10 THINGS “REAL PILOTS” DO

Acknowledgements: AIR FACTS (John Zimmerman)

(Ed. Note: I can't think of a better definition .........)

Have you ever met a “real pilot?” I sure haven’t – at least not the ones some aviation experts talk about. According to them, real pilots only fly taildraggers, real pilots don’t use GPS, real pilots don’t cancel flights, etc. Apparently, like many things in life, the new generation of pilots is a bunch of sissies.

But I have a different definition of a real pilot. It starts with someone who is smart enough to stay alive while flying, and it ends with someone who has fun doing it. So with apologies to those experts (you know who you are), here’s my list of 10 things real pilots do:

1.    Real pilots help a fellow aviator when in need. 

While the extent of a pilot fellowship can be debated (we’ve done it here at Air Facts), I do believe real pilots go out of their way to help a fellow aviator. Whether it’s helping to tie down an airplane in the rain or offering to share operating expenses, most pilots recognize that our group is a small one and needs all the support it can get.

2.    Real pilots don’t get into arguments on CTAF. 

Is there anything more pathetic than listening to a couple of arrogant pilots arguing about who cut the other guy off in the pattern? Real pilots know that such arguments only make flying more dangerous, so they avoid them. Even better, real pilots fly a standard traffic pattern if it’s busy.

3.    Real pilots are not afraid to cancel a flight. 

There is no purple heart in aviation, in spite of what some NTSB reports suggest. A real pilot feels no shame in cancelling a flight, whether it’s due to weather, mechanical issues or just not feeling up to it. Unless you’re in the military, no flight is worth dying over.

4.    Real pilots are also not afraid to push themselves. 

Just because real pilots are humble enough to cancel a flight does not mean they lack confidence. To keep improving, they have to deliberately but safely push their boundaries. That means taking on a 15 knot crosswind when the time is right, or opting for annual recurrent training instead of the minimum BFR.

5.    5. Real pilots embrace new technology, but never become slaves to it. 

There is no extra credit for completing a flight without a GPS. Sure, it’s a fun thing to do in a Cub on a beautiful day, and real pilots know how to fly without the latest gadgets, but only a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian would suggest that a KX170B is better than a GTN 750. Likewise, nobody is impressed if you don’t use the autopilot. Real pilots use all the tools at their disposal.

6.    Real pilots are polite to FBO staff. 

Some pilots step out of their flying machines as if they are John Wayne inspecting the crew of a World War II battleship. Real pilots know better. Line techs and FBO staff are partners, not employees, and just might bail out a needy pilot one day. Best not to burn that bridge.

7.     Real pilots fly the right airplane for their mission, skills and budget. 

One of my least favourite phrases in all of aviation is, “I only fly a Cessna 172.” Real pilots don’t care if they are flying a fancy new King Air or a well-loved Skyhawk. Both are excellent airplanes, depending on the mission, and both require real pilots to fly them. Likewise, the position of the third wheel does not determine the skill of a real pilot.

8.    Real pilots view ATC as a friend, not an enemy. 

Air Traffic Control, far from being the aerial police, is an invaluable resource for anyone willing to use it. Real pilots aren’t afraid to ask for a controller’s advice on weather or to request progressive taxi instructions at a big airport. Amateurs try to fake it; pros ask for help.

9.    Real pilots are humble. 

Mother Nature, gravity and Murphy’s Law are constantly working against a light airplane. Real pilots understand this, and appreciate the fine balance that’s required to complete a flight safely. That means they never overestimate their abilities or their airplane’s performance. It also means they are open to criticism, whether it’s from a flight instructor or from themselves during a post-flight debriefing.

10.Real pilots act like ambassadors for personal aviation–all the time. 

Just like a professional athlete or a politician, pilots are “always on,” at least in terms of representing personal aviation to others. Real pilots don’t brag about breaking the rules or tell dare devil stories at a cocktail party. Real pilots share the honest truth about flying: that it’s hard work and involves risk, but that it’s immensely rewarding and incredibly powerful.

FLY SAFE!

SUMMERTIME FLYING

Acknowledgements: AIR FACTS  (Richard Collins)

(Ed. Note: Taken from an article written by Dick in 2012)

“…… I am going to use two events to give you some items to ponder about summertime flying…..

Event 1: When I got up on the  morning of June 29^th, as usual I looked at the weather, including the radar. Even though there had been zero mention of thunderstorms or even rain the day before, there was a sizable cluster of storms moving by to our north. It was headed southeast and was going to miss us. The annual drought would continue. Little did I know what would come later in the day, but that is getting ahead of the story which, at this point is about nocturnal thunderstorms. I have read meteorological theories about what causes them until my eyes crossed and my brain shorted out.

Nocturnal storms are hard to predict, and occur when it is warm at the surface with a high dewpoint and a bit of cold air aloft wanders overhead and provides the instability required for the things to fire up. Night storms can be every bit as mean as daytime storms but they are pretty easy to see. I used to love to sleep on my grandparents’ sleeping porch in Arkansas when a nocturnal storm would light up. The show was great ……..

The first few times this happened, I had to fly east the next morning, and thought I would have to deal with the storms. That was no problem because they usually dissipated around sunrise. If there were going to be more storms during the day, they would start building by noon. You could look at the cumulus at noon, and if they were congested it suggested an active afternoon.

June 29^thwas a really hot and sticky day. I was aware of some thunderstorm activity out in Ohio but nothing suggested that the area from Ohio to the middle-Atlantic would be ripped apart by straight line winds from a line of strong thunderstorms that afternoon and evening. It was actually a fairly narrow line of storms and it passed through in 20 or 30 minutes, but hurricane-force winds don’t have to last long to do serious damage, (which on this occasion they certainly did!)

The storms we most often deal with in our airplanes in the Summer are air mass storms, but there are also fronts and low pressure systems that spawn storms. Mostly, we deal with individual storms or clusters of storms: 

·      En-route we deal with them by avoiding them like the plague. 

·      In terminal areas we deal with them by developing a good knowledge of the circulation in and around thunderstorms and avoiding bad places. Changing winds and downdrafts can take a terrible toll on aircraft performance.

I am going to use an airline event to illustrate this because this particular accident related to the two big hazards of summer flying: thunderstorms and density altitude.

Event 2: July 9, 1982. New Orleans. A typical summer day, hot and humid with scattered thunderstorms in the area but none reported as severe. As the crew taxied a heavily-loaded 727 for take-off they discussed, among other things, the heavy load, the fact that theybarely had balanced field length, the procedures to maximize take-off performance, possible fuel dumping in case of any power loss, and the fact that the wind was swirling around the airport as recorded and reported by the low level wind shear alert system.

There was a thunderstorm on the north-east corner of the airport, visible both to the eye and to the radar in the nose of the 727. The thing that made it more difficult to assess was the fact that it was moving toward the southwest. That is the opposite of what we usually deal with. This meant that the front of the storm was where we usually find the back of the storm.  The strongest winds out of a storm generally come out of the side toward which the storm is moving. Whether this crew had ever seen a westerly moving storm before was not addressed in the accident report. When they started to roll on runway 10 the last thing they heard about wind was that it was from 070 at 17 and that a heavy Boeing had reported a 10-knot wind shear on final to that runway.

The airplane climbed to about 100 feet where it encountered a 400 fpm downdraft and a decrease of 38 knots in the relative wind (shearing from a headwind to a tailwind) over a distance of about a half a mile. The microburst that caused all this was located just north of the runway and a little more than halfway down the runway. The airplane hit 50-foot trees first, near the tops, and then crashed in a residential area. 

There were lessons here. The margins were pretty thin on that take-off and everything combined to make what would usually be a manageable wind shear encounter unmanageable. 

The crew was aware before take-off of what was going on, and had thorough discussions about most of the factors influencing the take-off. They did not, however, openly discuss the possibility of a downdraft and the resulting wind shear. If they had been taking off toward a storm that was moving away from them, the sequence of events would have been different. But this storm was going the “wrong way.”

A thunderstorm is, by nature, unstable. That relates both to the atmosphere that creates and supports it, and to the capricious nature of the storm. They are constantly changing, literally from moment to moment, and where one flight might pass through with a bit of turbulence, one a minute later might encounter a severe wind shear.And while they almost always move in an Easterly direction (in the Northern Hemisphere), there are exceptions.

I have in my life only seen one Westerly moving storm, so they are rare. But it’s those rare things that will bite you if you don’t think them through. Have YOU ever seen a westerly moving storm in the Northern Hemisphere”.

(Ed. Note: Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but would YOU have made a decision to depart in those conditions, or would you have elected to wait for the storm to pass and lived to tell the tale?) 

FLY SAFE!

HOW NOT TO INFRINGE

Acknowledgements: UK CAA Airspace Infringements Working Group

(Ed. Note: Apologies for the repetition! The following tips, which were first included in the blog 18 months ago but are worth repeating now as airspace infringements remain a great concern, may have been issued for the benefit of pilots in the UK, but the principles are surely the same wherever you fly)

“Airspace infringements continue to be one of the UK’s main aviation safety risks. The UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), through its Airspace Infringements Working Group, is working with industry to tackle the issue. The Group’s “On Track Team” has issued a list of top ten tips to avoid an infringement: 

1. Navigation is a skill, and needs to be practised regularly, both planning a flight and conducting it. Safety Sense Leaflet 5 (available on the CAA website and in the LASORS publication) contains good advice on VFR navigation, but it only works if you read and apply it! 

2. If you plan a route through controlled airspace, remember that a crossing clearance may not always be possible and consider that route as your ‘secondary’ plan. Your primary plan should avoid controlled airspace - and don’t forget to make your overall time and fuel calculations using the longer, primary route! 

3. Where possible, avoid planning to fly close to controlled airspace boundaries. If you do need to do so, be very careful. A small navigational error or distraction of any sort can lead to an infringement – and it doesn’t take much to ruin your day! 

4. Pilot workload rises rapidly in less than ideal weather - and so do infringements. If the weather starts to deteriorate, consider your options early and if necessary divert or turn back in good time. 

5. If you wish to transit controlled airspace, think about what you need to ask for in advance and call the appropriate Air Traffic Control (ATC) unit at least 10 nautical miles or five minutes flying time from the airspace boundary. This gives the controller time to plan ahead. 

6. Thinking before you press the transmit switch and using the correct radio phraseology helps air traffic control to help you - and sounds more professional! 

7. Be aware that ATC may be busy when you call them – just because the frequency doesn’t sound busy doesn’t mean that the controller isn’t busy on another frequency or on landlines. 

8. Remember - the instruction ‘Standby’ means just that; it is not an ATC clearance and not even a precursor to a clearance. The controller is probably busy so continue to plan to fly around the airspace. Only fly across the airspace if the controller issues a crossing clearance. 

9. Your planned route through controlled airspace may appear simple on your chart but the traffic patterns within that airspace may make it unrealistic in practice. Be prepared for a crossing clearance that does not exactly match your planned route but will allow you to transit safely. 

10. Don’t be afraid to call ATC and use the transponder when lost or uncertain of your position - overcoming your embarrassment may prevent an infringement which may in turn prevent an Airprox (or worse)”. 

FLY SAFE!

THE GPS REVOLUTION – HOW AVIATION HAS CHANGED

Acknowledgements: AIR FACTS / John Zimmerman

(Ed. Note: Do you still miss the good old days? Read on, and like John count your blessings today, and look forward to what more’s yet to come … )

“2018 is a year of milestones for the Global Positioning System (GPS). The concept of navigating by satellite was first discussed in the early 1960s, but it was exactly 40 years ago that the Department of Defense launched the first fully-functional NAVSTAR satellites into orbit. 

It was Garmin who really changed the aviation industry though, with the introduction of the GNS 430 and 530 twenty years ago. Even jaded old veterans had to admit that a color moving map that always knew your position and groundspeed was pretty impressive, and it ushered in a new era of direct-to navigation and GPS approaches.

Decades after it first caught on, GPS is so deeply embedded in everyday life that we now take it for granted. Over two billion people carry around smartphones with GPS receivers inside, enabling everything from Uber to Instagram. As life-changing as these services have been, it’s hard to think of an industry more transformed than general aviation. Consider the long list of capabilities that even a 60-year old Light Sport Aircraft can now have thanks to 24 satellites.

Nobody gets lost anymore

At its most basic level, GPS does only one thing: it tells the user exactly where they are. That deceptively simple feature unlocks so much more when paired to a navigation database and a large screen, but even the basic “lat/long” location is a huge benefit for pilots. Before GPS, lots of brain power was required just to understand where the airplane was, especially when flying in clouds. Dead reckoning skills, VORs, NDBs, DME and radar were all used to answer the question, “where are we?” 

Even with all that technology, getting lost was a major concern. When I began my pilot training in the mid-1990s, we spent a lot of time discussing “lost procedures”, which included everything from circling water towers to asking for a DF steer.

Those conversations seem quaint now. Sure, you can lose situational awareness (usually due to lack of proficiency with avionics), but truly being lost for a long period of time is almost unthinkable. The panel-mount GPS will show you where you are and where you’re going. If not, the portable GPS will… or the tablet… or the phone. Maybe this has made our pilotage skills a little rusty; but it has alsoprevented countless accidents.

Navigation doesn’t just mean in flight, either. Geo-referenced taxy diagrams have become mainstream with the growth of the iPad, and have played at least some role in reducing serious runway incursions. 

Instrument approaches to small airports

Once a flight reaches the terminal area, the navigation challenge gets even more acute, at least when it’s IFR. Major airline airports have always been well served by ILS approaches that can guide an airplane down to 200 feet AGL, but smaller airports (where most general aviation pilots fly) had to make do with worse options – maybe nothing more than a circling VOR approach or an NDB approach.

GPS has fundamentally changed the distribution of power. Because WAAS GPS approaches depend on a single constellation of satellites instead of hundreds of locally-installed radios, a quiet country airport can have the same precision approach that a major towered airport does, complete with a glideslope down to 250 feet. The proof is in the numbers: today there are almost 4,000 WAAS approaches, over 1,000 at airports not served by an ILS. Score one for the little guy!

Terrain and obstacle alerts

Most pilots intuitively know that these navigation tasks are easier with GPS, but what’s less appreciated are the huge advancements in hazard alerting that have come about. 

Throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) was a leading cause of fatal accidents, with the American Airlines crash in Cali, Colombia a more recent example. That Boeing 757 had a basic Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS), but it only gave the pilots a 12-second warning before impact with a mountain. Modern Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems (EGPWS) use GPS to provide much more sophisticated alerts, and critically, they also provide a visual overview of terrain. They have been spectacularly successful, almost eliminating CFIT accidents in properly equipped airplanes.

The latest advancement has brought this technology to consumer devices. An iPad running “ForeFlight” or “Garmin Pilot” can provide not just terrain alerts but also obstacle warnings. Some avionics even show power lines, a critical feature for helicopter pilots and crop dusters. Without GPS these alerts would be either impossible or annoying to the point of uselessness.

Traffic and weather

GPS isn’t the essential technology behind traffic alerting; after all, radar kept airplanes separated for decades. What GPS has added is another level of precision and a lower cost of entry. Instead of spending $20,000 or more to install an active traffic system (or a full-blown TCAS), ADS-B traffic can be displayed on an iPad for well under $1,000. And instead of just showing position and altitude, ADS-B traffic can also show track and speed. This means pilots can make smarter deviations based on where a threatened airplane is going, not just where it is.

Datalink weather has been even more widely adopted than traffic alerts, with tens of thousands of pilots now flying with up-to-date radar imagesreceived via “SiriusXM” satellites or ADS-B ground stations. This is beginning to show up in the weather accident rate, which started declining around the time when ADS-B weather went mainstream. Again, GPS is not the main technology at work here, and yet it’s impossible to imagine modern datalink weather without it. A static radar picture in flight is nice; having your position and route as well makes it far more valuable. The big picture awareness is what makes strategic avoidance so easy. It’s not just radar, either. Imagine trying to avoid a temporary flight restriction (TFR) without GPS on board.

The future

Is the GPS revolution running out of steam? Not yet. The latest generation of GPS satellites, called Block III, are scheduled to launch in October, which should bring improvements in accuracy and availability. Beyond fundamental system upgrades, there are plenty of exciting projects in the works.

In aviation, the most visible advances will come from the world of ADS-B. This massive program will slowly transform how air traffic control works. By connecting a WAAS GPS to an upgraded transponder, ADS-B offers coverage in many places that radar could never reach, and usually with better accuracy. It’s even beginning to change airspace, as routing and frequencies are redesigned around GPS navigation instead of VORs.

An instrument approach that is only possible with GPS.

Pilots can also expect to see more WAAS approaches to remote airports, many of them in places where traditional navaids are simply impractical. The latest RNP approaches feature curving paths and multiple step-down fixes, designs that are only possible with very precise GPS receivers.

Another interesting idea is the creation of more data-driven safety programs that use GPS flight data recorders to analyze flights and identify potential safety issues. Such programs have made a difference in the airline industry, and inexpensive GPS receivers might make them practical for GA pilots too. Perhaps GPS could even begin to make a dent in the number of fuel exhaustion accidents, by showing real-time range graphics and more accurate time en-route numbers, although that may be wishful thinking.

As magical as GPS seems, it is obviously not perfect. Much of the behind-the-scenes work going on now is focused on protecting it from interference, either intentional or accidental. This is a small but growing problem, as it’s shockingly easy to spoof a GPS receiver. The more our world relies on GPS, the more critical this problem becomes.

Unfortunately, the bigger threat, as you might expect, comes from pilots. GPS is merely a tool, not a replacement for a competent pilot. Used wisely it can improve situational awareness and increase safety margins; used carelessly it can lead to disaster. Indeed, the key mistake made by the pilots in Cali was to mis-program their flight management system. This is a reminder that avionics proficiency is an essential skill in the modern cockpit, not a bonus.

Still, 40 years after the Department of Defense launched NAVSTAR and 20 years after Garmin launched an avionics boom, GPS deserves the prize for the most significant innovation in aviation history. One key reason it has had such an impact is its wide reach – unlike say, the jet engine, it has touched all parts of aviation. GPS has been a democratising force, both adding features and reducing cost for pilots all around the world. Here’s to 40 more years of saving lives”.

FLY SAFE!