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Is XM Wx Like a Parachute?

Ten years ago when Cirrus popularized the whole-airplane parachute recovery system on its SR20 single, there was a lot of controversy over whether such a chute was a good idea, with most of the strong opinion firmly in the "not a good idea" camp.

You didn't hear many complaints coming from the homebuilt side of aviation, as the Kitfox crowd had gotten used to flying with their BRS's and were generally convinced as a group that a chute made you safer and not less safe.

But many pilots who'd been flying certified airplanes for a long time felt differently. They felt emotionally that the chute was a "crutch." For the record, the term "crutch" is the same one I've heard over the decades to to describe autopilots, moving map GPS navigators and even nose wheels. So it doesn't hold any weight with me at all, other than to say the person who uses it is probably afraid of new things.

The most interesting argument I've heard against a whole-airplane chute is that it might inspire pilots to take more risks than they'd otherwise be comfortable with, thinking, the theory went, that if it didn't work out, they could simply pull the chute.

At least when it comes to me, the argument was and is right on the money. When I'm flying an airplane with a chute (my PlaneSmart SR22 G3 Turbo) I fly at night more often, I fly IFR over hostile terrain, and I will take off with slightly lower visibility than I otherwise might. Am I putting myself at more risk? That depends on how much you'd guess the chute might help if worse came to worse. It's probably less risk than in a non-chute-equipped airplane under the same conditions. It would be less risky, I'd agree, if I didn't fly at all.

And I got to thinking about XM Wx, another safety feature I've got in the Cirrus. Will I fly under conditions with it that I wouldn't without it? You bet your sweet bippy, I will. Because with it I can see pretty accurately where the thunderstorms are, so I can go where they ain't.

By my way of thinking, these safety devices don't expose me to more risk; they allow me to get more utility out of my airplane without increasing the risk. That's a pretty good testament to any new technology.

TSA Debacle: June 1st Deadline for Mandatory Badges Approaches

Despite stiff pressure from a number of aviation member organziations, the Transportation Security Adminstration has so far not backed down from a June 1st deadline for a rule that will require all unescorted personnel to have approved badges while being on the active areas of the ramp of an airport that has commercial air service or risk huge fines and possible additional legal action.

The directive is unclear, and despite its imminent release, the rule is little known by pilots, FBO operators or security personnel. Questions abound, and it's hard to find answers for them. Exactly who needs badges and where they need them is unclear, and it 's not clear where, if anywhere, a pilot might look to find out if he, for instance, needs an escort from his airplane to the terminal building of an unfamiliar airport that he lands at after hours.

As an example of just how little known the rule is, I called the desks at my local FBOs to find out how much, if anything, they knew about the new directive. The answer in both cases was, it was the first time they'd even heard about it. The front desk attendant at Atlantic Aviation in Austin, for example, assured me in a very poilte way that I must be wrong about the directive, because he surely would have heard about such a thing. He did give me a number to get a badge, if I wanted one.

When I spoke with a TSA official at the airport who did know about the directive, I was told that Atlantic's ramps were not controlled areas--though nothing in TSA's guidance would lead one to believe that--and that the tee-hangers at Signature, further down the field, were for some reason required-badge areas, though they're hundreds of yards further way from the airline terminal. And in case you were wondering, there are no markings or signs of any kind to indicate which areas are prohibited and which are not.

What the rule requires is equally unclear. Do pilots who fly in to an airport served by even one airline flight a day require a badge, FOR THAT SPECIFIC AIRPORT? The rule seems to suggest they do. This is, of course, an absurdity. I counted: last year I landed at 32 different airports that I think have airline service, and I might have missed a couple. How could a pilot be expected to get badges for every one of those airports--would a personal visit be required for the fingerprinting and background check application?

To add insult to injury, the TSA is instituting this rule by way of a security rule process, which seems little more than a way for the TSA to put forth the rule and not have to address what it knows will be a deluge of negative comments.

AOPA is directly appealing to the TSA to stop the madness and withdraw the rule. To see the text of Craig Fuller's letter to the agency, click here. (AOPA Letter)

And we agree. It's time to contact your elected officials and ask them to put pressure on the TSA to do the right thing here. The rule, in our opinion, would be confusing, unevenly implemented, randomly enforced, and completely unfunded. AND it would do no positive good toward improving security.

5 Lessons from the Buffalo Crash

More than any other crash in recent memory, the tragedy of Continental Connection Flight 3407, which went down on approach to Buffalo killing 49, made me think about how I fly my small airplane. How might the traps that snared the relatively inexperienced crew of that Colgan Air flight be waiting for GA drivers like you and me?

If you haven't read this elsewhere, it's come to the attention of the world that crew of the Q400 (Dash 8) that crashed was sleep challenged, relatively inexperienced and poorly paid. (This last part doesn't sound like a safety issue, but when you look at crew rest and travel factors, you can see that it is.) 

The NTSB transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder are absolutely chilling. If you haven't read through them yet, here is a link to the transcript (Buffalo Crash CVR Transcript) . Here, also, is a link to an animation of the last two minutes of the ill-fated flight. (Buffalo Crash Animation)  Be forewarned: its' not light reading or viewing. And while the NTSB hasn't issued a final report and its finding of probable cause, the transcript raised numerous questions that the final report will surely address.

How big a causal role did these five factors play in the crash of 3407? I have my ideas about it. But when it comes to examining our own flying, there's no question that there are risk factors exposed by the crash and the subsequent, ongoing, investigation that should give us pause and prompt us to take a minute to reflect on our flying.

5 Lessons

5. Training Did the crew of 3407 have sufficient training in their airplane? A Colgan Air official probably answered that indirectly when he was asked whether the crew should have been able to recover from the stick shaker incident: "Yes." was his one word response. But they didn't, and it has been reported widely that the pilot never had stick shaker training in an actual airplane or in the sim. What blind spots do you have for your airplane? Can you do the emergency gear extension procedure in your sleep? Do you know where the extinguisher is and can you get to and activate it without having to puzzle through the process? Do you know how far your airplane glides and how to get the best distance out of a glide in an engine out scenario? Can you fly on the backup gages in the soup? Bottom line: if you're like most pilots, you could probably know your airplane better and be more proficient in it.

4. Fatigue    I don't think I've heard anyone argue that the amount or quality of sleep that the Colgan Air pilots had was ideal, never mind adequate. I'd argue that it was insufficient. People who are sleep deprived can do all kinds of things--witness me making coffee in the morning. And flying an airplane is one of those things they can do when they're sleepy. I have a close friend who used to fly corporate in the 70s when rest rules were non-existent or unenforced, and the stories he's told me about schedules--post midnight arrivals with one set of bosses followed by pre-dawn departures with another set--make my hair stand on end. How would he deal with it? He and his co-pilot would swap naps. On more than one occasion they'd both be awakened by a radio call. And I know that I've flown when I've been too tired to be at my best, and I'm not proud of that fact. I did fine, but how would I have handled a complicated emergency? Probably not was well as I could have, and who knows, if that would have been good enough?

3. Preparation    Read the transcripts to see just how nonchalant the crew of 3407 appears. They chatted about their commutes, their experience levels, their career plans and their schedules. When it came time to do the approach briefing, they rushed through it as though it were an afterthought. Would something as simple as better advanced planning have prevented the accident? You could make a good argument that it would have.Dick Collins once told me that if on a long flight you think there's nothing to do in the cockpit, nothing to monitor, no information to gather, nothing to prepare for, you're just not paying close enough attention. Good advice.

2. Sterile Cockpit When I was based on the East Coast, I used to fly with friend and collegue Tom Benenson a lot. And I loved our chats while flying. But one day on departure from White Plains (KHPN), a couple hundred feet off the ground, we found ourselves talking about the imporance of a sterile cockpit. The irony was immediately apparent to us, and a good lesson. The crew of 3407 did not maintain a sterile cockpit below 10,000 feet, as the regs require. Would it have made a difference if they had? It's sure a possiblity.  The bottom line is, when you're close to the ground, you need to be paying attention.The sterile cockpit policy helps ensure that always happens.

1. Auto Pilot Stalls What was the cause of the crash of Flight 3407? It sure look as though it was the onset of an autopilot stall and a failed recovery from it. Many pilots, I'm certain, don't even know what an autopilot stall is, even those pilots who regularly fly with and use an autopilot. I had to figure it out myself. The first airplane with an autopilot I ever flew was a great little Grumman Tiger. The flying club owner checked me out in it himself. He showed me how to avoid PIO landing accidents in it, he put me through a series of accelerated stalls, and he put me under the hood, too. But he never said word one about how to use the autopilot, never mind about autopilot stalls.

I learned it myself one day when I was climbing out of Bridgeport, CT, (KBDR). I set the vertical speed at a good rate--I forget what it was--one that the airplane could hold down low. Problem was, I was going up to a higher altitude, and as I climbed, I got distracted, with a revised clearance and a new heading. By the time I got that copied down and deciphered, I got a funny feeling. I glanced up at the airspeed indicator, and I was slow, right around best angle of climb airspeed. Had I kept writing for another minute or so, I would have stalled. I saw what was happening, disconnected the autopilot, lowered the nose, and thought, "Hmm, that's a real trap. Wonder why nobody every taught me that?"

The problem is, unless you've got an advanced autopilot, one that knows the airspeed, it will keep flying the airplane for you just as you asked it to do. On approach, a similar thing can happen. You set an altitude, reduce power, and the autopilot will keep flying the airplane for you at the altitude you told it to maintain. If the power's low enough, the airplane will slow down. If there's a stick shaker, that will activate. If there's a pusher, it will push.

And if you're tired, under-trained, not focused and not ready, you're going to be in a tough spot.

By Robert Goyer

LSA Safety Redux

I'm working on a piece on Light Sport Aircraft Safety for Flying, and I just wanted to share a couple of the numbers I've been able to track down. In a previous post, I was taken to task for not having the figures to back up my contention that we needed to pay careful attention the safety of LSAs.

Here's just one of the numbers I found. The fleet size of S-LSAs, the manufactured type, is thought to be right around 1,200 airplanes. Of that fleet, there have been 12 fatal accidents, two of which were airplanes coming apart in flight. The FAA says the personal GA fleet rate is just over 2 accidents per 100,000 hours; The LSA rate is around 5.4, and it has gotten worse recently. The current LSA fatality rate is more than twice the personal GA rate. The Skyhawk, an airplane Flying called the safest such airplane, has a rate of around 1.  

Granted, these figures are for a relatively small fleet. But it should be interesting to find out more about the overall picture and to look at the types of accidents that LSAs are involved in, to see if there's some kind of emerging trends. The FAA, by the way, is doing this too.

Is Innovation All Electronic These Days?

When it comes to aviation innovation, electronics have been at the fore for the past 15 years, which, don't get me wrong, is fantastic. But I wonder if innovation in aerodynamics and powerplants is going to enjoy a renaissance, too, at some point.

The explosion of avionics capability, and the rapid drop in prices for it, didn't come about because the industry was suddenly overrun with geniuses. It's because we in aviation have been the beneficiaries of a technological revolution in the larger world that has brought unforeseen computing and display power to our panels. As more powerful and lower cost components have become available on the open market, avionics developers have repurposed them to our uses. And the FAA has been, while slow in some instances to adapt to the new technology, for the most part an enthusiastic participant for the revoution. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the DOD, whose lovely global positioning satellite constellation has become the backbone of aviation navigation systems.

I shouldn't say that there haven't been big developments in aerodynamics. There have been, but those "big" improvements have happened at the high end of the market, where great speed and high expense combine to make little improvements pay off big. A couple of impressive achievements that spring to mind are Aviation Partner's Blended Winglets, which increase range and cut fuel consumption markedly for fast airplanes, and Gulfstream's phenomenal new airfoil on its G650 design, which will allow that airplane, when it comes to market, to go faster and farther more efficiently than any production airplane ever. 

When it comes to small airplanes, the big breakthroughs have been slow in coming. In terms of trends, the most notable one is the large scale abandonment of retractable landing gear. Cirrus and Columbia (the latter now owned by Cessna) proved that you can go very fast with a fixed gear and a clean airframe, and the insurance companies stood up and cheered. 

Composite construction, now widespread, thanks again to the two companies referenced above, has proven not so much that glass equals speed but that it defers instant sexiness. Why is the Cirrus SR22 as fast as it is? Three-hundred-and-ten horses and a fast wing. Its leading edge cuff helps tame the stall, but that technology is hardly new. The composite construction helps, for sure, but don't tell Mooney you need it. Its Acclaim, with retracts and sheet metal construction, is the fastest of the bunch on fewer horsepower.

New powerplants have been slow to develop. Arguably the biggest news of the last ten years is the Thielert diesel, and the technological success of that story has been overshadowed by the financial collapse of Thielert and the terrible maintenance costs that prompted its best customer, Diamond Aircraft, to build its own engine. Will deisels dominate? There's a real chance they will, but not at this rate.

And turbofan engines have come down, too. Pratt & Whitney's small wonder, similar versions of which power the Cessna Citation Mustang (the PW615F) and Embraer Phenom 100 (the PW617), has proven that good things do get smaller, in size, fuel burn and price.  

But the question is, will our light airplanes be seeing an aerodynamic revolution? Once hoped for advances, like canard design, have proven to be footnotes or simply parallel technology, but they've hardly changed the state of design.

The holy grail of this grand endeavor is, of course, an airplane that can go substantially faster and substantially slower without overly undesirable side effects.

I'd sure like to see it. I wonder if it's in the cards.

By Robert Goyer

LSAs: Safe Enough to Just Barely Kill You

Back in the 1930s the Piper Cub was advertised as being the world's safest airplane. When asked about it, one smart alec pilot quipped that it was safe, safe enough to just barely kill you. The point, obviously, is that airplanes are potentially lethal and we'd be well advised to not forget that fact, lest we wind up just barely dead.

When the FAA first unveiled its Light Sport Aircraft category, I was worried that builders would tout them as a safer alternative to conventionally certificated airplanes. To our credit, that has not been a widespread marketing ploy. I felt at the time that we simply didn't know how safe LSA's would be. I still feel that way.

For the record, the FAA doesn't say that it thinks LSA will be safer than or even safer than Part 23. Instead, it thinks it will be safer than the ultralight and very light homebuilt sectors, which isn't hard to believe.

One thing I've learned from studying (and living) aviation history is that when a design is introduced that is going to revolutionize safety, watch out. Ercoupes come to mind. Designed expressly to be "easy" to fly, Ercoupes in their heyday and beyond had a horrendous safety record. Just about everything that Fred Weick built into the airplane to make it safer than conventional light planes, rudderless design, a steering wheel for control, and twin tails, was abandoned in later iterations of the same airplane. The tricycle landing gear is a noteworthy exception, though ground loops seldom end in tragedy.

And the early record of LSAs as a whole has been terrible, though many of the accidents apparently have been caused by pilot error and not problems with the airplane. Though there have been exceptions, including a number of accidents with the Zodiac CH601-XL in which the airplanes came apart in the sky. The NTSB has asked the FAA to ground the airplanes immediately. The FAA, so far, has declined to do so. Most LSA crashes happen during the landing, where fatals are relativley rare, and manuevering phases of flight. Stalls/spins were to blame in the vast majority of those accidents. So that's one thing that hasn't changed.

There are dozens of LSA designs out there, and while they're very different from one another in every imaginable way, we do know a few things that apply, by regulation, to all of them. They're light (a maximum of 1320 pounds) and they're slow (no faster than 120 knots). One-hundred-and-twenty knots, by the way, is well more than barely fast enough to kill a person.

And we know who's flying these airplanes, too. Everybody. There are pilots with vast experience coming to LSA for its cost and medical certification advantages and there are newbie pilots with a couple of dozen hours in their logbooks.

The new sport pilots concern me, because many of them don't know enough about aviation yet to know that all airplanes are potentially lethal, so we need to approach flying with an attitude of respect and humility. And light airplanes demand much of a pilot. I've flown a few LSAs for fllight reports, and I've flown many dozens of light sport airplanes over the years, and let me tell you, they are demanding of pilot skill, moreso, I'd argue, than higher performance airplanes.

Will LSA's get safer? I hope so. But there are built in risk factors that we need to continue to look at seriously. Training new pilots to be risk averse is a great start. High winds and low weather are bad things. And good maintenance is an absolute must.

Will LSAs get the point where they're as safe as regular Part 23 airplanes? Hopefully, they will and they'll be safe enough to just barely kill you. That's a risk we pilots learn to accept and manage, though training, vigilence and respect for the sky.

Addendum:

I've gotten several comments asking for detailed data. As far as I can tell, it doesn't exist. I do know that Avemco says that its insured LSAs were suffering hull losses at a higher rate than regular Part 23 insured airplanes and it raised LSA rates to cover its exposure. It has since offered reduced rates for certain LSAs. And I know that the FAA believes that the LSA record is substantially higher than that for the rest of light GA (exlcluding homebuilts). And I've had a couple folks from the FAA unofficially give me numbers, but I won't repeat them until they're willing to go on record with them.

Here's a link to a piece that Richard Collins wrote for the Februrary 2006 issue of Flying (Is LSA Flying Too Risky?) . His worries that LSA would be more dangerous than previous Part 23 flying of similar airplanes has turned out not to be true. The FAA says, as I noted earlier, that LSA flying is safer than Experimental/Ultralight flying but not as safe as Part 23 flying. At an EAA conference earlier this year, the FAA also said that pilots new to flying had fewer accidents than those transitioning from larger, faster airplanes. More food for thought.

Here's what the EAA said about the subject:

Both EAA and FAA will continue to analyze the accident statistics and to look beyond the numbers at the accident narratives, to identify the most effective ways of improving safety with the least amount of additional effort—“the best bang for our bucks.” It was agreed that EAA and FAA can and will work together to:

• find ways to increase participation in EAA and FAA safety programs;
• address the high numbers of stall-spin accidents; and
• improve the collection and analysis of accident data.

LSA accident data present unique challenges, Harris said, because there is no distinct “LSA Accident category” - too many variables are involved. Besides, he said, the low number of LSA accidents so far is too small for meaningful statistical analysis.

Overall, it was agreed that the LSA accident rate is a success story. It is lower than the amateur-built accident rate and higher than the broader general aviation accident rate. “It’s right where we predicted it would be."

By Robert Goyer