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September 2010 
Is That Too Much Airplane For You?Years ago in a sleepy college aircraft economics class, we learned the pecking order of items to consider when acquiring an aircraft. The short list included the usual items of damage history, engine time, avionics, operating costs and a variety of other factors making obvious sense. But one aspect of aircraft acquisition we weren’t taught is an issue that’s gained prominence in the current sales climate: the consequences of buying too much airplane. With used aircraft pricing at an all-time low, it’s easy to get sucked into a convincing fantasy that the airplane of your dreams is also one fitting your skills, operating budget and mission. Train To Mitigate Risk In the last decade, the general aviation fatal accident rate, which had been decreasing for some time, reached a plateau and has stubbornly resisted industry and FAA efforts to further reduce it. Hovering in the range of 1.20-1.38 fatal accidents per 100,000 flight hours, this safety record is widely considered a deterrent to general aviation growth and may be one of the reasons student starts have continued to decrease. As a community, we may have oversold the benefits of a new generation of technically advanced aircraft (TAA) to an emerging latent market of individuals who are not traditional enthusiasts and who wish to use these aircraft for safe transportation. NPAs: Stable Or Not? Over the past few years the FAA has added new non-precision instrument approaches at a remarkable rate—thousands of procedures with names like LNAV and VNAV, and ILS-comparable LPV approaches—2208 LPV approaches alone. The common denominator among these relative newcomers to an instrument pilot’s nomenclature is their dependence on the wonders of GPS, in particular, Wide Area Augmentation System-based (WAAS) GPS. The primary benefit of a WAAS-enhanced approach is availability of a pseudo glideslope generated by the in-cockpit GPS navigator, bringing ILS-like vertical guidance where there’s no ILS. From Denial To Final, II There you are, droning along in cruise. Suddenly, there’s a vibration, then a power surge, then combustion ends...and you’re flying a glider. For a moment you hesitate—no one is immune from at least a split-second of indecision, most of us much longer—and then you realize you have an engine failure. You maintain control, point the aircraft in the direction of a place to land, then confirm the failure. If you have time and altitude you can try to restart the engine, but if the failure is catastrophic you’ll quickly find there’s nothing you can do to fix the engine from the pilot’s seat. You are committed to a glide and a power-off landing. Going Soft My first time landing on something other than pavement was with an instructor in a Piper Arrow. I had yet to earn my private certificate, and we were out doing a combination of familiarizing me with a complex/high-performance airplane and transporting some items for the FBO. The most memorable occasion also involved an instructor: We were returning from a spin-training session to a grass strip just soaked by a passing shower. He landed long, locked the 152’s brakes in standing water and we sluiced our way to within 30 feet of the fence at the far end. More than anything, that was a demonstration of how not to do it. Open-Door Policy The Cessna 150 I first soloed had a time-between-window-openings of about three hours. My instructor and I had suffered the event a couple of times on my way to soloing at—as luck would have it—about nine hours. Sure enough, as I lifted off the runway on my second touch-and-go, the window on the "far" side of the 150’s "cabin" decided it was time I had some fresh air and noise. As if I needed another challenge. What I really needed was three hands: one for the yoke, one for the throttle and one to grab the window latch. Not capable of all three tasks, I climbed away from the runway to what I considered a safe altitude, loosened my death grip on the throttle, reached over, closed the window and latched it. After an otherwise uneventful circuit, I landed to pick up my instructor, who was still laughing. For all I know, he still is. | |
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