Jan/Feb 2020 Archives - FLYING Magazine https://www.flyingmag.com/tag/jan-feb-2020/ The world's most widely read aviation magazine Fri, 28 Jul 2023 16:07:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4 Jackie’s Last Flight https://www.flyingmag.com/ilafft-jackies-last-flight/ Tue, 24 Nov 2020 17:28:10 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/jackies-last-flight/ The post Jackie’s Last Flight appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Few things are as rewarding for pilots as having a partner who shares our passion, sense of wonder and exhilaration. I had such a person in my life before I lost her to cancer two years ago. Often when I think of Jackie, I reflect back on memorable trips we had together. But it was our last flight that held special meaning for both of us.

I knew she was going to be right for me after my first flight with her. At the time, our relationship was just beginning and I was a certified glider pilot. I convinced Jackie to let me take her up in a two-place sailplane. I didn’t know it then, but she was a fearless flyer. I put her in the front seat and climbed in back. On that January morning in the coastal mountains of Northern California, the seasonal rains had turned the surrounding hills into their emerald-green winter colors. I secured both canopies, gave the thumbs-up to the wing runner, and then waggled the rudder pedals signaling the tow plane to begin the take off.

The gliderport in Lake County was located in a valley surrounded by rugged terrain, forested mountains, and massive rock outcroppings that are remnants of volcanic formations. It’s a place of unsurpassed beauty, not fully appreciated from the ground. As the sailplane climbed through a few hundred feet, the terrain rose into relief, and our perspective of the world was transformed. Jackie turned her head to the side, and I caught the expression on her face. It was a look of amazement, wonder and discovery. Her beautiful visage always did hold the light in a lovely way, but there was something very different about the look on her face at that moment, conveying both awe and serenity. “Yes,” I wanted to say to her, “this is what it is all about.” But I didn’t need to say it because I could tell she felt that same sense of magic. It was to become one of the many precious things we shared.

Three years later, I walked into the kitchen on a Sunday morning and said: “You know, babe, I’m in my early 50s, and if I’m ever going to get my power license, I really should start.” She was all for it, and I had my first lesson that afternoon.

When I came home from my check ride waving a private pilot ticket, her joy matched my own. A few months later, I bought a Cirrus SR22, which I flew for the next 10 years and 2,000 hours. Its tail number was N907DR, representing her birthday and my initials, showing it belonged to both of us. We had many adventures together in that airplane, traveling throughout the US, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Our first three-day transcontinental flight to our summer home in Maine was a marvelous adventure, culminating in spectacular sights as we descended through the clouds near Portland, broke out into beautiful summer sunshine and flew up the Maine coast at 2,500 feet.

Jackie never had any interest in actually flying the airplane. She learned the radios, the basics of the autopilot and how to operate the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System. But her greatest satisfaction was pilotage, observing the world from above while sitting with a sectional chart on her lap and marking our progress against the passing cities, rivers and roads. Her other passion was photography, and she swung her camera into action regularly.

By the time Jackie was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in early 2012, she was working on a portfolio called “America by Air.” The pictures included everything from the formations in Monument Valley in Arizona, wind machines in the mountains of West Virginia, Crater Lake in Oregon, and striking photos of coastal California, Florida and Maine. She never finished that book, but the journey for her was indeed its own reward.

In spring 2017, Jackie knew her life would soon end. She was already moving to palliative care and would shortly tell her doctors that she wanted no further treatments. Courageous and strong in spirit, she could not overcome the disease that was sapping her physical vigor. As I sought ways to make each day as good as it could be for her, I hit upon an idea that touched on one of her other great loves. “Hey, babe, why don’t we bop down to Arizona and catch a spring-training game for the Oakland A’s this Saturday?” Jackie was surprised and said, “We’ll never get a hotel; it’s the last weekend.” To which I replied: “We don’t need no stinkin’ hotel, my love. We have a jet aer-o-plane. We can go down and back in a single day.”

Read More: I Learned About Flying From That

Yes, by that point, we’d moved up to a Cessna Citation Mustang. She loved being in that airplane because it was fast, comfortable and pressurized. I told Jackie we could easily fly from the San Francisco Bay Area to Phoenix, grab a car and get to the A’s stadium a few miles away. She hesitated because of her weakened condition, but I said if she wasn’t chagrined about it, I’d rent a wheelchair and get seats in the section with those accommodations. She agreed and clearly brightened at the prospect. The wheelchair folded perfectly into the baggage compartment, and we set off.

To our good fortune, it was a crystal-clear day. We flew along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, across Las Vegas, spied the Grand Canyon in the distance, descended over the chocolate-colored mountains ringing the Valley of the Sun, and touched down at Falcon Field in Mesa. Everything went right as the FBO had its last rental car waiting for us. We arrived at the ballpark just before game time. I was wheeling her up the ramp to our seats when they began to play the national anthem. Jackie got up out of the chair and stood silently, but I could see tears running down her cheek. I said, “It’s not your last baseball game, sweetie,” but she looked at me, and we both knew it was.

She was so happy to be there, it didn’t matter who won or lost. We laughed about the young unknown players and leaned back in our seats to take in the blue sky, green grass and lovely weather. She devoured a hot dog and then a three-scoop ice-cream cone, and she felt strong and free.

After the game, we drove back to the airport, loaded up and launched for home. The sun was low, and the shadows were lengthening across the desert as we climbed out of the Phoenix area. But the best was yet to come. I’ll never forget those moments as we crossed over the Sierra just at sunset. An enormous snowcap covered the mountains, and the entire range was bathed in rose alpenglow. We were in smooth air at 36,000 feet, listening to our favorite Mark Knopfler songs through the headphones and holding hands. Awed by the view before us, we were filled with gratitude for what we’d had in life and what we had at that moment.

I learned something about flying that day. The sense of freedom and joy it conveys can be so powerful, it will push back against even the worst of circumstances. Because of all that final flight brought us, I like to say that was the day we beat cancer.

My logbook devotes a page to it and has a special notation: “Jackie’s Last Flight. Love you, babe. Thanks for being my copilot.”


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Jackie’s Last Flight appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Chart Wise: PDK RNAV (GPS) Y Runway 21L https://www.flyingmag.com/chartwise-dekalb-peachtree-21l/ Fri, 03 Apr 2020 16:00:13 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/chart-wise-pdk-rnav-gps-y-runway-21l/ The post Chart Wise: PDK RNAV (GPS) Y Runway 21L appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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With Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) notorious as the busiest airport in the US—with passengers carried at just over 103 million—the air traffic in the Atlanta area can, at times, be intense. DeKalb-Peachtree (PDK), just 17 nautical miles northeast, is a perfect GA airport for anyone visiting the metro area interested in avoiding ATL traffic. When PDK winds blow from the west and south, the RNAV (GPS) Y Runway 21L is regularly used during IFR conditions—and often just to establish a stable arrival during VFR conditions.

A. AWSON Arrival

Pilots en route to Atlanta from the northeast should note the (GPS) Y procedure “is not authorized for arrivals at AWSON [while] on V5-311-417 westbound.” From a planning perspective, an arriving pilot might want to consider including AWSON in their flight plan. Arrivals from the north are commonly assigned the DEHAN ONE arrival, which uses AWSON as one of the intermediate transition points directly feeding the IAF at WODUS.

B. MAP Not at the Runway

The missed approach point on the 21L GPS procedure might look as if it’s at the end of the runway, but a closer look shows it’s not. The actual MAP is JOPUN intersection 0.4 miles from the runway’s end.

C. No Glideslope

This approach does not include LPV minimums created with a precisionlike glideslope. Pilots should plan to fly a stabilized nonprecision descent to step-down points along the way. While doing so, a visual descent point is depicted at 1 mile from JOPUN, or approximately 1.4 miles from the runway threshold. A VDP is a point along a straight-in, nonprecision approach from which the pilot can descend below the MDA, as long as they have the required visual reference. If not, the only option is a missed approach. Pay close attention to the note near the No. 2 in the profile that indicates the VDP is only authorized with a local altimeter setting in hand. The baro from nearby Fulton County Airport-Brown Field won’t suffice.

D. A Standby ASOS

With so many restrictions on the approach—especially when the PDK control tower is closed—a handy frequency to have stored in a standby radio might be 120.175, the ATIS for nearby Charlie Brown Field (as Fulton County Airport is also locally known).

E. Straight-In—Almost

Also note No. 8 indicating the approach. While labeled as a straight-in, it’s actually 15.04 degrees offset from the runway alignment. This is important because pilots must remember the runway will most likely not be right in front of them when they break out of the clouds, and a final turn will be needed to align with the runway centerline.

F. Circle to Land

A pilot shooting this approach with a tailwind is unable to use this procedure to circle to runways 03L or 16 at night, according to note No. 1.

G. Right on Missed Approach

To ensure there are no conflicts between an airplane executing a missed approach from 21L and traffic at nearby ATL, the missed approach calls for an immediate climbing right turn—more than 100 degrees—to the BAPPY intersection to hold unless instructed otherwise by ATC. The tight turn of nearly 120 degrees as the aircraft is climbing to 4,000 feet can certainly increase the pilot’s workload.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Chart Wise: PDK RNAV (GPS) Y Runway 21L appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Can Flight Instruction Get Any Better? https://www.flyingmag.com/redbird-can-flight-instruction-get-any-better/ Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:31:34 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/can-flight-instruction-get-any-better/ The post Can Flight Instruction Get Any Better? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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If the basics of airmanship still apply in safely controlling an airplane—coordinated maneuvers, power-and-speed management, and situational awareness, for example—wouldn’t the methods to deliver those skills to new pilots remain anchored in fundamental truths as well?

Redbird Flight Simulations launched in 2006 with the idea that this is not necessarily the case—and pursued development of a line of full-motion aviation training devices and other products priced for the flight school market to help prove the point. For the past 10 years, the company has hosted an annual conference—Redbird Migration—for the flight training industry, to assist both flight schools and the educators who deliver training in understanding that there’s a new world out there.

But instructors learn in their initial coursework that education doesn’t occur unless there is good communication, and a certain amount of mutual buy-in has to take place before a message comes through and is understood. That’s why training tends to lag behind the technology; it’s much easier to fall back on the “good old ways” when an instructor is trying at the same time to understand the new equipment. This is true of initial pilot training as well as that for advanced certificates and transitions to high-performance, complex and turbine aircraft.

Members of the Flying team have attended Migration over the years—and (full disclosure) I was managing the Cessna Pilot Center program and participated when it first launched 10 years ago. I returned in October 2019 to the event at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum’s “Boeing Blue Sky Aviation Gallery” to see how the conference had developed and if any change has taken place among those who participate.

Redbird's Migration
In the early years of Migration, social events were held in the Commemorative Air Force hangar at the airport in San Marcos, Texas. Redbird Flight Simulations

The structure of the conference has evolved over the past decade to bring new ways of teaching to light. What began as a series of presentations involving the entire group—at first, a little more than a hundred folks—quickly developed into a format of keynote speakers and breakout sessions, punctuated by social events and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association 2019 Flight Training Awards. The variety and timing of forums allowed participants to choose the topic areas they wanted to explore. While a handful centered directly around new Redbird products—and those of other partners—others took a look at integrating flight simulation into training curricula and how to develop flight instructors. These themes continue in Migration’s current state—meaning we haven’t licked these core issues yet. In 2019, more than 300 registered for the event, showing steady growth and a desire to keep after the change.

Over the years, Redbird has tested the utility of introducing maneuvers, procedures and concepts in the sim—as has just about every other major simulation manufacturer in the general aviation industry. It remains a challenge to get this message across to flight school owners and students, and it’s particularly sticky to impart to instructors. Why is that?

Perhaps the standard flight training device in residence at an average flight school in the United States over the past two decades hasn’t been optimal for teaching procedures, giving negative transfer in some cases—where the vagaries of the device impede good learning. That’s changed, however, with current devices focused on the flight school market—whether from Frasca International Inc., Elite Simulation Solutions or Flight1 Software, to name a few—which replicate so closely the true flight environment.

What’s more persistent, however, is an instructor’s default bias to the airplane. The instructor might be building time toward a career move to the airlines, or perhaps he or she is a seasoned professional who feels more comfortable teaching in the airplane—because that’s the way it’s always been done.

It’s this bias that needs to change.

Redbird's Migration
Forums included best practice sessions for training with simulation. Stephen Yeates

Forums for the Future

Jerry Gregoire, founder of Redbird, gives the rationale behind the event’s genesis and why it’s important to the company. “The Migration event, particularly the first one, was a reaction to the huge decline in investment the major aircraft manufacturers were making in flight training at the time,” he says. “Cessna, for example, gutted the [Cessna Pilot Center] program to the point where the annual/regional CPC meetings were no longer funded. The first Migration was our effort to keep the CPC meetings going.

“Over the next couple of years, Cessna [and then Textron Aviation] declined to participate in Migration, but by that time, Migration had established itself as the largest and, for the most part, only formal gathering of the flight training industry. In the process, it has become the most effective vehicle for flight school operators to influence the direction of regulation, aircraft, service and technology. The value to Redbird Flight Simulations has been immeasurable as a way to stay in close contact with the challenges and immediate needs of training providers…and the social and networking aspects are great fun for us.”

Those are just a handful of the reasons Redbird has opened Migration to nearly anyone in the flight training profession and makes it free to attend, though it began specifically tuned to flight schools—starting with those within the CPC program but quickly branching out—that sought to attain or maintain a certain standard of training. These star schools were viewed as the best places to begin to foment change.

Redbird's Migration
Keynote ­speakers one year included EAA chairman and CEO Jack Pelton. Redbird Flight Simulations

Eric Crump, the aerospace program director at Polk State College in Lakeland, Florida, has been with Migration since the beginning. “I think of Redbird as being the classic case for disruption in the industry,” he says. “No one had seen a sim [made for general aviation] that moved at that price point.” When Redbird entered the industry, reflects Crump, its modus operandi was to continually ask the question, “Why are we doing it this way?” and come up with a better answer. “To me, that’s what Migration is too: the tip of the disruption iceberg.”

The unique part of the conference lies in its ability to bring folks together who normally wouldn’t share airspace except under duress. “You get people in the room who should not want to share with each other because they are competitors,” Crump says. Not only would competing flight schools join in but so would representatives from various developers of pilot training materials. When a program continues for 10 years, you begin to see real adoption of new ideas, which are now percolating through the industry.

In the 2019 conference, Crump led a presentation during the forums several times to a standing-room-only crowd. His topic? “How To Build a Better Instructor.” Through real-time polling, he marched through a series of disruptive ideas on how to guide instructors to be better—and do better. “I’m a big advocate for completely rethinking the role of the flight instructor. It has to be different now,” he says. “Initial pass rates at the regionals have plummeted and retraining costs have gone up. This is a passion project for me. I’m invested professionally and personally. If we don’t fix our flight instructor problem, we’ll be totally ill-equipped to address [urban air mobility] and the other issues confronting us.”

Redbird's Migration
The 2019 Migration honored the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. Stephen Yeates

Building Engagement

So how do you get a hangar full of natural frenemies to open up about their hopes for the future? Engage them with the latest challenges—and give them a peek into new projects from innovative minds willing to take risks in order to save that future.

The Redbird Migration Challenge had its roots as another component of Migration during the very first year, in the midst of a crosswind-landing contest using one of the Redbird sims. A motley mob of instructors crowded around one of their fellow CFIs trying to land the crosswind sim, and they induced a “realistic level of distraction” by throwing pingpong balls at the poor soul—and having way too much fun doing it not to suspect a certain amount of deviant pathology in the group. Were those ball throws cathartic? Or just silly fun? Who knows—but the Challenge caught on as a way to drive engagement and interaction within the conference.

Migration Challenges over the years have included teams vying to create the best “Learn to Fly” video, as well as the Whizzie Marketing Challenge selling Big Red soda. In 2019, randomly selected teams were given the task of flight planning an epic journey from Earth to the moon—Earth, Texas, to Moon Township, Pennsylvania, that is—using no less than three aircraft and somehow covering the total mileage from planet Earth to the moon and in the same length of time as the Apollo 11 mission. Very few other parameters were granted to the teams, and as usual, the most creative answers won, even if they broke the rules.

Why do this? To get people to think differently and take the “rules” as guidelines rather than restrictions—when appropriate.

Redbird's Migration
During a Migration Challenge, instructors “distracted” a fellow CFI flying the crosswind sim. Redbird Flight Simulations

Takeaways for Educators—and Pilots

The most-telling results from the forums in 2019’s event came out of two questions that were posed in different ways over the course of the three days.

The first question, raised to the instructors in the forums, turns a common assumption on its ear: What happens if you charge less for flight instruction hours than you do for one-on-one ground instruction time?

On of the arguments given as the basis for the question: Most of the revenue in flight training is made in the aircraft-rental rate, percentagewise—if the school has its equipment priced correctly and managed well from a maintenance standpoint. When Crump presented this idea to one of the forums, he found a mixed response but enough consideration in the room to make it worth thinking through.

The second question: Should we be spending time in lengthy one-on-one ground lessons with an instructor at all?

Longtime CFI and designated pilot examiner Roger Sharp posed the question first during his keynote speech, to which he immediately answered for himself: a resounding no. His argument? Most instructors are not well-trained on delivering ground instruction and take far more time to cover the territory than a well-constructed ground-training course available digitally or in print from a variety of competent commercial providers. Of course, several of those same providers were in the audience at Migration and sagely nodded their heads in agreement, but he had a point—and one that hasn’t been discussed much. Why should instructors spend that time doing what they do least competently when a course may do it more thoroughly and efficiently?

Though no resolution was reached, the questions clearly prompted a lot of discussion. Maybe a few flight school owners in the audience (or reading these words) will try out the concepts and find if these are two assumptions—such as Redbird’s original quest to bring motion simulation to a lower price point—that can be dramatically changed.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Can Flight Instruction Get Any Better? appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Technicalities: The Story Behind the Boeing 737 Max Grounding https://www.flyingmag.com/tech-boeing-737-max-grounding/ Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:48:09 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/technicalities-the-story-behind-the-boeing-737-max-grounding/ The post Technicalities: The Story Behind the Boeing 737 Max Grounding appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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The cover story in The New York Times magazine for September 22, 2019, was entitled, “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?” The writer, William Langewiesche—son of the sainted author of Stick and Rudder, Wolfgang Langewiesche—is a veteran of Flying, an experienced pilot, and a thorough and technically savvy researcher of his wide-ranging articles and books. As you can imagine, I read it eagerly.

The article had been posted online a couple of days earlier. By the time I checked, it had garnered more than 1,500 comments. I didn’t read all of them, but the reactions I saw seemed about equally divided between friendly and hostile.

I wrote a letter to the editor myself; it was not published. Despite the variety of online reactions, however, the letters to the editor that did appear two weeks later were, surprisingly, all favorable. Did the editors consider the critical reactions not worth printing?

In a nutshell, Langewiesche’s position was that the real reason for the two crashes—one in Indonesia and one in Ethiopia—that had cost hundreds of lives and led to the worldwide grounding of the airplane was the poor airmanship of the crews involved. Properly trained crews, he argued, should have been able to disable their misbehaving stability-augmentation systems—the now infamous MCAS—in the same simple way one would remedy a trim runaway. This is what Boeing apparently hoped any pilot would do in the event that the system, which applied nose-down trim more rapidly than the normal trim system would, went off when it shouldn’t.

Langewiesche documented in great detail the combination of corruption, greed and irresponsibility he said leads to the rapidly growing airlines of developing countries—notably, in this case, Indonesia’s Lion Air—putting novices fresh out of simulators into the cockpits of their jets. What these crews lacked, he argued, was the wide experience in airplanes and flight operations of all sorts that enables pilots to react calmly and resourcefully to unfamiliar situations. Using cockpit voice and flight-data records, he dissected second by second the reactions of the two crews to the pitch-downs that had been triggered in each case by a single faulty angle of attack sensor. He showed how all four pilots failed to cope appropriately—one of them, in fact, turning to prayer as a last, and futile, resort.

Many online commenters branded the argument racist. It may have sounded that way, but I think, if Langewiesche was swayed by any unconscious prejudice, it was by a sort of class feeling: the belief of an experienced pilot—who has logged many hours flying freight in junky airplanes and seen a thing or two—that old-timers like himself are real pilots, and relative newbies simply aren’t there yet.

The refrain that young pilots “don’t know how to fly” is not infrequently heard from senior and retired captains. If it’s true, it’s not entirely surprising; just learning systems and procedures takes all of a new pilot’s training time. The design philosophy underlying the Airbus fly-by-wire system—in which the airplane, not the pilot, has the final say—signals tacit acceptance of this situation. Airbus airplanes are not so much flown as managed. You tell the airplane’s computers what you want; they do the actual flying. Software guardrails protect the airplane from clueless pilots. Many American pilots, even those flying Airbus equipment, have professed to prefer the Boeing philosophy, in which the pilot can override the airplane rather than vice versa. Boeing airplanes, they said, were “pilots’ airplanes,” and Boeing pilots were real pilots.

Read More from Peter Garrison: Technicalities

By now, no one can be unaware that the MCAS design was flawed. It was originally added to deal with changes in the 737’s longitudinal stability caused by the more forward position of new, larger engines on the low-slung jet. Boeing management deliberately minimized its importance, almost to the point of concealment, in order to hurry the new model into service without its requiring recertification or pilot retraining. Regulators—mainly the FAA, lulled by decades of reliance on Boeing’s competence and honesty—had not caught on.

Langewiesche conceded that Boeing had made mistakes but passed lightly over them, expressing little more than mild puzzlement over the company’s actions. I thought it would have been interesting to know as much about conversations that may have taken place in Boeing’s engineering and flight-test spaces as we know about what happened in the cockpits of the doomed airplanes. It’s hard to imagine that no one questioned the wisdom of allowing this powerful, fast-acting system to be triggered by an additional faulty sensor.

Three weeks after the article appeared, The New York Times printed a single belated letter. It was from Chesley Sullenberger.

Sullenberger, whose successful ditching of a goose-disabled Airbus in the Hudson River in New York has elevated him into a sort of Lindbergh for our time, was one of the pilots invited to reenact the accidents on a full-motion simulator. He dismissed as an “age-old aviation canard” Langewiesche’s idea that the pilots’ airmanship, or lack of it, was to blame, though he agreed with him that “inadequate pilot training and insufficient pilot experience are problems worldwide.” Still, Sullenberger wrote, “they do not excuse the fatally flawed design [of the] pernicious and deadly” MCAS, a “death trap” that never should been approved, by neither Boeing nor the FAA. “Boeing made faulty assumptions,” he said, not only about the reliability of the system itself but also about “the level of human performance possible once the failures began to cascade.” Inappropriate MCAS activations “did not present as a classic runaway stabilizer problem.” The airplanes felt and behaved differently than they would have with runaway trim, and crews might therefore look elsewhere for the cause, which Boeing had gone out of its way to hide.

Having more than once, in 50 years of flying, looked back with disbelief and embarrassment at my own reactions to in-flight emergencies and anomalies, I empathize with anyone who doesn’t reason accurately when failures begin to “cascade.” My own reaction to the article was in some ways similar to Sullenberger’s. My letter to The Times said, in part: “I have written an airplane-accident-analysis column for Flying magazine for many years, and something I have learned is that no pilot or crew can be certain of their reaction to an unexpected emergency. If Langewiesche struggles to define the quality of ‘airmanship’ that the accident crews supposedly lacked, it is because airmanship exists only after the fact. It knows no national boundaries. You can never tell who has the presence of mind to cope with unexpected and frightening events until the crisis is over. Because human performance is unpredictable, it is the duty of airplane manufacturers to provide crews with every possible advantage for coping with the unexpected. Boeing didn’t.”


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Technicalities: The Story Behind the Boeing 737 Max Grounding appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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In Depth: Dianna Stanger https://www.flyingmag.com/in-depth-dianna-stanger/ Tue, 17 Mar 2020 16:32:53 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/in-depth-dianna-stanger/ The post In Depth: Dianna Stanger appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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For so many reading this profile, “giving back” through some form of philanthropic flying is a big part of why we fly. To see the smile on a child’s face when a rescued puppy is delivered to its forever family, or taking a person up for their first taste of what our world of flight is like is one of the most rewarding experiences a pilot can enjoy.

While some of us have dreamed of filling our dream hangar with the proceeds from a winning Powerball ticket, that is not reality. Sometimes, though, people are very successful in business and can fill their dream hangar by manufacturing products people purchase in large quantities for a respectable profit. One of those people is Dianna Stanger—based in Texas and California—a very active pilot who has indeed filled her hangar(s) with an assortment of airplanes and rotorcraft.

If you’ve ever been to one of the Institute for Women of Aviation Worldwide events and watched a helicopter filled with girls and young women flying endless sorties out and back all day, that was Stanger in her Eurocopter EC135. She’s flown a total of 3,816 women at iWOAW events over seven years, and in 2018, she flew 716 girls and women at the rate of about 20 an hour. That marathon mission earned her the 2018 iWOAW title of “Most Dedicated Female Pilot Worldwide.”

When you run the numbers on that 2018 effort, she spent a total of $101,042 on that one event, and like all philanthropic pilots, she picked up all personal expenses, including fuel costs. Stanger was more than happy to pay about $141 per passenger, just so those girls and young women could get up in the air for a few glorious minutes.

“I’m able to fly so many girls because, in a helicopter, I do not have to taxi,” Stanger says. “Every day at these events, I fly as many trips as I can in the opposite direction of the airplanes flying the event. My trained crew can get four girls out and four new ones in very fast with the rotor turning, and I’m off on another flight. It’s intense flying, but I go into machine mode, and it’s a lot of fun for me as a pilot.”

Stanger has also flown patients for Angel Flight South Central for the past 17 years, an endeavor that gives her immense satisfaction. To date, she’s flown 231 patient missions for a total of 1,262 hours at a personal cost of an astounding $3.1 million. Of those AFSC flights, she says: “There’s never a bad flight flying patients to treatment. You just can’t help but walk away from these flights with the biggest smile on your face.”

And about that big smile we see in every photograph of Stanger: That’s not posing for the camera; she intends to make every day count. “With all the things I get to do with my airplanes and helicopter, I consider myself to be very, very lucky. No matter what life hands me, I always seem to get something out of it.”

Dianna Stanger
With her EC135 helicopter, Stanger has given 3,816 girls the free gift of flight at numerous iWOAW events. Courtesy Dianna Stanger

Stanger focuses primarily on flying girls and young women because that’s where she believes the need is greatest. “The ratio of females to males in aviation is devastatingly low,” she says. “That 7 percent number has always blown me away, and this statistic was the driving force in the beginning when I started doing all the flights for girls. When airports became fenced, the ability to interact with pilots and aircraft for kids stopped. I think it’s the most wonderful thing in the world to expose a child or young adult to the magical influence of flight.”

The company Stanger is involved in—Connecticut-based Electro-Methods—machines and fabricates complex assemblies and components for the aerospace industry, including some of the largest jet-engine OEMs. In 1992, Stanger became primary stockholder, and while not involved in day-to-day operations, she frequently visits the facility. “We’ve got a seven-axis machine that does parts up to 60 inches now, and to me, that’s just fascinating. I love going up there so the crew can show me all of the processes that go into making our parts. Occasionally, they also give me TIG welding lessons, which I just love.”

Read More from Dan Pimentel: In Depth

The good fortune of owning a successful company has allowed Stanger to buy flying machines for many years to fulfill her pilot dreams. The collection’s “flagship” is a Beechcraft Premier 1A jet. She also has a Cessna 208 Caravan, a pair of Lancairs (a Legacy and a 390-mph Super Legacy) for racing at the Stihl National Championship Air Races (in Reno, Nevada), an EC135 helicopter, an Aero Vodochody L-39, and a L-19 Bird Dog warbird. While all make very fine platforms, two additional airplanes give her the most joy.

“My vintage 1942 Waco UPF-7 biplane was previously owned by my grandfather,” Stanger says, “and just flying that airplane and listening to the wind as it goes between the wings is amazing. You don’t really have to think too hard to fly it or worry about the avionics. It’s nice to go out and just enjoy flying as it was meant to be.”

The rarest ship in her collection is the only Aero Vodochody L-139 training jet in existence. “My late husband and I had a deal. He could only buy me gifts with an engine, and he bought me the 139 as a birthday present. It flies like a dream, but it does go fast,” Stanger says.

What often defines an aviator’s character is not what they flew but how they gave back. Each time Stanger flies a girl at an iWOAW event or delivers a patient many states away, she represents all of us. With each flight, she touches nonflying families and demonstrates in a big, bold way that general and business aviation can do positive things for all.

There is one thing about life that is inevitable: At some point, we aviators will all “go west” to fly forever with Lindbergh. When that day comes, each of us will leave behind a legacy that was forged by what we did during our time on this Earth. That legacy won’t be determined by the amount of hours in our logbooks or what was parked in our hangars. We will be remembered for what we did with our airplanes—and in some cases, helicopters.

Years from now, after Stanger has gone west, to enjoy flying to find the finest $100 hamburgers, she will be remembered for spending some of her wealth introducing complete strangers to aviation—because she could.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post In Depth: Dianna Stanger appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Taking Wing: Rookie of the Year https://www.flyingmag.com/taking-wing-rookie-of-the-year/ https://www.flyingmag.com/taking-wing-rookie-of-the-year/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2020 15:20:31 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/taking-wing-rookie-of-the-year/ The post Taking Wing: Rookie of the Year appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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The six-cylinder, 310-hp Continental growls and pops as I line up on Runway 7L then builds to a throaty roar as I open the throttle. I feed it in slowly, just like Joe told me to, in order to keep this Lancair with its castoring nosewheel, tiny tail and monstrous torque pointed straight down the runway. But around the time I figure I’m at full throttle, I discover I have another inch to “firewall power,” and when I get there, the ­acceleration becomes gut-wrenching. We’re up to 85 knots in no time at all. I ease back on the stick, and we leap into the dry desert air. This is my first time flying an airplane that has the power and speed to compete in the famed Reno Air Races in Nevada, and even in this bone-stock Lancair Legacy, it’s a bit like having a tiger by the tail.

My friend, Joe Coraggio, is in the left seat. We’ve known each other since we both flew the Embraer 175 for Compass Airlines, where Joe, a check airman, was assigned to give me my annual line check. We hit it off over two short legs, and a few days later, I flew over to Fleming Field in Minnesota to take a look at the Long-EZ project Joe was building in his garage. Over the next couple years, Dawn and I came to be good friends with Joe and his husband, Kevin Vernon-Harris; they’re friendly, generous people with an infectious enthusiasm for life in general and sport aviation in particular. I helped out on the Long-EZ build a few times; we flew together in my Cub and Pacer and a friend’s RV-7; Dawn and I camped with Joe and Kevin at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and Joe introduced me to many of his seemingly endless pool of friends and acquaintances in the experimental, warbird, airshow and ­racing corners of aviation.

One of these is Eric Whyte, with whom Joe co-chairs the annual AirVenture Cup Race. Like Joe and me, Eric is a professional pilot who has been flying since his early teens, and in fact, it was Eric who gave Joe his first Young Eagles flight in 1995 and, subsequently, mentored him as he began flight training. Joe recalls, in those days, he hung around the airport so much that the other pilots started calling him “Ramp Rat,” a nickname that stuck. Both mentor and mentee have done a great deal to carry on the program that gave them and so many other young aviators their start; in 2017, Eric was the recipient of the Phillips 66 EAA Young Eagles Leadership Award, and Joe was the honoree the following year.

One cold winter evening in Joe’s basement, he and I got to talking about the AirVenture Cup Race, which takes place the weekend before Oshkosh and ends in nearby Wausau, Wisconsin. Joe made it sound so fun that, a few tasty IPAs later, we had cooked up a harebrained scheme to “race” my flying club’s 70-mph Piper Cub at the next AirVenture Cup. It was a great lark that made for a good shaggy-dog tale (“The World’s Fastest Cub,” December 2014), and the following year, Dawn and I raced our own Piper Pacer. At both races, I really enjoyed getting to know Joe and Eric better, along with their many racing friends—­several of whom also ­compete at Reno—and another ­highlight was ­flying dozens of Young Eagles on the Saturdays before the race.

Over the past five years, Joe and I were hired at two different major airlines. He and Kevin moved to Phoenix to be near his base, and Joe ­finished his highly modified Long-EZ, ­nicknamed “Betty.” Joe’s ­intention was always to make Betty a ­racing machine, and with that aim, he had incorporated quite a few ­aerodynamic mods and a ­200-plus hp Lycoming IO-360 swinging a three-blade ­composite propeller. She was fast but not quite as fast as Joe hoped, so he continued to modify her with the dream of racing her at Reno. When I visited on a Phoenix overnight in spring 2016, Joe expressed frustration at the slow pace of progress but still hoped to be able to take Betty to Reno that fall. Shortly ­thereafter, an exhaust ­modification suffered an unexpected failure mode that grounded Betty for more than a year.

Joe Coraggio
Improving every run, Joe moved from a qualifying speed of 274.4 mph to 280.7 mph. K G Eccles

“In retrospect, it was just pride that made me want to race the airplane I built,” Joe says now. “It took me a while to realize it was just the wrong airplane for the job. Even if got all the speed I wanted to get out of it, I would have been clinging to the very bottom of the Sport Class.” Some explanation is required here. The Stihl National Championship Air Races—as the Reno Air Races are officially known—has six classes including Jet, Unlimited, Biplane, T6, Sport and Formula One. The Sport Class is limited to 36 pilots (eight each in Gold, Silver, Bronze and Medallion subclasses, plus two alternates), and in 2019, all Sport Class racers but one qualified at 230 mph or faster. Joe was struggling to get Betty much over 220 mph.

In 2018, Joe learned that Reno ­staple Andy Findlay—who has ­dominated the Sport Class for ­several years with his highly ­modified, ­400-mph Lancair Super Legacy, One Moment—also had a stock ­normally aspirated Legacy he was willing to part with. With Lancairs and Glasair IIIs forming the backbone of the Silver and Gold Sport classes, it was the right airplane for the job. Joe and Andy made a deal, and Ramp Rat Racing was born. Shortly thereafter, Joe partnered with BendixKing, and they replaced Joe’s somewhat-tired first-generation glass panel with a beautiful, state-of-the-art layout built around their xVue Touch, AeroNav and AeroFlight products. Several of Joe’s EAA friends serve as his volunteer crew, Kevin handles the business side as team manager, and well-known homebuilder and AirVenture Cup ­regular Dick Keys is about as capable a crew chief as one could ask for.

Pylon racing taxes and hones a pilot’s stick-and-rudder skills like few other aerial pursuits. The Sport Class course at Reno is just under 8 miles long and defined by nine pylons strung across the Reno-Stead Airport and the adjacent desert plateau. The pylons themselves are 50 feet tall and denote the minimum race altitude, above which the racers seldom stray. Flying the course solo would be challenging enough, but it is all done in close proximity to up to seven other airplanes in any given heat. (Basically, flying formation on a lead who doesn’t really want you there and who you are trying to pass.) It is a credit to the pilots involved and the race ­organization that Reno is as safe as it is.

Read More from Sam Weigel: Taking Wing

In order to race at Reno, Joe was first required to attend the Pylon Racing Seminar, held in Reno each June. Good formation skills are a hard prerequisite, with a Formation Flying Inc. (FFI) or Formation and Safety Training (FAST) card required in most cases. The four-day course ­consists of classroom training, ­formation ­exercises, familiarization laps and practice racing. A strong emphasis is put on contingency procedures, such as engine failure and crowd-line escape maneuvers. It was an ­intensive week, but Joe kept improving and was awarded a Sport Class ­race-pilot certificate following the successful ­completion of his check ride.

“One of the things that kept me from coming to Reno sooner was this perception that all the racers are these superpilots,” Joe tells me. “And so there was a lot of fear—of the unknown, of whether I could measure up, for personal safety. I’ll tell you, it was scary coming down the chute onto the course at PRS the first time. At Reno, I always have the energy to make a runway in case of engine failure, for example.” He gestures to the surrounding mountains and desert. “That’s not true most of the time. Most of the time, I’m flying around here.”

Joe Coraggio
Joe posing with his BendixKing-revamped ride. Courtesy Sam Weigel

Experienced and well-funded racing teams do a great deal to eke every bit of performance out of their airplanes. For rookies like Joe, speed comes mostly with experience and learning. This was seen over the course of race week at Reno: Joe ­qualified at 274.4 mph, which put him in Sport Bronze Class, but then he finished in first place in his first heat and was moved up to Silver Class. His speed improved until he recorded 280.7 mph in the last heat, and in the Sport Silver final, he took sixth place—which is 14th out of 36 ­overall. “At the start of the week, I was so ­task-saturated, it was like ­tunnel vision down to here,” Joe says, ­forming a small circle on the windscreen with his hands. “But later in the week the tunnel expanded, and I was able to keep other things in my scan—like engine instruments. In ­recognition of Joe’s impressive debut, he was named the Sport Class Rookie of the Year.

I ask Joe if he has any plans to ­modify the Lancair for next year. “Well, one obvious thing to do would be to increase engine power by running nitrous oxide,” he says. “But that’s one more thing to manage, and I’d have to keep a closer eye on engine instruments. It goes back to expanding that tunnel vision.” Another option would be aerodynamic ­modifications. It turns out that the ­slick-looking Lancair suffers a good deal of form drag from the abrupt ­narrowing of its aft fuselage, and repairing that area yields around 10 mph, while strengthening the tail would afford an increase in VNE. As with most things in aviation, it comes down to money. Joe has enjoyed a fruitful partnership with BendixKing, and is hoping to sign one or two other sponsorship deals with the goal of making the plane more competitive within the Sport Silver Class.

The Legacy is a wonderfully responsive airplane, if a bit sensitive in pitch. We play around in the practice area as long as we can until the setting sun forces a turn back to Joe’s home airport. At reduced power of 21 inches of manifold pressure and 2,400 rpm, we’re “only” doing 215 knots true—which is still the fastest I’ve gone in a single-engine piston airplane. Joe talks me through a remarkably jetlike final approach and landing; final approach speed is 100 knots. It’s great to have friends with cool airplanes. As we push the Lancair back into the hangar, Joe tells me his desire to race at Reno was sparked, ironically, by Sport Class founder and AirVenture Cup ­regular Lee Behel’s fatal crash while qualifying at Reno in 2014. The crash itself wasn’t the spark, Joe explains; it was Lee’s explanation of his love of ­racing that was read at his funeral.

“We are here because we absolutely love flying and the fraternity of pilots within this group. We want to live as competitors, not spectators.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, flying the Lancair has put me in rather the racing mood myself. I have to go find myself a suitably sexy and speedy ride before the 2020 AirVenture Cup.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Taking Wing: Rookie of the Year appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Unusual Attitudes: Head in the Clouds https://www.flyingmag.com/unusual-attitudes-head-in-the-clouds/ Tue, 10 Mar 2020 15:54:51 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/unusual-attitudes-head-in-the-clouds/ The post Unusual Attitudes: Head in the Clouds appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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After reading, rereading and ruminating over an article on the direction of relative wind as affected by slips and skids, I still wasn’t getting it. Because I don’t have Peter Garrison’s number, I called another friend who has written extensively about all things aeronautical, and as expected, he patiently dumbed it down to where even I understood what the guy was trying to say. Our conversation then morphed into a discussion about readers who assume that because an aviation writer is so knowledgeable about the art and science of flying, he’s a de facto great pilot. My friend inferred he wasn’t—at least not anymore.

I agreed, but I was lying. This guy is a vastly experienced, exceptionally gifted pilot (and writer) who has spent a lifetime honing his craft. But when it comes to me, truth is, I’ve screwed up more in 58 years and many thousands of flying hours than nearly all the pilots I know…combined. And, no, I’m not bragging, thumbing my nose or feeling any sense of pride about this.

If you’re reasonably sane and have read my stories for some time, you’ll agree it would be a stretch to call me a great pilot. Enthusiastic? You bet. Pretty well-trained? By some of the best. A good stick? Usually. Many years and lots of time in wildly diverse flying machines? Yeah. A great airman? ’Fraid not—something known by my guardian angel and a few friends, if not the FAA. Believe me, it isn’t comfortable to acknowledge I’ve bent more metal than most pilots (thank God, never hurting anybody). After all, I’ve spent a lifetime advocating aviation safety, instructing and testing the skills of other pilots while having screwed up, albeit unintentionally, more than my share of the time.

My rap sheet began in the 1960s, when I put my Pietenpol Air Camper on its nose directly in front of the Sky Galley Restaurant at Ohio’s Lunken Airport: an embarrassing predicament caused by funky heel brakes, a 90-degree turn onto a taxiway in a gusty, quartering-left tailwind, inexperience, and a lack of knowledge and skill. But within the year, with a new prop on the Air Camper and a genuine CFI certificate in hand, I taxied into a sawed-off fence post lurking in the grass next to the runway at Johnny Lane’s Lebanon Airport in Ohio. John and his mechanic, Bob Gill, pounded out the prop, and until now, nobody except the three of us was any wiser.

Some years later, now a genuine FAA inspector, I took the rap for a boyfriend I was checking out in an Aeronca 7DC. Well, heck, I was madly in love with and felt sorry for this (as it turned out) rather nefarious character who was a CFI and an about-to-be-disbarred attorney. I dutifully reported it to the FAA and was sentenced to a 709 reexamination ride with an inspector from another FSDO. (The scene of the crime is commemorated by a large engraved stone at Sporty’s Clermont County Airport in Ohio.) And then there was a 2-hour student pilot I encouraged to make the takeoff in a 180 hp Husky from John Schweller’s 32-foot-wide concrete strip. Things quickly went awry, but wrestling for the stick and yelling, “I’ve got it,” didn’t work. When the dust settled, we quickly hauled it out of the cornfield and into John’s hangar. Madly in love—yeah, again—with John, we made two round trips in his little Mercedes, trailering the shrink-wrapped fuselage to Afton, Wyoming. John was killed within the year in another airplane accident, and strange as it sounds, I was almost thankful about the Husky; we had such fun on those long drives to and from Wyoming.

Another longtime friend, Mike Devanney, had a grass strip shorter than John’s and narrower with tall trees on the approach end and both sides of the runway. The right wingtip on my Cessna 180, well, brushed a branch on landing, but Mike’s artistry with duct tape had it flying like new. I did nothing about it until a friend who owned a propeller company insisted I let their mechanic repair it; that duct-taped 180 sitting on the Hartzell ramp in Piqua, Ohio, was something of an embarrassment.

Read More from Martha Lunken: Unusual Attitudes

But duct tape is wonderful stuff, and it saved the day when I took off for Oklahoma City without having secured the right cowl access door—invisible from the left seat while taxiing but certainly part of a proper preflight. When I leveled off and saw it flapping in the slipstream, I made an immediate landing at Greater Cincinnati Airport where another angel, disguised as a Comair mechanic, fixed me up with “500-mph speed tape.” Evidently, this stuff, which (then) cost about $700 per 4-inch-wide roll, is actually approved for certain repairs—well, temporary ones. But it served so well from Cincinnati to Oklahoma City and back, I was tempted to use a little paint and fly on. (I didn’t, but do you know what a genuine Cessna part for a 1956 180 costs?)

There were others: snagging a runway light taxiing a UPF-7, a taxiway light in a DC-3, losing a fight with a pine sapling and the wingtip of another Goon, and a more serious encounter with a tree when landing my Cub at night on an unlit, uphill, doglegged grass strip. And, of course, my finest hour was landing out of an overcast on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because I’d lost an unsecured fuel cap.

And you know all about my unlucky but careless J-3 Cub propping episode—technically not an accident because it was to reposition and “not for the purpose of flight.” My former confreres at the FAA weren’t pleased when the tiedown rope snapped off the tail and the Cub roared to life with nobody at the controls. Thus ended my career as a designated examiner. Interestingly—and here’s that guardian angel again—the guy who bought the salvage found the airframe so badly corroded, it was beyond repair, which was one of the reasons the rope attach point failed.

Thankfully and maybe ominously, for some years, things have been relatively calm. But I have this recurring dream involving my 180 and another cornfield. I’m sure it’s just that—a dream—but yesterday, searching the floor of the 180 for a lost tootsie pop, I saw what looked suspiciously like pieces of cornstalk…

Maybe I need to stop scoffing, swallow my pride, and enroll in one of John and Martha’s courses in decision-making and risk management. In the meantime, learn something from my screw-ups and know at least I’ll never lie to you.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Unusual Attitudes: Head in the Clouds appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Garmin’s Autoland Gets Flight Tested https://www.flyingmag.com/garmin-autoland-flight-tested/ https://www.flyingmag.com/garmin-autoland-flight-tested/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2020 20:57:02 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/garmins-autoland-gets-flight-tested/ The post Garmin’s Autoland Gets Flight Tested appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Your punishment for whatever mistake you’ve made in an airplane shouldn’t be the ultimate one. Not for you—and certainly not for your passengers.

That’s the underlying philosophy inspiring engineers to create revolutionary safety technologies for light aircraft across the past century. Advancements such as the large-format multifunction display with in-cockpit weather, upset protection and emergency-descent protocols—and whole-airframe ballistic recovery systems—stem from this drive toward solving our mistakes as pilots. Case in point: About 20 years ago, Cirrus delivered the airframe parachute to a certificated light airplane as standard equipment—known as the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System. Just a year or two later, Cirrus debuted its version of the wide-horizon primary flight display—around the same time as in the Lancair Columbia—but soon after, the innovative PFD followed in a cascade of single-engine pistons and twins.

Proponents saw into the future with the possibilities; those pilots with a reactionary take questioned the potential misuse of the technology. In a handful of cases, those skeptics proved to be correct—but for the bulk of the general aviation public, the result has been a net gain in both safety and utility. While the most recent statistics have shown an uptick in the fatal-accident rate (according to the most recent 2018 NTSB data), it’s premature to say more pilots have come to grief solely because of technology.

Say you’ve stumbled into IFR conditions or a situation in which you couldn’t fly your way out—we can all agree it’s better to learn your lessons by living to study the aftermath. And it’s the case even more that technology can save you from making those mistakes in the first place.

Autonomy refers to a state of being able to make choices and execute decisions as sovereign unto one’s self. Garmin’s Autonomi suite uses various tools to hand over that state to the airplane in an emergency situation—most likely when the pilot becomes incapacitated—and offers passengers an “out” they didn’t have before. The company has now introduced the key element: Autoland, the breakthrough system that allows those parts of Autonomi to not only escape the immediate hazard but also bring the airplane to a safe—and really quite-normal—landing.

Garmin Autoland
A guarded switch on the panel of the M600 activates Autoland. Garmin

Approaching Autoland

As a company, Garmin has created an environment within its walls where the testing of new ideas doesn’t necessarily need to go anywhere—so dreaming up the basic elements that would constitute the Autoland system for light aircraft fit right into the mix. But from the beginning, the engineers doing that forward thinking didn’t want their efforts to coalesce into just a “really great R&D project” and nothing else, and instead drove toward a system with broad practical application across several levels of aircraft types.

Bailey Scheel—senior aviation-programs engineer and manager at Garmin—grew up in Idaho, where she first learned to fly and where her family flew a Cessna 180 throughout the backcountry. Her excitement in joining the Autoland development team lies in its multifaceted nature: “The breadth of the project touches everything in the avionics, touches everything in the airplane—the radios, the transponder, the flight-control system, the [flight-management system], the displays—it touches everything,” she says. “There were definitely technical challenges in each of those areas, but just wrapping our arms around what it really was, was probably one of the more difficult things.”

The research into Autoland began in 2011; the first flight took place in May 2014. In September 2015, Garmin looped in the FAA, and in February 2016, it performed its first automated landing on an actual runway surface. Before that, all of the landings took place in the sky.

Jessica Koss is Garmin’s aviation-media-relations specialist and an experienced flight instructor, and she describes the process—which, to anyone familiar with Garmin’s creative side, makes perfect sense. “We’re very vertically integrated as a company, and part of that integration includes our own aviation database team,” Koss says, “so we actually built airports up in the sky—at 5,000 feet or what have you—and we would practice the approach to landing at altitude, the flare, the landing, all of that before we brought it down to the ground.”

Garmin Autoland
“Avoid touching the flight controls, which may interfere with Autoland.” Garmin

In 2016, Piper Aircraft stepped up to the plate, eventually committing roughly $3 million in assets to the program, including test aircraft. “Over three years ago, I said, ‘I’m all in, whatever you need,’” says Piper president and CEO Simon Caldecott. “It’s a big advantage [for] our class of aircraft. We see more and more people who want to buy a seat in an airplane—and to know there’s a safety benefit.”

The platform of choice? The manufacturer’s flagship, the M600. Piper’s customers can fly the aircraft under BasicMed, as long as they keep operational weight to 6,000 pounds or less and stay below 18,000 feet. Not to suggest that those flying under that program are more likely to suffer a medical emergency; in fact, any one of us could fall prey to a sudden cardiac event or stroke.

But Caldecott and the Piper team identified a sweet spot inhabited by the M600 for the first implementation of Autoland—the bones of the airplane fit the project. The airframe’s big enough to have room to work with while putting into place all of the required components. It also had an option for a radar altimeter, which turned out to be important for the first application of the system.

Most pilots might think they would never use the Autoland function—and all companies involved in its debut hope they’re right. But Caldecott believes in the value of the system—what Piper has branded Halo—enough to envision that it will become standard on Piper’s full lineup of aircraft at some point in the future.

Garmin Autoland
Sensors for wheel speed and braking ­deliver input for the delicate operations of touchdown, steering and stopping on the runway. Julie Boatman

How Did I Get Into This?

Autoland engages under two separate conditions: when someone in the airplane, either the pilot or passenger, presses the guarded button or the system detects a lack of response from the pilot.

In the latter case, Koss describes two branches of the Autoland architecture based upon emergency functions already familiar to pilots using recent versions of Garmin’s series of flight decks. “The first scenario, think of it as your EDM scenario,” Koss says. “The pilot is flying straight and level [with the] autopilot on, at one of those hypoxic altitudes, and they don’t interact with the flight deck. They’re going to get that message, ‘Are you alert?’ and they just have to push any button on the flight deck [to answer the system’s query], and if they don’t, then EDM will descend [the airplane] to a lower altitude.” After a period of time, if the pilot continues to not interact with the flight deck or do anything, then Autoland activates.

The other automated scenario anticipates the need for aircraft recovery from a serious upset. Let’s say an inexperienced—or less-than-current—pilot gets into the clouds and starts banking really hard or pitching up aggressively or lowering the nose. “Then ESP will engage, and then again if ESP is engaged for a prolonged period of time…it will go into level mode,” Scheel says. If level mode is active for two minutes, and the pilot does not take the airplane out of level mode, then Autoland activates without further prompting from anyone in the airplane. “And that’s probably the more desirable condition for [the pilot and any passengers]—especially if you’re upside down and disoriented.”

Garmin Autoland
“Your destination is shown on the bottom of the left and right displays.” Piper Aircraft

All Elements In Place

When someone inside the airplane presses the button, Autoland immediately launches into its activation sequence. Two of the engineers behind its development describe each element of the process and how their work evolved to deliver the desired outcome: a reasonable landing at the most appropriate airport determined by the program. Eric Tran has been the primary senior software engineer, with the responsibility to develop the algorithm that constitutes Autoland “brains.” Ben Patel is team leader of aviation systems, heading up the cadre that has solved for solutions on the mechanical side. Both are listed on the original Garmin patent.

First, Autoland ensures envelope protection. The aircraft uses ESP to return to straight and level if needed.

Second, the system provides terrain protection. The team gave the example: What if Autoland engaged while the airplane flew below the ridgeline at Crater Lake in Oregon, where terrain on all sides creates an immediate hazard? The system would recognize that and enter a circling climb until clear of the terrain.

Third, Autoland moves to weather avoidance. “When you select the button, Autoland is going to take into account a lot of information, and it’s going to happen immediately,” Koss says. “It’s going to consider weather en route, weather at the destination—Autoland even has the capability to forecast weather” up to 15 minutes into the future. XM Nexrad data is updated every 2.5 minutes, and Autoland can use all of the sources, including Iridium and Flight Information Services–Broadcast, to request fresh data when able. If the system finds it necessary, Autoland can reroute to a more optimal airport.

Fourth, the system executes a route selection to the nearest appropriate airport. These calculations take place within 8 milliseconds, according to Tran. It also considers fuel on board, so it will select a destination within your fuel range. “Runway surface, length, width, type—all of that is taken into consideration. For the M600, the ideal runway length is 5,000 feet. We’ll accept 4,000 feet if that’s all that’s within range for us,” Koss says.

Choosing the airport: “We take apart the decision a pilot would make, and we narrow it down into these discrete buckets, [which include] attributes for a destination,” Tran says. “We can give each of these a score, and we can weight those, [in a configurable fashion] and for the [manufacturer’s] preference; it’s the preference for the airframe. If they tune it in a particular way, [the algorithm] can pick a longer runway and pick one that isn’t affected by crosswinds as much—but however they tune it, it’s going to be a safe selection.”

Garmin Autoland
Our demo flight took place at New Century AirCenter in Olathe, Kansas, with the ­tower supervisor “in the know,” though the project was still in stealth mode. Julie Boatman

The Landing

“We collected the data, and it turns out that pilots don’t fly a glidepath perfectly down until they’re on the runway,” Patel says. “At some point, they decide, ‘That’s OK, close enough,’ and they actually dip below [the glidepath], typically, and flare up a little bit. So we had to look at some data and try to understand what makes sense and when we need to deviate from that geometry that we’d provided. We actually turned the problem into a little bit of a transition from a glidepath tracking to where we go into a mode where we’re simply trying to convert to vertical speed.”

Touchdown needs to be a bit firm. “The goal is not to feather it down but to be as comfortable as possible,” Patel says. “Once we get it down, [we want to] keep it on the ground.” That’s a steady vertical descent, as much nose-up as aerodynamically optimal, until the system is “confident” it’s on the ground. “Probably one of the hardest parts of the problem is knowing when you’re actually on the ground. We spent a lot of time just in the flight-test area really dialing in what is the right angle of attack, what is the right vertical speed target to get us on the ground.” The system also has to compensate for a wide variety of runway conditions, such as rain, ice or snow. On larger aircraft, these factors can be mitigated by a robust braking system, but on a light aircraft, it might not be cost-efficient or technically feasible.

But the truth is in the flying, so I took up Garmin’s invitation to come out and fly one of the M600 test aircraft in August 2019, before it returned to flight-test status and out of reach of aviation journalists vying for a preview. We took off from New Century AirCenter outside of Olathe, Kansas, and climbed up over the plains. Garmin flight-test pilot and engineer Eric Sargent sat in the right seat and walked through the activation. The control tower supervisor at New Century was somewhat in the know about what we were doing—but the automated calls to ATC were not part of the demo because they would instantly raise awareness of what the company had on the burner.

Garmin Autoland
The user interface is passenger-centric. Garmin

All was straightforward following activation—and we deactivated the system on our first attempt because of traffic vectored into the runway ahead of us. With a fully operational system, the airport normally would be cleared of conflicting traffic following the sequence of emergency radio calls triggered via Autoland. If a traffic conflict occurred, that’s a similar scenario to an encroachment made following a pilot’s own emergency call.

“I can tell you’re an instructor.” Sargent referred to the involuntary position of my hands below the yoke as we descended into the round out over the runway. True—I have grown accustomed over the years to restraining myself from smoothing out a student’s efforts in managing the touchdown, and I’ve learned to accept variations in technique (and contact with the runway) in order to allow for learning to take place. In this regard, Autoland looks to be a consistent performer. Our touchdown felt firm but secure, the kind of landing you would want on a slick runway to break any surface tension rain may have left behind. Sargent related that they had made more than 800 test landings at that point in the program.

We came to a stop on the runway, with the braking and steering mechanisms adjusting our rollout in a fairly smooth fashion. The engine did not shut down, but it would in the real activation. If we followed the instructions on the screens, we would exit the airplane on the runway and ostensibly be met by emergency personnel—shaken but not stirred.

Garmin Autoland
The algorithm favors 100-foot-wide runways. Garmin

Safe Return for Cirrus

Cirrus had the architecture for Garmin’s Autonomi system in mind for the Vision Jet from its inception and installed components of it on the airplane as they became available. The key to the final system capability was the addition of the autothrottle to the jet—without that, Autoland cannot perform its duties.

The Autoland program fits in neatly with Cirrus’ overall philosophy of taking what were unrecoverable accident chains in light aircraft, such as a midair collision or spatial disorientation, and crafting out-of-the-box ways to break those chains. The CAPS, for example, and the original primary flight display with a horizon-spoofing baseline. In the Vision Jet, the activation button is placed in the main cabin, well within reach of anyone in the passenger seats. This is key to the customizations made for Cirrus’ version of Autoland, which it has branded Safe Return.

Ben Kowalski, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Cirrus, has Garmin Aviation roots; he was its director of sales and marketing prior to arriving at the aircraft manufacturer. He envisions Autoland as a natural extension of the capabilities of both companies. “We see it being a pretty big deal because, in a passenger aircraft, this Autoland system can be activated [by someone] sitting anywhere in the aircraft…[it] turns it into an autonomous vehicle, and it’s making decisions to return to an airport like a pilot would. In the Vision Jet, you get to see the pilot [work], but now you get this enabling tool…I can press a button and bring it back to landing.”

Kowalski continues by making the direct link to the Cirrus philosophy. “If you have an airframe issue: CAPS. If you have a pilot incapacitation issue: Safe Return. We wanted to make sure that, if there’s a pilot incapacitation, the passengers can have access to the safety feature—Cirrus is trying to grow aviation.”

Todd Simmons, president of customer experience at Cirrus, explains further. “It all began with Garmin Perspective” and the inclusion of ESP and EDM—and the “smart” autopilot servos that drive those functions. “All of that integration…but it’s bigger than the technology. Collectively, we can harness them. We imagined [that would happen] when all the technology came together—autothrottle, autobraking and the key enabling technologies within the G3000.”

Standard on the Cirrus too? Yes, it will be a system on board in every single Vision Jet for now. And this is purposeful. “It changes the way single-engine pilot operations can happen. The stereotypical [worst-case] scenarios—it gives us a story to dispel those fears,” Simmons says.

Garmin Autoland
Cirrus Aircraft’s Safe Return version of Autoland debuts with the Vision Jet, and continues the company’s ­legacy of safety innovation. Cirrus

On Final Final

Each aviation generation sees a handful of revolutionary concepts, those leading-edge technologies that, once introduced to the airplane, undergo a transition period—because they are so game-changing—before we fully understand the increase in safety they can provide. As certification progresses on the M600 and Vision Jet, training must take place—for both pilots and passengers—in order to maintain the level of safety that Garmin, Piper and Cirrus envision.

The first true activation of Autoland will come at some point in the future—just like the first deployment of CAPS following its introduction on the SR20 in late 1999. That incident didn’t occur until 2002, when a lone pilot who had departed Addison Airport in Texas aboard his SR22 deployed the chute following a loss of control, prompted by the separation of the left aileron from the airframe. It took three years, essentially, for the first use of the innovative system in an emergency. One person’s life—inarguably—was saved. Nearly 20 years later, we look for a similar outcome with Autoland.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Garmin’s Autoland Gets Flight Tested appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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Leading Edge: Magenta https://www.flyingmag.com/leading-edge-magenta/ Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:55:47 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/leading-edge-magenta/ The post Leading Edge: Magenta appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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In late October, Garmin introduced an emergency autoland system that will fly an airplane to a suitable airport taking into consideration enroute weather and obstacle clearance, extend gear and flaps on final, control throttle position to a safe landing and even an engine shutdown; all the while communicating with ATC, and I imagine at least one not-very-calm passenger who has pushed the red button. The debate over magenta lines and we children who follow them is a moot one. Whether or not you rely on automation, it is happening. VORs are quickly disappearing. GPS is decidedly the future-proof standard bearer for navigation. Magenta is our present and future. The debate must move from discussing “if” to “how?” How do we remain proficient in this era of automation? How best to use these new tools?

The argument (read: fear) is that more avionics capability allows the errant pilot more room to maneuver into dangerous territory—as opposed to reinforcing current personal minimums. The technology improves, and we push our luck. Or do we? In the latest Air Safety Institute Nall Report (with analysis of 2016 data), weather-related accidents were down 65 percent. I’m just going to say it: The magenta line is our friend.

Flying home from Greeley, Colorado, in my ground-up restored 1972 Bonanza, I leaned heavily on the brand-new Garmin panel in my airplane. This was my first flight in six months, and I was more than a little rusty. Aside from the GTN 750 navigator, the avionics were completely new to me: PFD/MFD, autopilot, radios. Didn’t seem to matter much. The genius of the Garmin units is they match to your ability level. I just needed the basics heading home from Greeley, because I was not instrument current and had no plan on flying in anything but VFR. I used the GFC 500 autopilot in nav mode, and it took me straight across the country while alerting me to traffic, weather and airspace. I was also breaking in a new motor, so I needed to focus heavily on the engine instruments. The Garmin 700 EIS illustrated everything clearly. Though the avionics are capable of far more than I was asking, those potential abilities are hidden. It’s not distracting to fly behind the Garmin panel. You’re not lost in a sea of buttons. It’s all just waiting behind the scenes for when you need more capability. This is more impressive than perhaps it sounds. This is the way technology should work for us—transparently.

As I approached Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Nebraska, I dived a bit deeper into the Garmin’s capabilities. I asked ATC if I could fly in the Class C airspace for the 30 minutes required to qualify for the ADS-B rebate. They approved the request, telling me to stay north and west of the airport. I created a custom hold using the GTN 750, inputting the length of the legs and the area in which to fly. The autopilot took the navigator’s commands and flew a perfect racetrack course over and over until I secured my $500.

I was heading toward the smaller Burke Lakefront Airport on the coast of Lake Erie; I made it as far as Cleveland that first day. Burke is only 10 miles from Cleveland International and sits smack under the Class B shelf. About 15 miles out, the push-to-talk switch stuck open, making communication impossible. I was heading toward very busy airspace in the dark and could not talk to ATC. My heart rate went up a little, but I was prepared. I grabbed for my handheld radio. Batteries worked, but—in my never-ending quest for declutter—I had tossed the adapter that would have allowed me to connect my headset to the handheld. I had to remove my beautiful new Bose noise-canceling A20s, squawk 7600 for lost comms, and begin screaming into the handheld with the volume turned all the way up.

Fun.

Always use flight following. Always. Because I was getting VFR advisories, ATC knew where I was going and what I was doing. I found out later they could hear me perfectly fine over the handheld. I just couldn’t hear them. Over the noise of the engine and wind, I couldn’t make out anything beyond a few broken phrases and words. Importantly, I heard, “Cleared into the Bravo”—my permission to fly into Class B, with ATC watching over me. Next, I made out the words “light gun” from an otherwise incomprehensible sentence. From my private pilot studies, I remembered what red meant, but I drew a complete blank at solid green versus flashing green.

I descended into the Class B with the water on my left and the Cleveland skyline just off to my right. It was beautiful. I was about 2,500 ft agl over the field when I saw a solid-green light from the tower. With permission to land, I just needed to turn downwind and make one lap of the traffic pattern then descend to the runway.

Turning left out over the black water, I lost the horizon. Instantly. No boats, no stars, nothing. I felt a slight sense of vertigo and diverted my eyes to the panel. With the press of a single button, I converted the 10.6-inch screen of my Garmin TXi from a PFD/MFD combo into one large artificial horizon. I got my bearings back and entered a standard-rate turn until the city lights, and the accompanying horizon we live by, came back into view.

VFR isn’t always VFR. A conventional gyro would have given me the same information as the 500 TXi. But the brightness and resolution of the TXi’s screen—and most important, its size—allowed me to transition to instruments quickly.

I landed and shut down the motor and avionics master. I sat in the quiet for a moment. I was surprised at how tense I had felt through the experience. Not being able to talk to the tower was stressful. Accidents can occur from something as simple as a door opening in flight. This experience hammered home the age-old adage: Fly. The. Plane.

Read More from Ben Younger: Leading Edge

That night, the advanced avionics helped me. Not the automation—I was hand-flying—but the screen’s size, clarity and presentation allowed me to acquire a high level of situational awareness in a fraction of a second. The magenta line itself is only half the story. Much benefit can be found from these systems even when hand-flying. Other features my Garmin panel has, such as push-to-command, allow the user to tune into the destination ATIS or even the closest airport tower or controller using only your voice. Any technology that allows your hands to remain on the yoke and not press buttons is valuable. This is not automation that’s going to get you into trouble. Only out of it.

My friend Doug told me to fly into Burke because you can walk to downtown from the airport. He also said there are tons of hotels. While that may be true, when I arrived, not a single one of them had a vacancy because of preseason Browns football and some induction ceremony at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

A lineman from the Signature FBO, Michael Cunningham, got on the phone for a good 15 minutes calling every hotel in the area until he found me a room in Kent State. Yes, it was a 41-mile drive, but it was better than sleeping on the floor in the pilot’s lounge, and he loaned me a new crew car for the 80-mile round trip. There’s been some bad press as of late about the “chain FBOs.” Michael’s hospitality goes to show that the only user interface that matters when dealing with a faceless corporation is the person you’re standing in front of.

Exhausted, I followed another magenta line to my hotel in Kent State. I ended up at a gyro takeout joint at 2:30 a.m., listening to a band called the Full Flavor wrap up their set with a Woodstock-worthy performance for the 20 people left in the place. Every unplanned stop in GA can bring you somewhere you would have never otherwise seen. Follow the magenta line but be willing to hop off it when something catches your eye. It’s a big country.

Ben Younger belongs to the Garmin Ambassador program; this disclosure has not been included in his previous columns.


This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post Leading Edge: Magenta appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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The Lingering Mystery of ‘Undetermined Reasons’ https://www.flyingmag.com/aftermath-undetermined-reasons/ Tue, 18 Feb 2020 18:02:50 +0000 http://137.184.62.55/~flyingma/aftermath-undetermined-reasons/ When an accident’s cause is not easily found.

The post The Lingering Mystery of ‘Undetermined Reasons’ appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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When the National Transportation Safety Board announces the probable cause of an accident, it often makes use of certain stock phrases. One of the most common is: “loss of control for undetermined reasons.”

Unlike “controlled flight into terrain,” which can often be traced to an incorrectly selected radio frequency or a sectional chart left behind, loss of control for undetermined reasons remains mysterious. These are not the loss-of-control accidents that result from icing encounters or from a non-instrument-rated pilot flying into IMC; in those cases, reasons can at least be plausibly guessed. Undetermined reasons really are undetermined.

In October 2007, a VariEze crashed shortly after taking off from a Virginia airport. Witnesses saw the airplane roll down the runway and lift off, then turn crosswind and downwind; the pilot announced each step on the unicom frequency. Then came a panicked cry for help. Flying erratically, the airplane turned at low altitude, caught a wing and cartwheeled across a divided highway, disintegrating and scattering a shower of debris that collided with the moving car of one witness. The 580-hour private pilot, 44 years old, died instantly in the crash.

Designed in the mid-1970s, the VariEze is a plans-built, two-seat, swept-wing airplane of canard configuration and glass-fiber and epoxy construction. While it is a fast and efficient cruiser, it is most notable for its benign low-speed handling characteristics and immunity to stalling. It and its larger successor, the Long-EZ, were, for a long time, among the most popular amateur-built designs; thousands were built.

The pilot had bought the airplane from its builder 16 months before the accident and flown 70 hours in it since. His companion told investigators the purpose of the accident flight was to test the airbrake, which he had tried only once before—during the first hour he owned the airplane. On that occasion, she reported, it “really scared him.”

This comment had the effect of making the airbrake a central focus of the accident investigation.

The airbrake is a more or less square panel located amidships under the fuselage and hinged to swing downward. It is actuated by a lever behind the throttle on the left armrest, and is used during approaches and landings to make the glide steeper and ground roll shorter. Because it does not disturb flow over the wings or canard, it does not affect stability or handling qualities. Maximum speed for deployment is 90 kias; at a higher speed, the brake retracts automatically. The VariEze will climb even with the airbrake deployed.

Following up on the friend’s remark about the airbrake, the NTSB investigator in charge queried the builder of the accident airplane, who had flown it almost 1,500 hours, and Burt Rutan, who designed it. Both—as well as Mike Melvill, who had been responsible for customer support at the by-then-defunct Rutan Aircraft Factory—advised him they did not see how the airbrake could possibly have been responsible for a loss of control.

However, Melvill recounted how, the first time he inadvertently exceeded 90 kias with the airbrake out, the actuating handle “smacked” his wrist as the brake retracted itself. He wondered whether the same thing could have happened to the accident pilot; it “might have scared/surprised him.”

I think the airbrake was a red herring from the start. If the pilot had previously found something frightening about the airbrake—perhaps the mild rumbling buffet it caused or a sudden unexpected retraction—it’s not likely he would have deployed it at the very start of his flight, at low altitude and in the traffic pattern.

In his statement to the NTSB, Burt Rutan suggested that, because the airbrake could hardly have been responsible for a loss of control, the investigator might want to look at other possible causes, such as distraction or a “control disconnect.”

In the aftermath of any accident, investigators routinely examine the components of the flight control system. In this case, continuity was reported to have been established “from the cockpit area out to the cable breaks and from the breaks to their respective control surfaces.” Most airplanes use cables for all flight controls, but the only cables in the VariEze’s control system are those actuating the airbrake and rudders; ailerons and elevators are controlled by pushrods or torque tubes, of which no mention is made in either the NTSB’s final report or the report from the materials laboratory to which the cables and airbrake mechanism had been sent for analysis.

One of the ingenuities of the VariEze design is the extreme simplicity of its flight controls. Particularly, the pitch control system, in contrast to the long and often-circuitous linkage between the cockpit and the empennage in a conventional airplane, consists of a single short link from the sidestick to the elevators, which are on the canard surface within arm’s reach of the pilot. Mention of this linkage or the aileron system—which uses torque tubes, not cables—appears in neither the final report nor the supporting docket, and it is unclear whether they were recovered and, if so, whether the investigator knew what to make of them.

The maintenance of homebuilt airplanes is subject to special rules. The builder receives a repairman’s license for the airplane. If the airplane is sold, that license remains with the builder, and the new owner must either get the builder to perform the required annual inspections or take the airplane to a regular A&P. (Most maintenance on certified engines must be performed by an A&P.)

When the pilot bought the VariEze in June 2006, the builder/seller helped him dismantle, inspect and reassemble the airplane. The builder then made a 30-minute acceptance flight and found everything to be in order. A year later, when the next annual condition inspection came due, the pilot asked the builder to help again, but because of time constraints, he could not. Although the docket mentions that an inspection took place in June 2007, four months before the accident, it does not say who performed it.

The radioed call for help reported by two witnesses suggests, to me at least, the instinctive exclamation of a pilot suddenly confronted with some awful surprise he has no way to cope with. He certainly did not really expect someone to come up and help him. It wasn’t an engine problem; the engine was developing power, as investigators could infer from the way the wooden propeller blades had shattered. As I said, I think it unlikely he would have tried the airbrake almost immediately after takeoff. I think the fact that the airplane descended and the pilot failed to arrest the descent hints at a loss of pitch control.

It is conceivable, for instance, that a nut on some link in the control system was removed at some point and not properly safetied on reassembly and the associated bolt eventually worked its way out. The stick would have suddenly gone slack in the pilot’s hand—the sort of thing that could bring a panicked exclamation out of anyone. It’s not probable, but the very nature of the accident suggests that whatever caused it was something improbable.

There is no material evidence to support this hypothesis nor, for that matter, is there material evidence for the airbrake’s being a factor. If any clue existed, it was probably destroyed in the catastrophic disintegration of the airplane or disappeared in the subsequent cleanup. Like many loss-of-control accidents, this one remains a mystery, its reasons…undetermined.

This story appeared in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of Flying Magazine

The post The Lingering Mystery of ‘Undetermined Reasons’ appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

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