Ask a Flight Instructor

Archive for March, 2008

I have just returned from a successful (we made it back) international trip. On the drive home I was thinking about how many individuals and people had to come together to make the flight happen the way that it did. These are people who were directly involved in the trip. I was also thinking how it becomes the pilot’s job to coordinate all these people and their jobs in a timely manner just as a project manager would do when managing the building of a large skyscraper or any large manufacturing project.

A pilot acts the job of a project manager by coordinating the actions and services of many different businesses and people to make the flights and trip a success. And just as a traditional project manager is concerned with budget and time constraints so is the pilot concerned with the financial impact of his decisions and the specific timing of these events along the course of a trip.

Here is a list of job positions with the number of people in parenthesis at that position. These are people that could be directly or indirectly involved in a four-leg corporate international trip that a pilot has to either directly coordinate or delegate that coordination to someone else:

• Line Service Personnel (15+)
  • Fuelers (4)
  • Other Line Service (11 – papers, coffee, ice, parking, ramp escort, baggage assistance, etc.)
• Counter Personnel at the FBO (4-5)
• Maintenance Personnel (1)
• Meal Catering (4)
  • Cooks (2)
  • Catering Delivery Drivers (2)
• International Flight and Contract Fuel Planners – (3)
• International and U.S. Custom Agents (6)
• International Handlers (3)
• Hotel Shuttle Drivers (2)
• Rental Car Personnel (2)
• Hotel Receptionists (3)

That makes for a total of nearly 50 people who were directly involved with either the aircraft, passengers or crew for a typically trip! You could make the list a lot longer when you start talking about supervisors, managers and other support personnel within those organizations. Nevermind the ATC personnel who coordinate the filing and release of the flight plans and of course, enroute aircraft separation.

If you start thinking that a typical corporate pilot may have 4 or 5 trips like that a month you could see how a pilot could easily be dealing with 200+ people. These are people the pilot has to coordinate with to make every trip occur efficiently and safely. If you have a department manager who has that many employees he is responsible for, he is probably pretty high up on the food chain at his organization.

One of the things that strike me as essential for this to happen is communication. There are no organizational communication classes taught at a flight school, but maybe their should be. Communication is essentially the passage of information between individuals. That definition sounds easy enough but as that transmission begins to contain a lot of details you can see how it can become easily garbled, even if everyone is using the same language. If you add in the fact, that on a international trip many of those individuals speak a different language with different standards (liters vs gallons), you can see just how important communication can become.

Fly and Communicate Safely.

As reported in this month’s Flying Magazine, the National Weather Association (NWA) is offering a free online weather theory course.   It is designed to help general aviation pilots understand how weather theory affects flying.
When you go to their website (see links below) you will find they currently offer two “modules”  An introduction module and an aircraft performance module.  To begin you download each module to your computer.  You are actually downloading a zip file which contains an executable file that will launch a  Macromedia Shockwave presentation.  Each download is roughly 22 megabytes.  The introduction module goes over:

• Moisture
• Vertical Motion
• Stability

The aircraft performance module goes over…well, how weather affect aircraft performance.

I found both tutorials and courses to be extremely informative and highly educational.   The aircraft performance is very through and goes through many different aircraft performance scenarios and how weather would affect that situation.    I also learned from their website that they are planning on releasing two more courses Aviation Weather Forecasts and Application of Weather Theory.  I look forward to both additional courses.

My only complaints about this course would be that it is advertised as online and really you download the course which makes a “offline” course and also the menu and navigation were a little bit clumsy.  Once you start a section, you can’t stop it.   I actually had to use CTL-ALT-DEL and the task manager to end it when I had to stop it mid course.

You can check it out and review it for yourself at http://www.nwas.org/committees/aviation/WeatherTheory/

Enjoy.  I look forward to hearing your comments about the course.

I don’t know about you, but I have ALWAYS wanted to fly a DC3. When I meet anyone who has a DC3 type rating, instantly they are an aviation god to me. That is probably the one airplane I haven’t had the chance to fly that I really want to. Maybe because of what it represents to aviation and what a crucial part it played in American history during and after the war.

That is why I was so excited to read my AVwebBiz email this week when they announced that one lucky pilot will get the chance to do just that this year at Sun n’ Fun in Lakeland, Florida on April 8. This opportunity is being graciously provided by Herpa Wings, AVweb and Dan Gryder, the owner of the beautiful bird, N143D.

To enter this sweepstakes, all you have to do is email Avweb an email / short essay (200 or less words) with the subject “Why I Want To Fly The Herpa Wings DC-3.” The email address to send your essay to is fly-the-dc3@avweb.com. All entries have to be in by April 1, 2008.

There are a couple of requirements on this. One is you have to have a pilot’s license and medical. Second, you also have to be present to fly the thing (duh!) at 7:00 AM at Lakeland Florida Airport on April 8, 2008 (during Sun n’ Fun).

Good luck! And just to get you excited I’ve included the video AVweb developed for the promotion of their staff flying the DC3. Maybe it will be good motivation for your writing:

I was “stumbling” tonight and found a great website that I thought you would enjoy. But first, maybe I should explain what I meant by “stumbling” before you call my AME.

Stumble Upon! is a website and application that allows you by simpling clicking a button “stumble upon” new websites. It is kind of like having a “random” button on the internet but with preferences. When you set up your profile you can say what kind of sites you enjoy and has you begin to stumble upon new sites and approve or disapprove them it creates a preference pattern of what kind of sites you like or dislike compared to what other users with your tastes liked as well.

Ok, so the site I stumbled upon tonight is “the oops list” which is basically a collection of links to photographs of “oops”. What I like about this “opps list” was of course, a lot of the pictures were aviation and aircraft related. This picture of an airliner that landed with it’s parking brake on is an example of the kind of photo you will find on “the oops list”.

You can learn more about Stumble Upon here and here is a link to my stumble profile.

Fly Safe (so you don’t end up with a photograph in the oops list!)

I recently had a privilege to fly a Beechcraft Baron, a multi-engine piston aircraft made by Beechcraft (Hawker). That flight came as a result of the corporate jet I usually fly being in for some routine maintenance. After the flight, a friend said to me, “What did you think?” (comparing the two very different types of airplanes) and as I struggled to answer him, I thought of an analogy that I think pretty accurately describes at least my feelings regarding the comparison.

The analogy I came up with was that of comparing digital music (CDs or MP3’s) to flying a jet aircraft and comparing vinyl records, or LPs, to flying a piston aircraft.

Most audiophiles will tell you that when it comes to richness and fullness of sound, nothing comes close to the fidelity of vinyl records. There is just a hidden quality with analog music that you can’t find with any digital music medium (especially when played through a good tube amp!). I kind of think the same about flying a piston aircraft, especially something like the Baron. Being able to feel the hum of the motor through the seats, seeing the analog gauges move directly in correlation with the engine controls and syncing the props perfectly by ear….I don’t know, there is something there that is missing when you fly a highly computerized jet aircraft.

Then again, how many people own LPs anymore right? (I do, but that is a different website entirely) Digital music is more reliable, more efficient, portable, modern and you can say similar things for a jet aircraft. Jet aircraft typically see the first wave of technology, cutting edge, efficiency…modern. There is something to be said for the reliability of the jet engine (the rest of the airplane…eh).

Which one is better? I can’t say. If I had to chose to fly around the world in a piston or jet, that choice would be easy (jet). I also wouldn’t take my turntable to the gym which I can with an iPod. But if could choose an airplane when flying my wife to lunch somewhere or taking my friend fishing, well, the choice would be easy.

I guess when it comes down to it…I’m just lucky to fly at all.

In whichever airplane you choose…Fly safe.

I was given the task recently of creating a map with aircraft range rings centered on my home airport. We were comparing two different types of aircraft and wanted to see visually what extra destinations would be available to us with another aircraft. I mentioned making the map briefly in my previous post about 85% Boeing Winds.

Now I have a secret. I just happen to run another forum and website about Global Mapper. Global Mapper is a very useful mapping program that allows you to do just a thing (plus a whole lot more). I posted this tutorial and video on the other site but was thinking to myself that some pilots here may want to be able to create a map like that as well. So I uploaded the video to Youtube and I am posting it for you here. It honestly took me less than 10 minutes to create this map, the program is that easy.

You can download a trial version of Global Mapper by clicking here. This trial version is fully functional (with some export limitation) but will allow to create a map like this.  The download is about 21 MB.

You can learn more about Global Mapper and download some of the files I used to create this map by visiting the Global Mapper Forum.  Just go to the download section.

Fly Safe.

This might be one of those things I’ll write about that everyone else is already aware of but did you know that you have to register your new 406 Mhz ELT with NOAA?  Apparently these new transmitters send out a lot more than just an anonymous distress code.  They also send out the serial number of the beacon, the manufacturer code of the beacon and the country code it was registered in.  That is why you have to register.  So they can assign that serial number with your emergency contact information in their database.

Here is a link to NOAA  forms to print and send in.

Here is a link to register your 406 Mhz ELT online

The avionics shop that I visited today (where I learned all this information) also had a poster on the wall that they were given from Artex – an ELT manufacturer.  I went to the Artex website this evening and found the poster.  Here is a screenshot:

The yellow area above corresponds to the search area (if your lucky) if you have a traditional two-frequency ELT.  The orange area is approximate search area with the new 406 Mhz ELT.  The black dot represents the search area if you also have a GPS or NAV link to your ELT.  With that added feature, the 406 Mhz ELT is then able to transmit your latitude and longitude! That’s amazing.

Fly Safe (but if you can’t get a 406 Mhz ELT!)

So I’ve been thinking about buying a new Boeing 767. You know, just something to get up to the lake and back.

When Boeing sent me my informational brochures this past week, I decided to take a look at the range charts. Just to make sure it will make it to the lake (did I mention it was Lake Lucerne?) And like a good pilot should, I read the fine print on the range chart to make sure I understood the specific conditions those performance numbers were generated with. I read an interesting note, “85% Boeing Annual Winds” hmmm…..

So what is 85% Boeing Annual Winds?

I did some research, made some phone calls and ended up talking to a guy at Boeing Flight Operations named Jeff. Jeff was gracious enough to send me some information on Boeing PC WindTemp. Turns out that Boeing keeps some pretty good records of winds. In fact, they have complied 30+ years of wind information for well, basically the entire world. That information is available via a software interface they call PC WindTemp. This information can be really important say, if you are an airline or an airplane manufacturer and wanting to very accurately determine range and aircraft performance between two given locations.

So 85% Boeing Annual Winds means that those performance numbers were generated with wind information that is that has an 85% probability of being present on any given day. In other words, there is a 15% chance that the winds when you go flying could be higher or lower than the winds calculated for those charts. Make sense?

I was really interested in the information for creating some range rings comparing two different types of aircraft. Boeing PC WindTemp is a commercial program, so it has a commercial price but it might be of great benefit to your operation.

Fly Safe

This past week I spent a lot of time on Airnav.com. It is THE online aviation database. I use this site, well, A LOT. How do I use it?

• If you want to quickly find some airport information (like latitude and longitude).
• If you quickly want a list of the FBO’s on a field
• If you want a list of local hotels
• You want a quick glance at the airport diagram

So it is a pain if you are looking up a lot of airports because once you are on a airport page it is 2 more clicks to get to another airport page. There is no search engine built into the airport information page. I also use the internet browser Firefox (vs Internet Explorer). One of the reasons I like Firefox is because of the built in search engine window and the ability to add extra search engines. I was thinking to myself this week, “I should create an Airnav search engine extension for Firefox.” Too late! I found an extension this morning on Mozdev.com

Now all I have to do is go to the upper right of my Firefox window. Type in the name of my airport I’m looking for and the Airnav.com information appears in new tab. Awesome!

Here is a link to the plugin at Mozdev.org it says it was developed by a man name George Bean. Thanks George!

The weather is pretty bad here is Ohio this weekend. So time to get a good book and read. What better to read than an aviation book? Especially one that you can learn from. I was looking over my “flying” bookshelf and found this book. I read it a couple of months ago but thought I’d share it with you.

Every month when my issue of Flying Magazine comes in, usually the first section I read is “I Learned About Flying From That.” If you are not familiar with this feature, it is where readers contribute personal stories about incidents, accidents and other events while flying that left them with invaluable lessons and memorable impressions. Through their stories they share with readers their lessons learned in the hope that the incidents will not be replayed. This feature has been a part of Flying Magazine since 1939!

For me, it is a bittersweet experience. One part of me feels bad, knowing that these are true life stories with people’s lives that were endangered. Yet the other part of me is glad that these people lived through their experiences and that they were humble enough to share those lessons with me.

Flying Magazine has complied this stories in a book form. The publishers organized the stories in sections like “Weather Woes”, “Mechanical Jam” and “When All Gets Quiet.”

I really enjoyed the book and was able to get through it one weekend while waiting on some commercial flights. I recommend it, for what it’s worth. If you do decide to read it, share with us your favorite story as a reply to this thread in the forum. You can purchase this book from Amazon and your local booksellers.

Fly Safe.