Podcast – Jetwhine

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to The Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.

At the risk of droning on about a topic my pals David and Max at the UAV Digest show are getting tired of hearing, I just think it’s time to come clean. I really do think drones, UASs, or RPVs or whatever you want to call them, are really pretty incredible technology. And like David and Max, I think their future is set in stone … even here in the United States.

There is just one teensy little piece of the conversation that drone builders and operators seem to be avoiding in the constant push to let the drones fly. How do we safely separate remotely-operated drones from people-carrying airplanes?

We expect a new rule on commercial drones from the FAA by year’s end. But my guess is that will only cover the barest minimums like operations below 400 feet and within line of sight of the operator. Those kinds of model-airplane like guidelines might work too if drones keep well clear of airports.

But what about the rest of the million or so drones sold around the world in the past few years, the ones that seem to be flying closer and closer to airplanes and airports?

I met a helicopter pilot from Alaska earlier this year who told me he’d had more than a couple of close calls with drones on the North Slope. Who was operating them, no one knew. He just knew they were too darned close for comfort.

In Australia last week, firefighters operating both aircraft and helicopters said they’d had so many near collisions that they’re planning on pulling out of a fire scene if there’s even the mention of a nearby drone.

The real missing link in this drone puzzle is that practical technology to sense-and-avoid other traffic, the roll normally played by pilots looking out the cockpit windows, doesn’t exist. Sense-and-avoid technology is a must-have too if drones and manned airplanes are ever going to operate in the same airspace safely because ATC radar doesn’t seem to see drones at all. Luckily, there haven’t been any drone / aircraft mid air collisions … yet

So to all you drone builders and operators out there, I’m really with you on these things. We pilots and air safety geeks don’t want to shut you out … honest.

Without a universal miracle tool packed inside each and every drone however, one that protects the flying public from drone drivers operating somewhere safe with a joystick and a laptop, expect pushback against drones – plenty of it too. Right now the push is only coming from a few pilots and industry organizations. But when passengers realize the real threat they’re facing, the conversation will become much, much louder.

Dear Reader / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.

Time to Give ATC an “Atta Boy”

Most aviation stories only seem to find their way on to the desks of those of us who devour industry news or consider themselves true aviation geeks, except when it’s about an accident, especially one involving an airliner. Those stories can remain in the public eye for weeks or even months.

In late September though, a local Chicagoland story made it to the front pages … and it had absolutely nothing to do with an accident. September 26th was the day a deranged Harris Corp employee – a guy I won’t dignify by mentioning his name – contracted to work for the FAA at Chicago’s massive enroute ATC center in Aurora Illinois reported for work in the early morning hours and went right to his mischief. Shortly after reporting for work about 5 am, he ignited a fire that demanded the building be evacuated. Unfortunately, in addition to lots of center radio frequencies going dead, the fire also destroyed much of the enroute ATC system radar and radio infrastructure. That meant hundreds of airplanes and thousands of people sat on the ground around the nation eventually while the FAA tried to figure out what to do next.

Surprising to many people, me included actually, the FAA brought center traffic back at ZAU, the center’s identifier … slowly at first by sending hundreds of controllers to nearby terminal radar facilities like O’Hare, Rockford, South Bend, Milwaukee and dozens of others. They also sent another few hundred people to adjoining centers like Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland and Indianapolis where traffic was kept moving … slowly.

No doubt the cost to the airlines for the delays and cancellations was massive as was the inconveniencing of hundreds of thousands of airline and business aviation passengers. But it all worked … and it all worked safely.

I think it’s time to recognize the men and women of the FAA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association and the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists and everyone else who worked around the clock to restore ATC service in a mere two weeks.

To all of the FAA controllers and PASS technicians and yes, probably even a few managers who probably haven’t heard it yet, thank you. Thank you for getting air traffic moving again in Chicago and around the country. And thank you for working without a safety net or even a plan for the most part.

If you find yourself flying through Chicago Center’s airspace one of these days, or those adjoining centers that lent a hand to make this work too, be sure and say “Nice job fixing that ZAU mess guys. We appreciate what you did.”

I’m Rob Mark. See you next time.

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well.

I wouldn’t be much of an aviation writer if I didn’t read. And I don’t think you can be much of an aviation enthusiast if you don’t read either, so I do my part by strumming through a bunch of aviation magazines, online pubs and a couple of newspapers each week to stay in touch with the industry. Here are some of the folks I read, no matter what they write. You’ll also find most of them on Twitter.

I’ve known most of them for years so trust me, if you have the opportunity to say hi at a show when you see them, don’t be shy. They all like to schmooze about the industry no matter where you come from … except maybe for helicopters. I’m not sure they count since we all really know those things fly using wires and magic anyway.

author with Dan Webb (C) & Jon Ostrower (R) at MDW

Jon Ostrower – The Wall Street Journal – I first learned about Jon when he started writing his 787 blog. Right from the start I realized he had a flare for digging deep for the inside details on every single issue relevant to the extra years it took Boeing to kick that new bird of theirs out the door. He spent a few years at Flight Global before heading out the door to DC to work for the WSJ. There’s even a pic around the net somewhere of Jon at his first AirVenture sporting a Jetwhine button. I have to find that one. @jonostrower

Molly McMillian – The Wichita Eagle – Molly’s one of the few working journalists who still covers aviation for a general readership newspaper, The Wichita Eagle. Really nice, smart lady. Find her on Twitter @mmcmillin   

Matt Thurber – Aviation International News & Business Jet Traveler – Matt’s a versatile writer, pilot and even an A&P technician so he’s the guy I go to with nuts and bolts questions when I get stuck. And the guy writes 24 hours a day I think since his byline is everywhere.

Tom Haines – AOPA Pilot’s – Tom’s the soft spoken editor of AOPA Pilot magazine and the guy who gets to file some of the coolest pilot reports around, so I’m extremely envious. Despite the fact that he flies a Bonanza rather than a Cirrus, I still respect him a bunch. He also hosts AOPA Live, every week, another cool job. @tomhaines29

Flying’s Pia Bergquist

Pia Bergqvist – Flying – I remember back in the old days when Pia worked in PR at Cessna. She gave me my first demo ride in a Cessna Corvalis before she moved on to Flying magazine. She loves the Cirrus like I do and there is no truth to the rumor that I only admire her because she’s Swedish. I’m half on my dad’s side. @piapilot

John Croft – Aviation Week – John’s Av Week’s safety geek so we see eye to eye on many things in this industry, although AvWeek gives him way more space each week to write than I do at AINSafety … not that I’m complaining Charlie, just comparing. We actually met up at a safety conference in DC some years back when he introduced himself only by his Twitter handle, @avweekjc

Mike Collins – AOPA Pilot’s Technical Editor – Mike earned my undying admiration when he came to Chicago a few years ago to shoot the photos for an AOPA Pilot story I wrote about flying the L-39 at Gauntlet Warbirds at KARR. We flew in January and Mike spent half a morning hanging out of the back of a T-6 shooting the photos. The way he was dressed, he looked like a big bear at the back end of that airplane. He also climbed on board an MU-2 for a quick ride around the world earlier this year. What a guy.

Bill Garvey – Business and Commercial Aviation – Bill Garvey gave me one of my early chances to write a story when he was still editor at Professional Pilot magazine, a place nearly everyone I know in the biz has hung their hat at one time or another. Good people Bill … and he gets the helicopter thing because his son’s a Coast Guard chopper driver.

Terry Maxon – Dallas Morning News – Terry’s the only other reporter I know for a major newspaper – The Dallas Morning News – who thinks and talks aviation. He was also one of the first newspaper guys to add “Jetwhine” to his blog roll eight years ago when we started. @tmaxon

Mary Kirby with author at NBAA

Mary Kirby – Runway Girl Network – The first time I heard Mary’s name was at an Aerospace Industries Association luncheon in DC a bunch of years back. She asked a question of AIA president Marion Blakey … one of those truly awkward questions … one that every other guy in the room really wanted to ask but didn’t. She stood up and I was instantly impressed. She’s the GIC (goddess in charge) at The Runway Girl Network now. OK, so she’s a little taller than me, so what? @runwaygirl

Steve Trimble – Flight Global’s Americas Editor – Now about Steve. I know the guy writes for Flight Global, but he also travels more than any other writer I know. We chatted for a couple of minutes this year just before he left AirVenture about the fact that he had to scoot back east and then down to Brazil for LABACE and then I forgot where. I’d get airsick if I had to travel on as many airliners as he does. @fg_strim

Tom Horne – AOPA Pilot – Tom and I had the good fortune to connect at Bradley CT a bunch of years back when we were both assigned to write pilot reports for different magazines on the Challenger 605. Besides being a great writer, Tom has probably forgotten more about how weather actually works here on earth than I ever knew. @tomhorne

Andy Pastor – The Wall Street Journal – Andy is one of the few writers here I haven’t actually met, but still read religiously. Perhaps that’s because every time there seems to be a breaking aviation story, he’s the one doing the breaking at the Journal.

Auntie Benet

And what would a story like this be without Auntie Benet, aka the Aviation Queen. Boy do we go back a ways … Regional Airline News was our first connection I think and I can’t even remember that far back. Now, of course, she’s with AOPA but still manages to join us on The Airplane Geeks often, like here last summer at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center at KIAD.

No mention of writers would be complete without a tip of the hat to someone who got me started 35 years ago … Gordon Baxter then of Flying magazine.

Gordon, or “Bax” as he liked to be called, wrote a column every month called “Bax Seat,” that ran for as long as I can remember. He also earned part of his living traveling the country giving talks about airplanes and how flying fit into his life down in Beaumont Texas. He came to the Stick and Rudder flying club at Waukegan Illinois a many years ago and I mustered up the courage to go say hi and tell him I wanted to be an aviation writer like him … something I’m still trying to achieve BTW. “So just sit down and write,” he suggested. And I did.

I still remember the weekend he stayed at our home before a local talk I helped organize at Chicago DuPage Airport (KDPA). “Do you mind if I take off my shoes and socks?” he asked my wife after he put down his suitcase. That was Bax. He died in 2005.

Enjoy them all. And don’t forget to tell me who else the rest of us should be reading.

Rob Mark, Publisher

Note to the World’s Best Readers / Listeners – You now have the option to listen to the Aviation Minute podcast or read the text below. If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, you can click here to listen as well. 

One obstacle to learning to fly these days is that so many of the GA training fleet is old … and many definitely look their age. It wasn’t that long ago that I cancelled a nighttime demo flight for a prospective student because I noticed that some of the old Cessna’s interior lights were inoperative. And early Cessnas didn’t offer much cockpit lighting to begin with to see the instruments.

Then I found a few bruises outside that had been covered with Duct-Tape and I just said no. A few years earlier, I’d tried to check out in an old Piper down in Florida that looked like it hadn’t been washed in 20 years. It flew OK, but after spending the money to fly it, I decided to pass on putting my family into it.

I’m not the only instructor nor renter that’s ever faced this situation either.

I was pretty excited last week to see a canary yellow Cessna 152 sitting outside of the south door of the AOPA building at AirVenture. The airplane was part of AOPA’s 152 reimagined project to encourage more people not only to learn to fly, but to also get back into the air at a relatively low cost. The airplane at Oshkosh had been rebuilt inside and out … new paint, new interior – even those cheapie plastic parts Cessna used were all new. The engine had been rebuilt and reset to zero time and the airplane had new Garmin avionics including a GPS installed.

This practically new Cessna 152 can be had for $99,000, or $89,000 for a Cessna 150. AOPA chose Aviat in Afton Wyoming to handle the refurbishment work and you can pick the color scheme when you order one.

Yeah but …

Now before you cough at the $99,000 figure, don’t forget that a Cessna 162 Skycatcher, a much less capable airplane, was selling for $150,000 brand new before Cessna cancelled production last year. The price of a brand new 172 can easily top $300,000.

What I think should make the reimagined 150 and 152 even more tantalizing to someone trying to build time with two or three other pilots, or a flight school after a rugged inexpensive airplane, is that it costs just a tad over 60 bucks an hour to operate … including the fuel. AOPA’s even willing to finance 70% of the purchase.

Of course, you could go out and find your own used 150 or 152 for much less than $99,000. You’d need to find a company to strip it all down bare for the inspection, replace all the interior bits, hang a new motor on it and add the fresh instruments and avionics. Could you do it for less than $99 grand? Probably. But I think that’s a lot of work, especially for someone new to aviation.

There will be plenty of experienced pilots out there ready to tell you about all the other airplanes you can find for less money, but if those airplanes were such a great deal, I’d have to ask why more people aren’t buying them. AOPA doesn’t make a dime on these airplanes either.

Think about this … if four wanna-be pilots came up $7500 each, they could build a lot of flight time for not a whole lot of money, especially in a time when the magic 1,500 hour ATP limit seems unreachable. Personally, I like this idea. But if you have a better one, let me know.

You’ll find more info about the 152 reimagined at AOPA.org where I’m sure you’re already a member.

That’s all for the Aviation Minute this time. Don’t forget to share your Aviation Minute link with a friend.

Rob Mark, Publisher

If you receive Jetwhine via e-mail, click here to listen to the program.

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I was working on a couple of a stories related to the Malaysian Airlines tragedy over the weekend when an idea popped into my head. The Nall Report AOPA publishes each year tells us the GA accident rate isn’t improving much these days, but thankfully is not getting any worse either.

I wondered if there were other parts of the industry we GA folk might be able to model to create a system that might actually reduce the number of GA accidents. The airlines and their FOQA program came to mind. That stands for Flight Operational Quality Assurance.

FOQA is all about capturing operation data and digging deeply to understand the stories that information tells us.

Before you go data privacy on me though, give this episode of The Aviation Minute a listen and tell me what you think.

Rob Mark, Publisher

AP photo of the MH17 site in eastern Ukraine

The trouble with an aircraft accident that happens on the other side of the world for we Americans, especially one that occurs in a battle zone, is understanding which source speaks the truth about what’s happening on the ground.

Right now the MH17 crash is one of those kind of accidents. The Ukrainians say the Russians and the separatists were behind shooting down the Boeing 777 while the Russians either point the finger at the Ukraine government or simply refuse to answer at all.

For us over here, reports vary from “people are wandering all over the MH17 accident site and have already given the black boxes to the Russians,” to the alternative I heard this morning, “the site is completely intact and nothing valuable has been removed.” So who do we believe? Our only official source in the U.S. is the White House press secretary of the State Department and they say the site’s been compromised.

While I do agree that the first 24-48 hours worth of accident information almost always seems to be tainted with rumor more than anything else, it does make it pretty tough to relate the story without a journalist or government source we can trust to tell us what they see on the ground.

That said, I thought you might find this Saturday evening interview from Fox News about the potential implications of the data recorders and evidence being removed from the MH17 site of interest. It runs about 5 minutes.

Rob Mark, Publisher

If you receive Jetwhine by e-mail, click here to listen in.

I had an opportunity to visit the normally closed-to-the-public NTSB Training Center near Leesburg Virginia a few weeks ago as a guest of director Paul Schuda assisted by Senior Air Safety Investigator Bill English.

To say my visit was eye opening would be quite an understatement. Schuda’s briefing detailed the thought processes behind the NTSB’s recent decision not to reopen the TWA 800 investigation. There was much more too, including a look see at the TWA 800 fuselage reconstruction.

The entire Friday afternoon event gave me pause to think about how I write about an aircraft accident, with the insight that perhaps too many of us our jumping to indict the pilots when there may be more to the probable cause to consider.

I hope you’ll give this episode a listen.

If you’re receiving this Jetwhine/ Aviation Minute post via e-mail, click here to listen to the program.

Rob Mark, Publisher

Fresh evidence has been uncovered in the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370 (MH370) according to The Telegraph of London. To date, there hasn’t been one single shred of physical evidence that proves any of the dozen or so theories about what happened aboard that airplane less than an hour after it departed Kuala Lampur in March. The mystery was never solved, just put on hold.

Then last Friday, a media note surfaced in Australia that said MH370 searchers were again altering the search area for the airplane to another part of the South Indian Ocean based on some undefined new analysis. Yesterday’s Telegraph story again pointed the possible finger of responsibility at the captain of the 777,  Zaharie Shah and his flight simulator.

Listen to the latest Aviation Minute to learn more about new evidence in the MH 370 mystery.

Rob Mark, Publisher

If you received this Jetwhine story via e-mail, click here to listen to the program.

First let’s talk a little reality … Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or drones as most of us refer to them are coming … and they’re coming soon. That’s not necessarily all bad though. Drones can operate in places that are not safe to send a manned aircraft, as well as on missions where the duration would surely exhaust a human. They also come in a range of sizes from just a few pounds to the mammoth Global Hawk weighing in at about 32,000 lbs. or slightly larger than the Hawker 800 biz jet I used to fly.

The FAA’s come under fire from drone manufacturers and potential users for not acting quickly enough to draft regulations allowing these pilot-less aircraft to blend into civilian airspace with the rest of the civilian aircraft. But there’s a safety problem with moving too fast that no one seems to have addressed.

Give this show a listen though and tell us what you think. BTW, for the most up-to-date coverage on drones here in the U.S., give a listen to the UAV Digest produced by my Airplane Geeks comrades Max Flight and David Vanderhoof.

Rob Mark, Publisher – If you’re receiving this Jetwhine post by e-mail, click here to listen … even from a smartphone. You can also subscribe to The Aviation Minute at iTunes.

Memorial Day here in the United States is one of the days we remember all the men and women who served and perished in armed conflicts around the world since our own Civil War in the mid-1800s.

The stories emerging about how poorly we treat these men and women once we’re through with them though is not pretty. There are some parallels between VA care for vets and our aviation industry. Tell us what you think.

Rob Mark, Publisher — If you’re receiving this Jetwhine post by e-mail, click here to listen … even from a smartphone. Subscribe to The Aviation Minute at iTunes.