC Runway 26 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The silence on the Potomac Approach frequency was stark. It was September 17, 2001, and I was flying a Piper Archer from KFDK in Frederick, Maryland, down to Newport News (KPHF), Virginia, logging two hours down and 1.7 on the return. I filed IFR on a day of shockingly blue skies because that was the only way to operate six days after the World Trade Center towers came down, the Pentagon’s seemingly impenetrable belt line was breached, and a field in Pennsylvania became a final resting place for heroic souls. A defining moment, when I felt viscerally how the world had changed.

Twenty years later, I’m circumnavigating the special flight rules area around Washington, D.C., but I’m VFR and monitoring my fellow pilots and controllers on a sunny summer Sunday without any particular restriction to my flight path beyond my choice to stay outside of Class B. That I choose to just listen stems from my desire to hold on to a certain amount of freedom in my flying—and because the ADS-B In traffic data illuminates almost every target that ATC would call out to me anyway.

One September morning, the ground shifted under us. But we overcame it all. With persistence, we rolled back the most onerous provisions against general aviation; the total lockout of all GA traffic from Class B airspace was on the table at one point. Permission to land at the GA airports inside the flight restricted zone was for only those already based there, and no one save the airlines and government aircraft could land at KDCA. I thought, “How would those ‘DC-3’ airports survive?”

Well, in March of this year, I flew in and out of College Park Airport (KCGS) with a friend with a PIN (I need to get my own now that I’m based back in the Washington, D.C., area). That I have a path to the PIN needed to fly in I also consider a win for GA; you can apply for one by going through a background check and interview. That we’ve maintained that privilege 20 years down the road, to me, solidifies the fact we are mostly responsible, competent users of the national airspace system. In June, I went to a lively hangar party at Potomac Airfield (KVKX), with Washington Executive/Hyde Field (W32) remaining open just a mile to the east.

Leesburg Executive Airport (KJYO) in Virginia has a cutout enabling the relative free-flow of student and corporate traffic. In New York, the Hudson corridor can be flown by anyone with a chart of the VFR flyways.

Read more letters from Julie Boatman: View From Above

And we have flown through it all as an industry, continuing to innovate, continuing to lead with our very best. We’ve seen it in the expansion into commercial spaceflight, and we celebrate the achievements of SpaceX in cooperation with NASA inspiring us into orbit—and beyond.

We’ve seen it in the power that one device—the autothrottle—has brought to single-engine and multiengine turboprops and jets. The assist it gives to those flying single-pilot earns our respect and admiration. We salute Innovative Solutions & Support for its continued drive to apply this efficient, workload-saving technology in future mounts.

And we’ve seen it in the market acceptance of Garmin’s Autoland, the winner of the Flying Innovation Award for 2021. For more on the Autonomi avionics and systems suite, and its application in Piper Aircraft’s PA-46s, see “We Fly: Piper M600/SLS Halo” in these pages. As we’re tying up the bow on this issue, we’re also preparing for the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where we’ll present the award and see our aviation friends there for the first time since 2019. A defining moment, indeed.

These moments add perspective. Sometimes we see changes coming, and sometimes they hit us like a bolt from the blue. But we have the strength, courage and creativity to navigate the changes, move forward and embrace the opportunity ahead.

This story appeared in the September 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post View From Above: Defining Moments and September 11 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.