It is a beautiful starlit night deep in the Bahamas’ Exuma Cays, warm and soft in the light caress of the easterly trades. I am sitting on a white-sand beach moodily lit by the flicker of a driftwood bonfire, sipping a dram of aged rum, and taking an occasional pull on an aromatic cigar. Piper is dozing at my feet, and along with Dawn and my brother-in-law Paul, a number of new and old cruising friends are softly chatting around the fire. All are adventurous kindred souls who have sailed here on their own boats.

I look out over the popular anchorage and can pick out Windbird among the constellation of anchor lights; our floating home glows just a little warmer than the rest. This is a sublime night, and it reminds me of all the other really good days and nights we’ve had in our nearly five years of living and cruising aboard Windbird. Moments like this feel serendipitous, like gifts from the universe we just happened to catch. We are indeed lucky beyond measure—but it is worth remembering that these moments are also the result of conscious decisions, trade-offs, hard work and sacrifice.

For our first three years aboard Windbird, I was a Boeing 757/767 first officer at my airline. This wasn’t an accident; I bid the airplane specifically because it dovetailed so well with our cruising plans (never mind that I had lusted after Boeing’s lithe, sexy 757 since I was 10 years old).

When Dawn and I decided to sell everything, buy a boat and head to the Caribbean, I was flying the McDonnell-Douglas MD-88. This is an airplane with a certain dubious reputation among airline pilots—well-deserved in my experience—but I would have happily continued to fly it if doing so had fit our plans. There was certainly the allure of instant seniority as other first officers bid to bigger, better-paying, less-cantankerous airplanes. But the “Mad Dog” was a year-round workhorse at my airline, with no quiescent season, and its very “juniority”—the fact that people kept leaving it for greener pastures—made it perpetually short-staffed. It was no place for a lazybones pilot looking to hang out on his boat in the Caribbean half the year.

The 757/767 category, on the other hand, appeared to be tailor-made for the pilot who also loves altitudes of 0 feet msl and speeds of 6 knots. It was a niche fleet, with the airplanes mostly paid for and therefore no great need to fly for their keep. The 757 could haul full loads of people and cargo over routes where the 737-900 and A321 struggled; the 767 was big enough to cross the pond with ease but small enough to cover the secondary European routes.

In my adopted base of Atlanta, the fleet flew a ton in the summer and early fall, and it was all hands on deck. I didn’t mind—summer was my moneymaking season, when Dawn, Piper and I made our northward migration while the warm tropical waters spun up fierce hurricanes I wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

During the winter and spring, on the other hand—when there are no hurricanes, when fragrant tropical climes beckon as the sweet, sweet alternative to yet another crappy nor’easter—the 757/767 fleet’s block hours plummeted some 20 percent, and the company refrained from furloughing layabout first officers only because the union contract and training costs forbade it. If some shaggy, wild-brained FO who somehow slipped through the hiring process wanted to voluntarily remove himself from the payroll and sail his dinghy off to the ol’ Caribe—well, have at it buddy, see you in June!

So off to the 757/767 I went. Loved it, loved the airplane—both of ‘em (loved the 757, loved the 767 even more). I loved the destinations; I flew to five continents. Loved the people I flew with. Loved barely even thinking about airplanes as I sailed across the Caribbean, bare-chested and piratically bearded, for weeks and months on end. I even loved enduring brutal shaves and digging my wrinkled, mildew-spotted uniform out of the hanging locker to jet off to the wintry north and saunter into a cockpit I hadn’t seen in eight weeks and put it on like a favorite old sweater on the first blustery day of fall. The real question is: Why the hell did I give that up? It was the best aviation gig I ever had.

Read More from Sam Weigel: Taking Wing

There are a few answers to that, and I think they’re good ones. The first and foremost is that I’m blessed with a wonderfully adventurous, infinitely adaptable wife who has happily tagged along for quite a few harebrained escapades over our 17 years of marriage and sent me off with her blessing for a number more. When I proposed upending our settled life in Minnesota for an itinerant sea-nomad lifestyle, she astonishingly agreed—for a period of one to three years.

Dawn has since turned into a very capable sailor who gladly stands the midnight watch, made Windbird a home, and thanked me time and again for our wonderful adventures afloat—and she has made abundantly clear that after nearly five years on the boat, she is quite ready to return to land. Happily, we found the perfect spot to build our next life together, on a grass airstrip across Puget Sound from my airline’s growing base in Seattle.

Second—and this is a bit difficult to admit because it’s not quite the “cool” attitude in the airline world—I missed being a captain. Mind you, the life of a first officer can be wonderfully relaxing: When some Neanderthal in the back decides that, pandemic be damned, it’s his God-given right to breathe maskless upon the 180 souls sharing his pressurized aluminum tube, it’s quite nice to be able to turn left, share a wry grin of moral support, and say, “Good luck, captain, this one’s all you.” And there is a certain unique professional pride to being a really good FO—the dogged chameleon who adapts seamlessly to his captain’s style, professionally building on his strengths while unobtrusively shoring up his weaknesses. But it’s also really nice to be able to set the tone, run your cockpit as you see fit, buy the drinks on layovers, and do your best to take care of your crew.

Lastly, as I’ve written before, I have a personality that craves change. When things get a bit too static for my liking, I have a tendency to knock down the house of cards and see what I can build next. So, from a fairly early age, both my life and my career have been quite neatly divided into four- to six-year segments. I was a first officer at the regional airlines for four years and in the left seat for six. Five years in the right seat at my current airline was just about perfect, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to upgrade to 737 captain at that time (and even more fortunate to keep the left seat during the pandemic).

So far I’m glad I made the move, but there have certainly been some trade-offs. I make a good bit more money, the better to sock away for creating our Washington homestead. Naturally, I’m a lot more junior and don’t have nearly the control of my schedule that I had. The 737 is emphatically not the 757/767, but it’s not a bad airplane either, and I’ve grown to rather like certain aspects of it. I don’t get to fly to Europe or South America, but I do regularly tread the West Atlantic Route System to some of my favorite islands in the Caribbean. I’m probably flying more than the piratical, lazybones version of me would prefer—the 737 fleet has been the workhorse of the pandemic. Even in normal times, they’d be working me fairly hard; a junior New York-based 737 captain requesting a winter off to go sail the Caribbean would usually get laughed out of the chief pilot’s office.

Which is why this lovely Bahamas interlude will last but a month. It’s just enough time to revisit our favorite spots in the Exumas and explore a couple of new anchorages, while enjoying some beach bonfires and cruiser potlucks, spearfishing expeditions, and sundowners on friends’ boats—basically a month to reprise the lifestyle we enjoyed so much for three fantastic years. Even getting this time off required the use of 10 days of vacation, front-loading my March schedule and back-loading my April schedule.

That’s OK. A month in these lovely isles is much better than no month. I made such a point of getting back here because it would be just about our last hurrah aboard Windbird. In the second week of April, we would cross back to Miami and sail down to Key Largo to celebrate my 40th birthday with close friends. Then, after flying my April schedule, we would make our last passage north, a Gulf Stream sled ride to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where we would complete a long list of boat projects, move all our belongings onto a cargo trailer, and put Windbird up for sale. About the time you read this, we should be embarking on the last leg of our long westward migration, moving onto our nascent grass-airstrip homestead in the hills above Bremerton, Washington. As this issue went into production, I found out that my airline awarded me my requested base transfer to Seattle, effective October, and that I’ll end up fairly senior there. (Astonishingly, I could have even held Seattle 757/767 captain—be still my heart—if I didn’t still have a seat lock on the 737.)

Obviously, it’s a bit bittersweet to be ending this chapter of our lives. But we’re excited for what comes next—not least because we’ll really be getting back into general aviation after occasional dabblings at the periphery for the past five years. We’ve both really missed our Piper Pacer, and owning another airplane is high among our priorities. I feel very fortunate to have a job that not only pays me rather well to do something I love but also affords the flexibility and choices to adapt my work life as needed to enjoy so many of the other neat adventures our fascinating world has to offer.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Taking Wing: Senior Airline Pilot Moments appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

For as long as I’ve been eating solid foods, I’ve had a dream car—and the conviction that it would one day be mine. It began with the Lamborghini Countach, which was first produced in 1974, when I was 2 years old. I found it a few years later in a MotorTrend magazine my father left on the kitchen counter. The Countach was stunning, unlike anything I’d ever seen. Even then, I understood that the Italians were the only ones who could make a car that possessed that potent combination of speed and aesthetics I found so intoxicating as a boy who had yet to discover girls.

Next, my imagination moved 27 miles east from Bologna to Maranello, Italy, where I discovered the Ferrari 288 GTO. Another fanatical group of Italians produced the car for only two years: 1984 to 1986. The GTO combined the timeless looks of the 328 GTS (Magnum, P.I.’s car) with a twin-turbo V-8 described at the time as an actual monster that ate drivers as much as it did asphalt. I was 12 when that car came out, and I nearly lost my mind—even with the discovery of girls.

As I grew older, I became less obsessed with looks and more fascinated with underpinnings. The Porsche 959 traveled my attention across Europe, from Maranello to Stuttgart, Germany. It certainly wasn’t prettier than the GTO. Rather, it was the all-wheel drive, water-cooled, sequential twin-turbocharged, rear-mounted motor and active aerodynamics that captured my imagination. Back then, AWD was for Subarus, not supercars. It was a revelation. But then, both the 959 and Outback have horizontally opposed “flat” motors that we pilots are intimately familiar with in our Continentals and Lycomings. There was lineage to trace, even back in 1986.

Then, I got my driver’s license. It was time to survey what I could actually afford to drive. I don’t come from money, but my parents instilled a strong work ethic into me. I did some quick calculations, adding up what shoveling snow from driveways and waiting tables at a kosher deli in Teaneck, New Jersey, was netting me—not much. Work ethic is one thing. Porsche 959 money is something else entirely.

Something unexpected happened at this point in my life: My dreams became tainted with pragmatism. I reasoned that it would be better to lower the bar and dream of a car I might be in a position to buy one day, rather than continue to fantasize over something utterly unobtainable. The crosshairs of my desire moved one last time, from Stuttgart to Bavaria. My new obsession became the BMW M3. I lusted after it for years until one day in 1999 I bought one—the last year of the E36 designation. I loved that car more than any other I have ever owned. With this car, my dreams met reality and dovetailed like the most sublime Japanese joinery. The car actually was that good. I never should have sold it.

Over in airplane world, my fantasies started early with military aircraft, as I imagine is the case for many young boys eternally fascinated with destroying things. I had the compulsory love affair with the A-10 Warthog, “the plane built around a gun.” That description alone made me want to quit fifth grade, get a work permit, Sharpie in a mustache, and load ammo belts for the Avenger 30mm Gatling gun planted in the nose. F-16s were next. I loved that bubble canopy, and its menacing viper looks pulled my imagination toward it like a scrap-yard magnet does an iron engine block. Then Top Gun came out, and Tom Cruise directed 14-year-old me squarely toward the F-14 Tomcat, Kawasaki GPZs and a strange desire to play beach volleyball. After that, I drifted away from aviation for a time (for motivation, see earlier references to girls).

Read More from Ben Younger: Leading Edge

In my late teens, I returned with little interest in military aircraft. I began to dream about getting my pilot’s license and, with it, the distant possibility of owning an airplane. There are no A-10s for sale in Controller, so my sights moved to GA aircraft. Although it took me another two decades to get my private pilot certificate, I became a student of all things aviation. I read this magazine cover to cover for years. I learned about the world of GA as my tastes ricocheted from riveted aluminum to composite Kevlar and everything in between. I began with Mooney Acclaims, bewitched by their odd tails and the promise of flying the world’s fastest certified piston airplane. At 18 years old, speed ruled my world and would for some years to come. Then, I moved on to the Beech Bonanza and its legendary build quality—and still no slouch, either (I currently own a V-tail model). Then came a return to speed when I saw a Lancair at a 1995 exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

But just as it happened in my automobile dreamscape, the concept of utility forcefully gained access to my aviation fantasy life. I entered my late 20s with a vast schedule of interests and hobbies, and an airplane seemed to be both a conduit to access those interests and a passion all on its own.

When I first saw a Pilatus PC-12 in these pages, I did not fall in love immediately. The airplane looks like what it is: a sturdy hauler with some extra speed if compared to a Cessna Caravan. But as I matured, I came to the conclusion that 300 ktas, though a visually beautiful number, doesn’t make all that much of a difference to the 285 ktas the Pilatus easily achieves in cruise. What made a very big difference was the PC-12′s cargo door that could load two motorcycles, the bulletproof Pratt & Whitney turboprop, and the ability to take off from a dirt strip. I saw a photo of two sport bikes tied down in the back of a PC-12, and the possibilities of what I could do with that airplane captured my imagination more than any ground-attack aircraft with a mounted cannon ever could.

What sealed the deal for me was a flight I took in a rented Piper Archer my first year as a private pilot. ATC called out the traffic at six o’clock and 1,000 feet above. That 285 ktas might not sound like a lot compared with some of the speed demons I once lusted after, but as I watched the PC-12 blow by me directly overhead, it felt as if I were still sitting on the ramp doing my run-up.

Unlike my flirtations with cars, the PC-12 remains my dream airplane, even after 20 or more years. This is both the consequence of the glacial pace of new aircraft design and the PC-12 maintaining its unicorn status in regards to mission capability.

Over decades of obsession, what I have learned is that age becomes a contributor to fantasy realignment. I now appreciate that a dream with no chance of realization is not all that much fun to dream. To a teenager, anything is possible. “One day,” you tell yourself. That opinion wavers in midlife: “Best to keep those dreams in the realm of reality.” And that’s where you find me at age 48—a dreamer with clay feet. Will I ever be able to afford a $4 million airplane? Most likely not. I’m not Spielberg; I make independent movies. But a used Epic LT might be half that in a few years. It doesn’t have a cargo door, but I’ll finally hit 300 ktas.

Ben Younger is a TV and film writer/director, avid motorcyclist, and surfer—but it’s being a pilot that he treats as a second profession. Follow Ben Younger on Instagram: @thisisbenyounger.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Sweet Dreams appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

We use the word “thrust” for the force that drives the airplane forward against air resistance. Because the word applies equally to all kinds of propulsion, comparisons of the properties of jets and props may include some statement to the effect that props produce their thrust by accelerating a mass of air backward.

This is true in the same sense that it is true that wings produce an upward force by accelerating air downward. But the thrust of a jet engine is different; it is produced directly, within the engine, and does not depend on an aerodynamic interaction with the surrounding air. In fact, the surrounding air is an impediment, in that it resists the outflow from the exhaust nozzle.

A jet engine creates thrust by taking in air, heating it so its pressure rises, and letting it spew out the back end at a higher velocity than that at which it came in. Fuel adds almost nothing to the mass passing through the engine; what is added is velocity, and this change in velocity produces an opposite reaction, as if you propelled a boat forward by tossing its cargo over the stern. (In case you ever wondered what in the engine this reaction is pushing against, it’s the compressor blades and the central structure that supports them.)

What a reciprocating engine—or a turbine driving a propeller—produces is not thrust but torque. It spins a shaft. To produce thrust, something must be added, namely, a propeller. Wings, helicopter rotors, propellers—they all do the same thing: exploit the pressure changes that occur when an inclined plane is made to move through a fluid.

Because a propeller depends on the surrounding fluid medium to produce thrust, whereas a jet does not, the two types of powerplant are differently affected by altitude.

The output of a jet engine declines, broadly speaking, in proportion to the density of the air in which it operates. You can’t turbocharge a jet engine because the engine itself is fundamentally a self-propelled turbocharger. On the other hand, at high speeds, a jet profits from ram effect, which its compressor compounds, while lower ambient density reduces resistance to the outflow from the exhaust nozzle. Jets therefore operate more efficiently—that is, require less fuel per unit of thrust—at high speed and altitude than they do when flying low and slow.

The situation of the propeller is different. The engine driving the propeller can be turbocharged and may maintain sea-level power up to a high altitude. But as the density of the air diminishes, the propeller blades have less to work with. Once they are at their optimal angle of attack, the only way to maintain thrust against increasingly rarefied air is to increase the area, number or speed of the propeller blades.

At the same time, as the airplane takes advantage of thinner air by increasing its true airspeed—which is the main reason for wanting to fly high in the first place—the pitch angle of the propeller blades, governed by both their own rotational velocity and the forward speed of the airplane, must increase. As blade pitch increases, the lift vector of each blade points farther and farther away from the thrust axis. This difficulty might be alleviated if it were actually possible to spin the propeller faster, but in fact, the faster the airplane goes, the slower the propeller must turn to keep its tip speeds away from the transonic drag rise. The efficiency of a given propeller therefore decreases as speed and altitude increase.

Read More from Peter Garrison: Technicalities

In short, it is just as you guessed: A jet engine gets happier with increasing altitude and speed, and a propeller engine gets sadder. A turbofan, a hybrid of the two, gets both at once—it’s a conflicted, bipolar thing, just like the rest of us.

A Postscript on Lift and Drag

In the March issue, I wrote about the word “lift” and how it improperly implies a force always acting upward. I solicited reader suggestions for alternative terms and received but one proposal: “suck,” which I do not think has much of a future. Actually, I’m not sure many readers care whether “lift” is a misnomer or not, so long as their wings keep lifting. One person who does care, however, is Terry Golden, from whom I got the idea of writing about the subject in the first place. Golden has campaigned tirelessly against the word “lift” and even hands out buttons proclaiming, “Lift Is False Terminology” (note the initials). Yet even he has not offered a convincing replacement.

In that article, I posed a question about drag. Suppose you took a streamlined body of revolution, such as a tip tank, and sliced it across at its thickest point. Which chunk would have more drag—the bullet-shaped front portion, with the smooth oval nose and the bluff aft end, or the one with the flat front and streamlined tail?

I thought the flat-nosed body would have less drag. But that turned out—after a series of computer simulations run by my friend Hans Kandlbauer—to be true only if you rounded the sharp edge of the front face. You don’t have to round it much; a radius of one-fiftieth of the body length was enough. A sharp edge produced tremendous drag, five times the drag of the bullet-shaped alternative. But with the rounded edge, the drag of the flat-faced body was a third less than that of the bullet. This finding hinted at why radial-engined fighters of World War II, with their flat fronts and rounded-edge cowlings, performed as well as they did, and also why it is desirable for trailers to have rounded front corners.

Drag is usually expressed as a coefficient—that is, a dimensionless number—by relating the measured drag to some area, called a “reference area.” For complete airplanes, the wing area is often the reference area, although in professional circles the total surface area of the airplane, or “wetted area,” is taken a little more seriously.

For streamlined bodies—such as fuselages or, say, an external radar pod—cross-sectional area is used; this is true in the automotive community as well. This approach makes sense because an external pod, a fuselage or an auto body is a streamlined fairing around some object or collection of objects with a known cross section.

For an external fuel tank, on the other hand, it would seem logical to relate the drag to the volume because that is what you want to get most of with the least penalty in drag.

It turns out that to envelop a certain volume, the original airfoil-shaped body of revolution is best. To provide a fairing around an object of a given cross section, however, a blunt or hemispherical nose and streamlined after body is slightly superior to the pure airfoil shape—probably because the predominant cause of drag is skin friction, and the blunter nose has somewhat less skin area for the air to rub against.

The lesson of all this is that low drag, at least at subsonic speeds, does not require long swoopy noses so much as gently tapering tails, as Charles Darwin evidently knew when he created the sperm whale.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Why Jets Fly High and Fast appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The great American radio and television comedian George Burns emerged in America during the vaudeville era and became known as a king of the one-liners delivered in his uniquely subtle deadpan style—and always with an El Producto cigar between the fingers of his left hand. Before his death in 1996 at the age of 100, Burns was asked for the secret of his long life. His response was simple and to the point: “Keep breathing.”

The strategy needed to stem the tide of loss-of-control accidents is almost as simple as Burns’ secret to long life. To avoid a loss of control, don’t exceed the wing’s critical angle of attack and avoid flying into weather that’s certain to cause spatial disorientation and an upset. A pilot should also maintain a keen sense of their situational awareness from before engine start until shutdown, as well as constantly strive to improve their risk-management skills.

While LOC-I is a popular acronym to assign as a cause, loss of control in flight is never the actual culprit behind an accident. It’s merely the inevitable, usually fatal result of some action that preceded it. LOC-I means the pilot and their aircraft find themselves operating outside the normal flight envelope with no idea how to return to straight-and-level flight.

Robert Wright of Wright Aviation Solutions confirms that assessment. “LOC-I is really a useless way to describe the root cause of accidents,” Wright says. “LOC-I is merely the final event in the accident chain that has a myriad of root causes. However, my own analysis shows that poor risk management may account for between two-thirds to three-quarters of GA fatal accidents.”

Randy Brooks, vice president of training and business development at the Mesa, Arizona-based Aviation Performance Solutions, says: “There are three major causal factors [of LOC-I accidents]. They are environmental [factors], systems-related failures, and pilot-related failures. Pilot-related failures are the most common. Environmental factors include factors such as thunderstorms, wind shear, and mountain wave rotor and wake turbulence.” APS is a company specializing in aircraft upset-prevention-and-recovery training to many of the major Part 121 air carriers, Part 91 business-aircraft operators and the US military. APS’ goal is more than simply teaching pilots how to successfully fly their way out of a LOC-I event; it’s also about learning to identify those situations that point to an impending upset.

In previous FLYING articles, we’ve looked closely at LOC-I caused specifically by VFR flight in IMC conditions and loss of control just after takeoff. Let’s take a look at what the industry has done to reduce these accidents in general, as well as review some recommendations for the future.

Many industry pundits noticed that, in 2019, the National Transportation Safety Board dropped “loss of control in flight” from its list of top 10 transportation risks, perhaps leading people to believe the problem had been solved. While LOC-I accidents for US-based Part 121 air carriers have been nearly eliminated, LOC-I remains a significant threat outside our borders. Brooks says, “Worldwide, loss of control in flight is still the leading cause of fatalities.” In the US, between 2019 and 2020, the NTSB recorded no fewer than 59 LOC-I accidents in general aviation aircraft, while Part 121 carriers in the US experienced just a single fatality. That should make us all wonder what air carriers know that we in the GA world don’t.

First, the decline in air-carrier accidents didn’t just happen. The industry worked hard to achieve that reduction. As they did, they left behind a trail of valuable lessons for the industry as a whole, while acknowledging that LOC-I “is one of the most complex accident categories, involving numerous contributing factors that act individually or, more often, in combination,” according to the International Air Transport Association. “Reducing this accident category, through understanding of causes and possible intervention strategies, is an industry priority.”

The Fight To Reduce Accidents

Most pilots today have heard of loss of control, but the concept is actually rather recent, perhaps just 30 years old. It emerged following a 1997 report from the White House Commission on Aviation Safety chaired by then-vice president Al Gore. One key highlight: “In the area of safety, the Commission believes that the principal focus should be on reducing the rate of accidents by a factor of five within a decade and recommends a reengineering of the FAA’s regulatory and certification programs to achieve that goal.” No small goal.

The Commission led to the creation of the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, a group that added another bold goal: to reduce the commercial-aviation fatality risk in the US by 80 percent from 1998 to 2008. CAST turned out to be very effective, reporting that by 2008, “the fatality risk of commercial air travel in the United States was reduced by 83 percent. CAST aims to reduce the remaining US commercial fatality risk by 50 percent from 2010 to 2025 and continue to work with our international partners to reduce fatality risk in worldwide commercial aviation.” CAST also offered its vision: “Key aviation stakeholders acting cooperatively to lead the worldwide aviation community to the highest levels of global commercial aviation safety by focusing on the right things.” The Commission also recognized that the global nature of aviation demanded that aviation safety needed to be addressed worldwide, not just in the United States. In 2001, for example, there were 41 Part 121 accidents, six of which were fatal and claimed 531 lives. In 2019, there was just a single accident that claimed one life.

About the time of CAST’s creation, the General Aviation Joint Steering Committee emerged trying to achieve similar results for the light-aircraft community. Members were drawn from the FAA; alphabet groups such as the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and Experimental Aircraft Association; and flight-instructor groups such as the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE) and National Association of Flight Instructors. But because air-carrier accidents are usually more spectacular than the loss of a Cessna 172, CAST attracted the lion’s share of the public attention.

In February 2009, a Continental Airlines Express Bombardier Dash 8-400 crashed during a snowy nighttime approach to Buffalo, New York, after the PIC stalled the airplane and was unable to recover. That accident claimed the lives of all 48 people on board as well as one person on the ground. A few months later in June 2009, Air France Flight 447—an Airbus A330—fell into the South Atlantic after it stalled at 35,000 feet. The crew was also unable to recover the aircraft after a stall and impacted the water with the loss of all 228 people aboard.

These two accidents spurred relatives of the passengers on board along with many others to demand better scrutiny of airline safety, much as the White House Commission had envisioned a decade earlier. The result was Public Law 111-216, the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010. In addition to reauthorizing the FAA, Public Law 111 outlined a number of changes demanded by Congress through the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act of 2009. After August 2013, the law required that pilots on the flight deck of Part 121 aircraft—even regionals—must hold an ATP certificate. It also spoke to how flight crews were paired, how new pilots were mentored, and demanded that all Part 121 crews should be put through upset-prevention-and-recovery training. The results were impressive. In the ensuing 11 years, air-carrier accidents involving LOC-I have dropped dramatically—but LOC-I numbers for general aviation pilots remain stubbornly high.

Fixing What Ails GA

One reason is that flying in the GA world and the air-carrier world are vastly different, not only in the way the two groups are regulated but also by the methods they use to keep a pilot’s skills fresh. GA pilots are only required to renew their skills with an instructor every two years, while professional pilots must repeat recurrent training as often as every six to 12 months. A GA pilot with a private certificate and no instrument rating might never actually sit through another check ride—ever—and it’s perfectly legal. Without regular access to a CFI or other training, GA pilots might never learn any of the secrets to survival that their airline brethren have experienced. Unless a GA pilot found themselves the subject of an FAA ramp check in which they were asked for their certificates and logbook, no one would ever know if that pilot even possessed a recent flight review or had completed three takeoffs and landings in the previous 90 days.

The NTSB cites loss of control on the ground and in flight as prominent in most of the fatal GA’s fatal accidents reported in aggregate in 2018. But that doesn’t mean no one is trying to solve this problem. In 2012, the GAJSC’s Loss of Control Work Group 1 issued its first report for review and approval. Some safety enhancements included integrating angle of attack systems into aircraft, an increased awareness on aeronautical decision-making, pilot’s over-reliance on automation, the need for specific aircraft-type transition training, the vital role of aircraft type clubs, and the importance of stabilized approach-and-landing criteria, among others. LOC Work Group 2 analyzed 120 randomly selected LOC accidents. The first 90 were analyzed in detail for the development of other safety enhancements, including the value of flight-data monitoring to provide insights into how GA pilots operate their aircraft.

With very little in the way of regulation dictating recurrent training, the safer pilots are those who realize the odds of becoming a statistic and make an effort on their own to avoid many of the fatal lessons already learned. These are the pilots to whom simply meeting the minimum standards is never good enough. Aiding the pilot hungry for knowledge are the aircraft type groups such as the Cirrus Owner and Pilots Association, American Bonanza Society, Malibu M-Class Owners & Pilots Association, Pilatus Owners and Pilots Association, and others. Many of their members are experts on the models their members operate. The training modules they create deliver up-to-date tips as well as the known issues their members might encounter, except for accidents caused by loss of control and the specialized training that topic requires. Unlike the airlines, GA isn’t mandated to demonstrate recovery ability from a potential LOC-I, just unusual attitudes.

APS’ Brooks explains that much of the flight training happening today focuses on teaching pilots to keep their aircraft within the normal flight-operations envelope that focuses on LOC-I prevention. “What the 121 carriers have that general aviation doesn’t is the recovery side [of training].” Schools like APS demonstrate “how pilots should behave when they do wander outside that normal flight envelope,” Brooks says. Many GA pilots have taken the UPRT at APS voluntarily “because they understand the statistics. We teach them to mitigate the risks.”

The Buck Stops Here

A serious flaw in pilot thinking is that far too many aviators will avoid any discussion of flight outside the normal envelope because they believe it’s scary and dangerous. Few CFIs have any training outside the normal flight envelope themselves and, hence, have very little to offer their students. There’s an assumption flying around that pilots, by virtue of their licensing training, have all the knowledge they need, despite the fact that training to the airman certification standards doesn’t require flying beyond 30 degrees of pitch and 60 degrees of bank. “In fact, if you go beyond 60 degrees of bank on your commercial check ride, you fail,” Brooks says. There’s no requirement for a commercial pilot to even experience a spin—only instructors, and then only a few times around to earn the endorsement needed to take their CFI check ride.

So, we have this large portion of the flight envelope into which a pilot might wander and for which they’ve never been trained, and yet, the FAA requires no special focus on this educational void. Brooks says: “Most flight training occurs within just five to 10 percent of the normal flight envelope. Aerodynamics can change fundamentally beyond critical angle of attack and beyond 90 degrees of bank—in ways in which the pilot trying what they might in normal [situations] is exactly the wrong reaction, and actually makes the situation worse, rather than better.” The continuing GA accident numbers confirm there’s a message the FAA and flight-training world are missing.

Some pilots believe an aerobatics course delivers perfectly adequate results to recover should their aircraft roll over for some reason. Brooks says: “It’s pretty understandable why people would confuse [UPRT with aerobatics]. After all, both involve all-attitudes maneuvering.” While a good aerobatic course is far superior to no training at all outside the normal envelope, aerobatics represents precision maneuvering toward a known outcome—a loop, a roll, a hammerhead—all conducted within specific boundaries. A preflight brief for an aerobatics lesson details precisely what the pilot and instructor will focus on, and all training is conducted during day VFR conditions. Brooks says: “An upset is not a precision maneuver, and most importantly, it sneaks up on the pilot unexpectedly—or it wouldn’t be an upset. It’s not precision maneuvering. Pilots just want to safely return to a normal part of the flight envelope.” An upset can also occur in darkness or clouds.

Pilots have been losing control of airplanes for decades, and other than UPRT, there has not been a push to change what we teach them—beyond training pilots never to lose control. “That’s because we can’t imagine a universe where loss of control and flight is actually contained,” Brooks says. “If you’re ever unlucky enough to have an upset, you’re screwed. We can’t solve all upsets, but we could cut them in half, if we only treated loss of control the same way that we treat every other aspect of flight instruction.” That places the onus for more education squarely on the shoulders of the PIC of every aircraft. Data confirms that those pilots who aren’t satisfied with being average or settling for simply meeting minimum standards are leading the way toward reducing LOC-I accidents. The airlines and business-aviation flight departments strive to create a cockpit run by professionals who fly with precision.

Unfortunately, the GA world can’t quite duplicate the atmosphere of a professional flight department. But pilots don’t need to be professionals in order to fly like them. That means trying to fly a stabilized approach on every flight, constantly updating their airport alternatives during a flight, or confirming the approach they’ve loaded into their GPS navigator is indeed the one they plan to fly.

The key to preventing an upset is the knowledge to recognize one before a recovery maneuver is needed. Like every other skill, pilots become more knowledgeable with each training session. Because the FAA has no plans to regulate more training for GA pilots, the responsibility for staying safe and demanding more and better training falls upon all of our shoulders. Type clubs have taken a major step in that direction by providing regular training opportunities for pilots who are eager to improve. But all too often, the people who miss these valuable educational sessions are the pilots who would most benefit from them.

Brooks says: “In the physics of upset recovery and aerodynamics, there is very little difference between what we would teach the pilot of the 182, a Piper Saratoga or a Meridian and a Delta or United Airlines pilot. When an upset begins, the only thing that the pilot needs to focus on is returning the airplane safely and efficiently back into the normal envelope. That means reduce the angle of attack.”

But the efforts to learn upset-recovery techniques are as critical as learning how to avoid an upset in the first place. It’s your life. Choose wisely.

Tips To Avoid Loss of Control

• Learn what a realistic upset looks like.
• Keep in mind that true upsets are unexpected events.
• Remember, in an upset, the first step to recovery is usually reducing the angle of attack.
• Check out schools that offer UPRT in addition to aerobatics.
• Join a type club for the make and model of aircraft you fly.
• Subscribe to the FAA’s FAASTeam page to learn of training opportunities in your area.
• Bring along a friend when you attend a FAASTeam event.
• Invite another pilot to sit in the back seat during your next training flight and the debrief afterwards.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Preventing a Loss of Control Accident appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

Despite a falloff in world air traffic since early 2020, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (PANC) in Alaska still represents a stopover point for thousands of airline and business-aviation flights between North America and Asia, as well as thousands of local general aviation and military airplanes. Visitors will notice that many of those local GA aircraft are mounted on floats, so they can freely move between PANC and the nearby Lake Hood Seaplane Base. About the terrain transient pilots can expect, city-data.com says: “The Chugach Mountains to the east have a general elevation of 4,000 to 5,000 feet, with peaks from 8,000 to 10,000 feet. These mountains block warm air from the Gulf of Mexico, keeping precipitation relatively low.”

A. Required Equipment

On this month’s chart, the ILS Runway 15 into PANC, pilots will learn that while many precision procedures allow a pilot to identify a final approach fix with a crossing radial, an outer marker or something similar, this procedure does not. That’s why the first note reminds pilots that DME is required. Even if an aircraft is vectored to the approach with ATC calling out the CARDD intersection, aircraft are still required to carry DME or a suitable substitute such as GPS to fly this approach.

B. DME ARC

DME arc approaches still exist, and this procedure employs two—one from each side of the final approach course. There are, however, no procedure turns. The DME arc is based on the Anchorage VOR (TED), making the arc a desirable method of establishing an aircraft on the approach. A pilot could fly directly to the TED VOR and then follow either the 288 radial to the IVANN IAF or the 012 radial to the PEPVE intersection, then via the 22-mile DME arc to intercept the IBSC localizer inbound. Pay careful attention to the requirement at some point to switch from the TED VOR to the ILS localizer that delivers DME data. It must be an easy switch to miss because Note 3 calls it out to the pilot reviewing this chart.

C. VOR to Navigate to CARDD IF

A feeder route for this approach is designated by the heavy arrow line coming from the Big Lake VOR (BGQ) to the CARDD intersection and represents a common path to join the approach from the en route environment, but there are a number of limitations. This route is not allowed “for arrivals at the BGQ VOR on V438-456 northbound and T227 northeast-bound” because it would require too steep of a turn to intercept the course back inbound.

Check out more charts: Chart Wise

D. Missed Approach or the Alternate?

Some approach plates, such as this one, publish a missed approach and an alternate missed approach procedure. Typically, these are provided when one fix may be unreliable at times—such as if a VOR is out of service—and are often located in completely different places. In this case, however, it might be easy for any pilot to be confused about why there are two, when both place the aircraft in holding at the JUKEP intersection. The primary missed approach is based around the 15-mile DME on the 210 radial from the TED VOR. The same intersection can be identified as the 34.2 DME on the 028-degree radial from the Kenai VOR (ENA). The difference here is not where an aircraft will hold but which VOR and DME source the pilot will be relying upon to establish themselves in the hold from the missed approach point.

E. No Localizer or Circling Minimums

Many ILS approaches can be flown as precision or nonprecision approaches, but this approach publishes only ILS minimums, meaning a pilot would not be able to use this approach to circle to land on another runway or if the glideslope were inoperative. It also means there is no approach timing available from the final approach fix from KANSY at the 6.2 DME point on the localizer, from the IBSC ILS transmitter.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Anchorage ILS Runway 15 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

In fall 1967, I was a Marine second lieutenant and completed my first solo in a Navy T-34. After a couple of times around the pattern, the instructor got out, slapped me on the helmet, and told me to make three touch-and-goes and come back to pick him up.

In fall 2017, I completed my last solo, this time in a flight school’s Cessna 172. Between the two, a lot of gas went out the exhaust as I chased flying jobs.

After that first flight, I went through VT-2 at Whiting Field in Florida, flying the magnificent T-28C/B. Having requested jets, F-4s or A-6s, I found myself in North Carolina at New River Marine Corps Air Station, flying the CH-46 Sea Knight—a helicopter later called the “Phrog,” but in a loving, respectful way.

For me, flying Marine helicopters in Vietnam was the ultimate adventure. The job itself was simple enough: take care of the “grunts” on the ground, regardless of weather or the fact you were regularly being shot at. I loved it. I flew for a year, came home with a bunch of medals and, after a tour in the training command, was unleashed on an unsuspecting civilian world.

I ultimately wanted to fly for the airlines, but airline hiring has more ups and downs than a pork-bellies futures chart. I interviewed with the “spooks” but wanted an accompanied mission of some kind. I talked with Air America but found the same problem: no families included.

A few years later, I was on the Hawaiian island of Maui, still not flying, but I was bartending and having a lot of fun. I realized that I couldn’t do that forever—that I should go flying, which I could do forever. After sending out a batch of résumés to various companies in Hawaii, I was picked up by Aloha Island Air, flying de Havilland Twin Otters around the islands.

After three years with Aloha Island, and a lot of library time searching for operators in Africa, I was hired by Air Serv to fly Twin Otters out of Lokichogio (“Loki”), Kenya. Loki was on the border with Sudan, which was embroiled in its continuous civil war.

In many ways, the job was similar to the one in Vietnam: rough country, taking care of relief workers in a hostile area, but not shot at as much.

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After Sudan, I was working for a drilling company in Algeria, working a five-weeks-on, five-weeks-off schedule in the virtual center of the Sahara. Finally, through connections I had made in Loki, I was hired by Champion Airlines to fly the “big iron,” Boeing 727s. Later, I was in 737s and Twin Otters for Saudi Aramco in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. I was there on 9/11—an interesting time.

Returning to the US, I taught ground schools and got my CFI-I. I worked for flight schools in the Los Angeles area and enjoyed the interaction with the students until one porpoised on her first solo landing and tore up the airplane. So much for that job. Fortunately, she wasn’t hurt.

I was hired by a Cessna Caravan company in Hawaii, but things started to change. During training, I couldn’t remember simple procedures or checklist items, things that I had easily mastered in previous years. Consequently, ground school did not go well.

I returned to the mainland and worked for a flight school out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport (KSMO) in California, but the problems continued. I didn’t tie down an aircraft—twice. I wasn’t being lazy; I just forgot. That company moved their operation, and I moved to another flight school. The instruction seemed to be going better, but I often had to go through a long process to remember what I wanted to say to the student.

I was taking out a renter for an area-and-aircraft checkout, but I had left my iPad, filled with all the ForeFlight goodies, in the car. I didn’t even think about it, though I had been a dedicated “don’t leave home without it” user. Weather was marginal—low scud with some haze—but I still could see the ground. We went out and did the usual maneuvers and returned to the airport. Taxiing in, ground control called and gave me a number to call. Yeah, the FAA.

A week or so later, a student and I entered the downwind, and she landed normally, no big deal, but I once again received the call-the-feds message. A couple of weeks later, I was invited to visit the local FSDO for the dreaded 709 meeting—a check ride to reevaluate my skills.

In the FSDO office, I met with three examiners. The lead said they had two things to discuss. One, that I had neither acknowledged nor obeyed a tower instruction to “go around,” break off the landing and reenter the pattern. And two, that I had violated the nearby Class Bravo airspace. I had no memory of either incident and said so.

The second man at the meeting took out some papers and showed them to me. One was a radar track of our flight, showing it crossing the departure path from the Bravo airport. The first guy asked, “Didn’t it occur to you that you weren’t where you should be when you saw the airliners taking off under you?”

Read More: I Learned About Flying From That

I told him that we were above an undercast and had only occasional glimpses of the surface, but that everything was clear above and around us. The second guy brought out a cassette recorder, and I heard my voice calling for landing and the tower telling me to go around. I have no memory of either call.

The dates were set for an oral and a flight test. All would be to ATP standards. Great. It had been nearly 20 years since I had obtained my ATP, and I had been busy flying in distant places, far from the FAA, and not reviewing the books as I should have. Besides, remembering procedures, checklists and manuals had never been a problem—until the Caravan ground school.

I went home and studied but could not maintain my concentration or, upon review, remember what I read. I had years of teaching that exact material and couldn’t remember it 20 minutes later. A meeting with the FAA confirmed that maybe I had, as the representative said, “lost a step.”

A week later, we all met at the FSDO again, and I surrendered my certificates: an ATP and airplane-multiengine-land certifications, with B-737 and G-IV type ratings; as well as airplane-single-engine-land, rotorcraft-helicopter and instrument-helicopter certificates, with BV-107 and SK-58 type ratings. I asked for and received a 24-hour temporary certificate and drove back to the airport where I checked out a Cessna 172.

I flew out over the ocean and went through the various maneuvers, enjoying the ride and not really thinking that it would be my last as a PIC. I asked for the ILS under VFR conditions back in. At pattern altitude, I called for an overhead break and landed gently on the numbers, taxied in, and tied down the airplane. As I was walking back to the office, a couple was walking toward me, headed for their airplane. The woman said something to the man, who turned to me and said, “She said that you really look like a pilot.”

“I am a pilot,” I said.

It was a couple of hours later I realized that, after 10,000-plus hours across 50 years in all kinds of flying machines over all parts of the planet, I had lied to her.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post No More Happy Landings appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

The pilot, 40, was an instrument flight instructor and held a commercial certificate, with airplane single-engine and multiengine land ratings and an instrument rating. He had something over 1,400 hours and made his living giving flight instruction. His logbook displayed the required endorsement for “training stall awareness, spin entry, spins and spin-recovery procedures.” He mostly flew a Cessna 172, but he had recently administered a flight review in a Stearman. I will call him Jack—not his real name.

In July 2019, Jack bought a homebuilt Poberezny Acro Sport II from its builder. A small two-seat tandem biplane designed by the late founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association, Paul Poberezny, the airplane had a 160 hp Lycoming engine, a gross weight around 1,500 pounds, and a wing loading of 10 pounds per square foot. It would be expected to be a lively performer. Naturally, it’s a taildragger. Jack, his uncle and some friends brought it, disassembled, to his home field, where they reassembled it over a couple of weeks.

On August 9, a Thursday, Jack made his first flight in the Acro Sport, taking it once around the pattern. After landing, he taxied back to his hangar, spun the airplane around three times, and shut it down. The engine ran like a million bucks, he told his uncle, who was watching, and the controls were very responsive. He was happy with his purchase.

A pilot with whom Jack shared hangar space talked with him on Friday. They discussed the first flight, and the pilot asked, out of curiosity, what the Acro Sport’s stall speed was. Jack replied that he didn’t know because the airspeed indicator was out of view, and he couldn’t see it while piloting the aircraft in the rear seat.

Like other small tandem-seat biplanes, the Acro Sport is flown solo from the rear seat. The instrument panel is in the rear cockpit; typically, a rudimentary panel—consisting of airspeed, altimeter and little else—might be provided in the front cockpit as well. Most likely, what Jack meant was not that he could not see the airspeed indicator from the rear seat, but rather that during the landing, when the view forward is blocked by the long front end of the airplane and one orients by peripheral vision, there is no time for looking down at the instrument panel to check the speed at touchdown.

Jack invited a friend, who was also a pilot and had built his own experimental Kitfox, to go up with him on his next flight. On Saturday afternoon, they took off from Runway 27, flew a wide circle, and returned for a fast pass over Runway 9 at 150 feet, followed by a zoom climb.

There were several witnesses, and their accounts coincided. One witness had talked with Jack before the flight, and the man and his son stayed to watch. The man thought the engine was running at full throttle during the pass. He said that the biplane went straight up in the air about 500 to 600 feet before its left wing dropped and it made two or three “spirals down” before hitting the ground.

A woman who was sitting at her campsite a quarter-mile from the end of Runway 9 saw the airplane “going almost straight up in the air.” She thought to herself, “Wow, he is really climbing very steep.” Then she saw the left wing quickly dip down and the airplane go almost, but not quite, straight down.

Another witness mistook the drop of the left wing for a deliberate maneuver and said, “He doesn’t have enough space to do whatever he’s doing.” Moments later, he heard the thud of the impact.

All of the witnesses hurried to the site of the crash, 100 yards from the end of Runway 9. They found both pilots dead in the wreckage.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigators performed the usual checks of control continuity and engine functions, and they found nothing amiss. It was difficult to escape the obvious diagnosis: Jack had stalled out of the zoom climb and had not had enough height to recover from the ensuing spin.

• Read More from Peter Garrison: Aftermath

While NTSB “probable causes” are seldom, if ever, models of elegant English prose, they do contain some nuances. This one blamed “the pilot’s decision to conduct low-altitude aerobatic maneuvers which resulted in an exceedance of the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering at a low altitude, which resulted in an aerodynamic stall.”

Clearly, the airplane had stalled, and the low altitude had not permitted a recovery. The steep climb was by definition an aerobatic maneuver because it exceeded the parameters of “normal flight,” which are understood to be 60 degrees of bank and 30 of pitch. The statement could have begun, “The pilot inadvertently exceeded the airplane’s critical angle of attack while maneuvering at low altitude…” The nuance was in the word “decision,” which made the basic error one of judgment rather than ship handling.

What the probable cause surprisingly failed to mention was the pilot’s lack of familiarity with the airplane. He had flown it only once before, briefly, just around the patch. He was not used to its light-stick forces. He had not stalled it at all. He had not assessed its recovery characteristics, its behavior when spinning, or its propensity for, or resistance to, secondary accelerated stalls. Critically, he had not ascertained the rate at which it would lose airspeed in a steep climb. He had certainly not rehearsed the zoom climb at a safe altitude—in order to be sure that he knew when to pitch over and what would happen if he were late doing so. He did not know how the addition of a passenger in the front cockpit would affect the airplane’s behavior and performance. In just about every sense you could think of, he and the airplane were strangers to one another.

I have not flown one myself, but I asked a friend who built an Acro Sport II and flew it for a number of years what he thought of the airplane. “Not for the fainthearted” was his reply. But Jack’s first flight had gone off without a hitch, and he evidently felt comfortable in his new ride. Why should he expect trouble on a second flight?

Somewhere between faintheartedness and bravado, there is a region where joyful abandon meets rational discretion, and they fall in love and get married. It is there that pilots ought to dwell. Not all will; the hero in us clamors to be let out. But if time could be rewound like a tape, and Jack could replay the decision that cost him and his friend their lives, he would most certainly say this time: “Yes, I’ll be happy to take you up, but first let me get a couple of hours in the airplane. We barely know each other.”

Too Much Zoom

Among the pleasures of low passes and zoom climbs is that of putting on an impressive performance. In March 2015, the pilot of an American Champion Decathlon made a low pass over a lake while friends watched from a nearby beach. The pilot was grinning from ear to ear, one witness reported, and the passenger was waving. At the end of the lake was a stand of 50-foot trees which the Decathlon should have had no problem clearing; but either because the distracted pilot waited too long to begin his climb or because he climbed too steeply or pitched over too late, the Decathlon stalled, rolled left and crashed.

It may be that Jack’s accident and that one have in common not only a desire to entertain and impress watchers on the ground—a common and harmless enough impulse in itself—but also an unconscious reluctance to appear timid by ending the maneuver too soon. To be impressive, the zoom must not appear too cautious, but to end well, the low pass must not go on too long. In the pleasurable excitement of the moment, a pilot may cross the line where fun turns to folly.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post The Danger of Irrational Exuberance appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

As I stood on the Textron Aviation ramp in Wichita, Kansas, for my first look at the company’s new turboprop flagship, the King Air 360, I slipped back in time to a different era and form of transportation: cars (muscle cars as they called them). My pal Lennie had just bought a brand-new, fire-engine-red Chevrolet Chevelle and, to my amazement, spent his first weekend with it stripping off many of the stock parts, mostly the ones no one could see.

He changed out the wheels, lowered the front end, added a growly exhaust, and yanked the automatic transmission in favor of a four-speed stick. The 1960s marketplace offered a plethora of options to add horsepower and torque, while owners maintained the stock look of the original machine as much as possible. The auto-parts store we visited in Chicago one Saturday was as vast as a Walmart today. Noticing my obvious awe at the incredible collection of mods for any kind of car, a salesman told me, “Kid, they only build this stuff for machines that have withstood the test of time.”

Beechcraft King Air 360 at a Glance

Back to the present in Wichita, I realized the King Air—a muscle airplane of sorts—has certainly stood the test of time, nearly 60 years since the first model 90 took to the air. With more than 7,000 King Airs having rolled off the Beechcraft production line since 1964, King Air magazine labeled it the most modified business airplane in history. Companies including Raisbeck Engineering, Garmin, BLR Aerospace and Blackhawk Aerospace wouldn’t have wasted time and money designing retrofit options for King Airs if they didn’t see a market—and they were right.

King Airs emerged from a rich Beechcraft heritage dating back more than 80 years. In the late 1930s, the Beech 18—of which 9,000 were built—became the guide for rugged, do-practically-anything airplanes. Those were followed by nearly 1,000 Twin Bonanzas, and then Queen Airs in the early 1960s. Because all King Airs share some version of the NACA 23000-series wing, they all owe part of their success to the Bonanza, where that airfoil’s use began. In fact, every Beechcraft product features a scaled or modified version of that 23000 airfoil. Over the years, the world eagerly purchased first the model 90, then the 100, then the 200, 250 and 260, and on to the 300 series that included the 350, 350i and now the new 360. This latest King Air was announced in August 2020 at block point change 1234 on the production line with deliveries beginning in November 2020.

On the ramp, most King Air 350 pilots probably won’t be able to distinguish a new 360 from a previous model from the outside. When I climbed on board, my eyes were drawn to the myriad ancient toggle switches and pop-out circuit breakers that have defined King Air cockpits for decades. Alex Hunt, a Textron Aviation technical marketing advisor and sales engineer on the 360, told me that in order to update any of that analog-era circuitry I’d noticed, Textron would have needed to reopen the original aircraft-certification documents with the FAA. Think big dollars for minimal return. He said, “We were very focused on reducing the pilot workload while improving passenger comfort.” That translated into “improve it where we could and not fix what wasn’t broken.”

That makes discovering how the 360 differs from the 350 a visual challenge. “We didn’t make any performance changes to the airplane,” Hunt said. “The powerplants are the same 1,050 shp P&W Canada’s PT6A-60As from the 350 and the same four-blade Hartzell aluminum props. With dual main landing gear, the 360 is still at home with rugged off-field landings.” In a pinch, the airplane can support its entire weight and operate on just one tire per gear. There’s also a Kevlar belly-plate option to cope with gravel runways, as well as a heavier version that comes with the landing gear from the Beech 1900 and tundra tires if needed.

The 360 retained the King Air’s elongated, oval-shaped fuselage, but the 360 added passive cabin-noise reduction versus the 350i’s active system. The 360 comes standard with 85 tuned absorbers working behind the scenes, sucking in all that annoying noise energy. The airplane also includes 11 seats: two in the cockpit, eight in the cabin and one belted potty seat. Some special-mission 360 models can seat up to 15. With a 1,550-pound useful load, flight-planning a King Air 360 is pretty simple. Fill the fuel tanks and all the seats, and with a 3,300-foot balanced-field-length runway nearby, trips of 1,500 nautical miles are a snap. How many twin-engine airplanes can handle that?

Jared Jacobs, the Textron Aviation operations pilot I flew with, told me during the preflight: “About two-thirds of the wing is flat for lower approach speeds. The aileron is about the other third of the wing that leads to some really nice handling characteristics. That NACA wing has great low-speed handling characteristics and good mid- to high-speed handling characteristics. We typically cross the threshold at about 100 knots. It also has a very good ice-carrying capacity because it was designed to [accumulate] less ice.

“The 360′s fuel system is pretty simple,” Jacobs continued, “[with] two mains in the outboard wing that gravity-feed the two auxiliaries inboard. Nothing tricky about moving fuel around. The engine nacelles each hold 300 pounds of baggage while the rear fuselage compartment next to the potty can carry up to 550 additional pounds. The wings and tail use pneumatic deicing. The props, the engine inlets, the windshield, the pitots and the fuel vents are all heated too.” He mentioned the T-tail has more than one advantage: “The 350/360′s [tail] helped create a wide CG envelope, so you’re pretty hard-pressed to create any CG issues when loading. There’s no need to tell passengers to sit in one seat or the other.”

The King Air was always designed to be flown by a single pilot, and most customers operate it that way. Up front, the Collins Aerospace Fusion avionics support that goal by bringing the Collins team’s airline experience to the flight deck, with three 14-inch touchscreens that include synthetic vision, TCAS II, dual FMSs and optional dual GPSs. The touchscreens allow the pilot to drag icons all over for graphical solutions, such as updating flight plans and diverting around any weather highlighted with the new multiscan weather radar.

Hunt said, “Textron also introduced the Innovative Solutions and Support’s ThrustSense autothrottles, which I believe is one of the finalists in Flying’s Editors’ Choice Awards this year.” When engaged, the IS&S autothrottle (A/T) system automatically provides full control of the engine power lever, from takeoff to short final and through a go-around when necessary. ThrustSense also includes aircraft-envelope protection should an engine experience a sudden reduction in power, as well as helping the pilot avoid the region near minimum controllable airspeed (VMC).

In addition to replacing those three analog pressurization dials beneath the throttle quadrant—which were older than many pilots flying the King Air 360 today—Hunt explained that the new automatic digital pressurization system is based on the one in the Cessna Citation CJ series. The automatic system eliminates the pressurization bumps common to older King Airs if the pilot didn’t keep up with the system, especially in the descent. Cabin-pressurization limits have increased from 6.5 to 6.8 psi, a full 10 percent change. At 35,000 feet, the cabin hovers around 9,600 feet. At 27,000 feet, the cabin altitude is 5,960 feet. Jacobs added, “The RVSM-approved 360′s sweet flying spot is between FL 280 and FL 310.” His flight-planning rule of thumb says, “At FL 300, the 360 will burn 300 pounds per side and move along at 300 knots.”

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This King Air’s cabin rivals that of many medium jets and includes newly redesigned, locally produced cabin seats in a variety of tempting flavors. Adding to the cabin’s rich feel, the cabinets are now made of real wood veneer and tilt inward near the top to give passengers just a little more room as they walk through the cabin.

Hunt said the Textron team spent an enormous amount of time redesigning the seats using digital pressure mapping and SUV seating as a guide. “The test seats had dozens of embedded sensors to measure how a wide spectrum of bodies put pressure on them. The seats rack in all different directions and recline with adjustable headrests and armrests.” The cabin is outfitted with LED lighting, including pinhole accents that softly illuminate the lower side walls as well as the floor, cup holders, and power and USB plugs. The 360 now offers dual-zone climate controls, one for the cockpit and another for the cabin.

Textron Aviation quotes direct operating costs at $1,087 per hour based on flying 300 hours annually. Each purchase includes training for one pilot and one maintenance technician. Pilots head to FlightSafety International in Tampa, Florida, where they can earn their entire type rating in a Level D flight training device. List price on a King Air 360 is $8.39 million, a $640,000 rise from the 2020 King Air 350.

IS&S Autothrottle System

Surely the star of the King Air 360, at least from a pilot’s perspective, is the standard-equipment IS&S ThrustSense full-regime autothrottle that controls the power levers with just a touch of the button on the right power lever. The ThrustSense envelope protection is active during takeoff, climb and go-around should an engine experience a sudden reduction in power. It’s smart enough to turn on the igniters and rudder boost when needed and feather the prop on a bad engine—usually before the pilot even recognizes what might be happening. It also prevents the pilot from overtorqueing or overtemping the engines.

ThrustSense also provides VMC protection should the aircraft slow to anything near that speed. But this system’s envelope protection operates differently from what some pilots might expect. Rather than commanding the autopilot to pitch the aircraft’s nose over to reduce the angle of attack, the IS&S system slowly reduces power on the good engine to prevent a roll toward the bad engine as the aircraft reaches VMC. Hunt called the IS&S equipment an “elegant little engineering solution.” The autothrottle’s brain and most of the indications reside in the new IS&S standby attitude indicator that replaces the stock EFIS version sitting just below the glare shield.

Jacobs added: “In the event of a power loss, ThrustSense turns on the auto-ignition—thinking the engine may have flamed out—and attempts a relight. Assuming that does not work, the rudder boost kicks in with deflection proportionate to the power on the good engine. If engine rpm continues to drop, the propeller automatically feathers to reduce drag. Like in a jet, a 360 pilot only needs to maintain directional control and pitch up to climb.” The time from power loss to feather is about 10 seconds. Equally important, the IS&S system allows for use of the autopilot even through an autofeather. Jacobs said, “I do not know of another autothrottle system approved for single-engine operations.”

Autothrottles aren’t new, having been installed on airliners decades ago. I spoke to Tom Grunbeck, IS&S director of autothrottle programs, who said the company has been in the aviation business since 1988 and created the first practical RVSM altimeter, some 600 of which were installed on the Air Force’s KC-135 fleet and, later, on business and commercial jets. The IS&S’s first autothrottle installation on a business jet was on the Eclipse 500 in 2014.

Grunbeck said that while the King Air 360 was a relatively straightforward installation, “the challenge was fitting the actuation mechanism in that very tight throttle core and pedestal. One of the big breakthroughs was the actuation mechanism—there [are] two of them similar to what we designed for the Pilatus PC-12. Based on the safety and performance of the King Air, we came up with the [VMC] mitigation, which we felt was a huge added capability to the full regime system. We’ve only heard a lot of positive feedback. When ideas do come in, those are incorporated into the system with just software upgrades.”

Autothrottles in Operation

Pilots who’ve experienced autothrottles on medium or heavy jets might not think the IS&S system is all that impressive. But for an experienced King Air driver, especially as a single pilot, it will seem like heaven. Imagine arriving into the New York terminal area during bad weather at night when approach might have left you a bit too high for too long or changed the approach at the last minute, and then sequenced you behind a much slower airplane, and you’ll understand how busy a single-pilot cockpit can become. Just dial in the required speed, and the autothrottle handles the rest.

Just before lining up on Runway 19 Left at Wichita’s Eisenhower International Airport (KICT), Jacobs pointed out an important item: ensuring the throttle friction was set just right. Many King Air power reductions after takeoff have been traced to inadvertent power rollback—the result of the throttle friction being set too loosely. Many King Air pilots are apparently used to letting go of the throttles once they set the power. IS&S suggests pilots cover the throttles lightly on takeoff but not grab them, which might interfere with the servos.

I used the little finger on my right hand to engage the A/T switch as I began to add power. The IS&S system handled the rest of the work; all I did was steer. The CFI in me did find it tough to simply relinquish all control to the automation—at least on the first takeoff—but everything ran perfectly. Departure gave us a right turn to the west, and we blasted into the first cloud deck at about 1,200 feet, climbing at about 165 knots. As they cleared us above 10,000 feet, I set the altitude selector and rolled up the speed to about 200 knots for a flatter—though faster—climb. Within five minutes, I was comfortable with the A/Ts and switched speeds easily, watching the throttles find exactly the right power setting every time. We climbed to FL 300, and I swung the heading a few times as we dodged a few building thunderstorms and watched as the A/Ts gently increased the power in the bank and removed it at rollout. Having spent a couple of years flying a Garrett-powered turboprop, I tend to classify turboprops as either noisy or noisier, so I removed my headset for a check of the noise the passengers will experience. This King Air 360 had a trick up its sleeve—at FL 300, I heard almost nothing. I was really surprised at the quietness of the cockpit, and 360 buyers won’t want to skim past this feature. Back in the cabin, I had a normal conversation with Hunt, who had joined us for the two-hour flight. Thanks, Beechcraft. I give your passive noise-canceling system an A-plus.

I also performed a VMC demo as Jacobs retarded the left throttle. As the airplane began to slow, I continued adding back pressure. Approaching VMC, the right throttle began to roll back just as it was programmed to do. Sure, the airplane might not climb well, if at all, like this—especially if the gear wasn’t retracted and the flaps eventually raised—but the airplane certainly won’t roll over on its back the way that 350 did at Texas’ Addison Airport (KADS) in 2019.

But the most fun—though hardly what I’d call any work—were the first few ILS approaches we tried on the way back to 19 Left. Descending out of 10,000, the A/Ts were really smart—but not smart enough to slow the airplane below 250 knots if the pilot forgets for some odd reason. On autopilot, and approach control asked for 200 knots for a vector to follow traffic. I reached up, dialed 200, and watched the throttles come back as I reviewed the plate. As they descended us to 3,000, I heard, “King Air 360KG, turn right heading 160, join the 19 Left localizer, cleared ILS 19 Left approach.” All I did was crank in the new heading and adjust for the 130-knot approach speed, punch the approach button on the autopilot, and watch the aircraft shoot a perfect ILS. Wichita Tower cleared us for the option, so just before we reached minimums, we decided to go around. I pressed the GA button on the left throttle and watched the IS&S system add just the right amount of power. The flight director raised the command bars, and I followed them back around for another approach to a full-stop landing, cranking in speed updates as needed.

I think one reason the King Air line has been so successful is that they don’t excel at one particular mission, yet they possess something endearing them to pilots and operators across the board. The King Air is fundamentally a strong airplane, thanks to its evolution over more than 80 years of Beech aircraft construction. It’s also quite easy to fly, especially with the autothrottle to absorb some of the work for a single pilot.

Inside the IS&S Autothrottle

The IS&S autothrottle is made up of a standby display unit that replaces the aircraft’s stock backup EFIS display, actuators, a system annunciator, the A/T state light, an “A/T ENG” indicator, and a status LED. It has two primary operating modes: torque and airspeed.

The IS&S SDU includes standard pitch-and-roll, vertical-speed, airspeed, altitude, and nav data, as well as the A/T’s operational annunciations for speed and torque selections. The SDU also houses the A/T brain controlling the actuator assembly that physically moves the throttles with a gearless driveshaft mechanism that uses no physical clutch. Each of the power levers is controlled by a separate actuator/driveshaft assembly.

Annunciator

The operating mode, either “A/T speed” or “A/T torque,” appears in white. The annunciator text (“A/T ENG”) in green indicates when the A/T is engaged.

Status LED

The status LED will display: steady green when the autothrottle is engaged, flashing amber when the autothrottle has disconnected, and steady amber when the A/T disconnect must be acknowledged.

Protection Modes

A/T logic includes protection limits: flight-envelope, interstage-turbine-temperature, overtorque and airspeed protections. The A/T enters Protection Mode automatically when one of the protection limits is exceeded. The manually selected Operating Mode is restored when the protected condition is cleared.

Takeoff Mode: ThrustSense is engaged for takeoff and compensates for any engine surging. Takeoff mode is active until the system transitions into Climb Mode.

Climb Mode: The throttles automatically adjust for maximum continuous climb or torque as a function of altitude.

Go-Around Mode: The system automatically sets maximum safe power while maintaining full engine protection.

Airspeed Mode: This adjusts airspeed to the value commanded through a manually selected speed change.

Engine Out Mode: If Takeoff, Climb or Go-Around modes are selected when an engine fails, the A/T controls the good engine by transitioning into Engine Out Mode. A/T Engine Out will be annunciated in amber, and the A/T will command maximum available torque on the operating engine. The pilot may still adjust the target torque setting as long as the airspeed is above VMC. If the airspeed falls below VMC, the A/T reduces torque as needed to avoid overpowering the rudder’s authority. Below VMC, the target torque value will be blacked out on the SDU and cannot be manually adjusted.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post We Fly: Beechcraft King Air 360 appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup… And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know—that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.” — Beryl Markham, West with the Night

Traditionally, there’s been an element to a pilot’s personality that turns upon adventure. Whether it expresses itself in the desire to seek, test or master depends further upon the person—but many pilots still list a type of adventurousness as a reason why they fly.

To see the world from above. To challenge our skills. To find an outlet for our determination and need for accomplishment. I have been drawn to aviation for all of these reasons—and I’ll add more that speak to adventure, such as discovering a view of places as I travel the world that is open to pilots alone. Stringing together a cross-country route between popular airport cafes takes you on a very different path across the US than going from convenience store to gas station, truck stop to fast-food drive-through on the interstate.

But we don’t remain pilots for long if that sense of adventure isn’t tempered with caution. That intrepidness must be grounded in respect for the laws of physics—and a willingness to work within the laws of our society, an overall mindfulness of action.

Add to this sense of adventure another twist true of many aviators: John and Martha King have talked often about the fact that pilots are goal-oriented—and this is both a blessing and a curse. Completing a flight feeds this feeling, but doing so at all costs can be fatally self-limiting.

Factor in a third element: We all make mistakes. It’s intrinsic to the human condition—and certainly to the pilot one. These lapses run from forgetting to secure the door over the oil dipstick or remove a nosewheel chock before flight to errors in judgment, when we either fail to factor in the true risks of a situation or place other goals—such as getting home—above staying safe.

Read more letters from Julie Boatman: View From Above

Our sense of adventure may lead to deliberate actions that have unintended consequences. We have learned a lot from the poor choices of others through the years in our I Learned About Flying from That series, which is now on its 961st installment. You can also catch at least 14 episodes of our ILAFFT podcast online, hosted by airshow announcer and experienced RV pilot Rob Reider, in which more pilots share their stories.

These pilots often talk about what they’d do differently given the chance.

On March 2, 2020, Flying columnist Martha Lunken made a choice. The deliberate action was completely in keeping with her own strong sense of adventure—yet it ran counter to the willingness to abide by regulations that underpinned her career as an instructor and examiner, as well as the accomplishments she’d held dear.

Lunken tells her story in her column this month, “A Little Too Unusual,” and we have published a selection of letters from Flying readers that we received after the news of her certificate revocation broke in April. We expect to hear your thoughts on the questions and concerns raised by both the incident and her response to it, as well as our own. It’s a conversation worth having because those elements of adventure, achievement and pilot error play within most all of us who fly.

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post View From Above: Adventure appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

It was a dark and stormy night; my electrical system had failed, and the battery was dead. Descending lower and lower in the murk, looking for familiar landmarks, I saw—dead ahead—the magnificent Jeremiah Morrow Bridge spanning the Little Miami River on Ohio’s Interstate 71. My only option was to fly beneath that high-and-wide span and make my way back home to Lunken Airport.

No—that’s a big, fat lie.

The unvarnished truth is: It was a pretty, early spring afternoon on March 2, 2020, and I was randomly boring holes into the sky, making takeoffs and landings at several small airports and planning to call Cincinnati Approach for a practice approach into Lunken. I did some bounces at a nontowered airport near Wilmington, but nobody was home, so I flew north a few miles to an old friend’s semi-abandoned private strip. He’s gone now after a tragic airplane accident, but I still land there sometimes and sit on the empty ramp, remembering and whispering a prayer for him. But that day, I was testing my mettle with a couple of landings on that narrow 32-foot-wide paved strip with a built-in crosswind. My “arrivals” were less than elegant, so after the last jarring touchdown, I gave up and pointed the Cessna 180 west toward Oxford, Ohio.

Now I was in “Martha’s Vineyard,” nicknamed by Johnny Lane when he hired me as a fledgling flight instructor 50-some years ago. I’d use this area south of Lebanon for my students’ practice area while John worked with his to the north. To this day, it still feels like my backyard. Still pretty low, I glanced over my left shoulder at the expansive, recently rebuilt Jeremiah Morrow Bridge. And, friends, even now I can neither explain nor justify my impulsive, unpremeditated and spontaneous decision to fly underneath it. I do remember saying out loud, “Lord, I just have to do this before I’m too old to fly anymore.”

Yeah, those were the exact words, but evidently, He didn’t think it was such a great idea. Neither did Ohio’s state highway department or the FAA.

There’s no excuse for this lapse of judgment, but I am very familiar with the area, having frequently hiked and biked the trail underneath this span over the scenic river. I knew there were no cables or obstructions, and I also knew an airplane flying underneath wouldn’t be visible to traffic on the bridge. As an airline-pilot friend once said to me, “Hell, you could fly a DC-3 under that thing.” So, I didn’t consider it reckless or dangerous; I would never intentionally put anyone at risk. But I sure as hell knew it was illegal.

So where was my guardian angel that day when highway workers were underneath the bridge using a photo drone that caught my blurry image? About a week later, I got a phone call from two inspectors at “my” former FSDO.

“Ms. Lunken, on March 2, 2020, did you fly your airplane under…?”

“Yes.”

“Did you turn off your transponder?”

“No.”

We’d go around about the ADS-B Out transponder which—confirmed by a radio shop—had worked loose in the panel mount and was operating intermittently. Maybe those hard landings and the considerable low-level turbulence had unseated the pins. But the FAA wasn’t buying it, and this remains my word against theirs.

Understand, I’ve been “living” and writing this story for more than a year, agonizing over when and how to confess it to you. It’s time. The sword of Damocles has fallen.

When I received the FAA’s letter of investigation, I had already contacted the Yodice Associates law firm in Maryland. Kathy Yodice and I knew that if action isn’t taken on a proposed suspension within six months, it becomes a “cold case” and the FAA issues a “no action” letter. For six months, I checked the mailbox daily with my heart in my throat. I’d even put a tiny crucifix inside the box and retrieved each day’s mail, saying, “Lord, this is up to you…”

Read More from Martha Lunken: Unusual Attitudes

I was mildly hopeful after a year passed—until Kathy reminded me there’s no time limit on certificate-revocation actions, which can be executed years after an alleged event. Yeah, I’ve jabbed at the FAA for years in my monthly column, but it’s hard to believe the administrator would “get even” by revoking my certificates for a relatively benign prank. Especially with no previous violations in 60-plus years of aviating?

You bet.

More than a year after flying under the bridge, a large box appeared on my porch. Opening it, wondering what I’d ordered from Amazon, I felt gut-punched as I stared at a letter titled “Emergency Order of Revocation,” stating, “Effective March 2, 2021, any and all airman pilot certificates you hold, including your airline transport pilot certificate, were revoked.”

FAA enforcement attorney Brian Khan’s letter stated that—after I’d been flying for a year—protection of the public required immediate revocation of everything. My deliberate, egregious operation of an aircraft without an activated transponder and flying under a bridge within 500 feet of persons and structures showed disregard for the regulations, lack of compliance disposition, and defiance of safety regulations. Because I can’t be trusted to conform, I lack the qualifications to hold an airman certificate.

Well, I’ve never claimed to be a role model, but what a cruel and harsh punishment. You can’t begin to imagine how devastating it feels to have everything I’ve worked for, held dear and loved for 61 years suddenly erased.

The Yodice firm would appeal such a severe FAA sanction to the National Transportation Safety Board, but attorney and expert fees in litigating the case could run well in excess of $25,000. Even a decision that mitigated the sanction would probably be appealed to the full NTSB by the FAA. This would drag on, becoming increasingly more expensive, with no guarantee of success.

Kathy got the one-year revocation period reduced to 9 months. So, I can take written exams now and apply for a student pilot certificate after December 2. In the meantime, I’ll stay proficient by flying with an appropriately rated friend as PIC in the 180. Then I’ll take the practical tests for the private pilot with instrument rating. Meanwhile, Flying is temporarily putting my column on hiatus; maybe I’m a little too “unusual” for readers uninterested in the stories of a renegade aviator. I’m scheduled to be back in the January+February 2022 issue, with my story of starting again.

I’ll miss you but will stay busy—as students sometimes say—”studying for my privates.”

This story appeared in the August 2021 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Flying Under a Bridge Too Far appeared first on FLYING Magazine.