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Bravo to Roger Federer and to NetJets

On a weekend when Americans were celebrating the most nervous Independence Day in 70 years, I spent much of my weekend like a lot of folks, in front of the television watching grown men and women batting a little yellow ball back and forth. For me the Wimbledon fortnight is a guilty pleasure, one that I've enjoyed since I was a kid watching the then-limited coverage of the big show and seeing my heroes, Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, Johnnie Mac and Martina wielding rackets in the summer sun. (And I do still miss the serve-and-volley game and the wood rackets that allowed it.) And thanks to NetJets, all the while I was watching tennis, I kept on thinking about airplanes.

This year's Wimbledon turned into a different kind of tournament than expected, with Roger Federer enjoying a respite from playing against his arch nemesis Rafael Nadal, who was out with an injury. Roger was in search of his 15th Grand Slam title, a remarkable achievement by any standard. Federer is a true champion, a graceful, intelligent, resourceful and supremely talented player who has risen to the ranks of one of the two or three elite athletes in the world.

And, as were reminded on a very regular basis, he is also a NetJets owner.

Quite unexpectedly, the final turned into a classic, as American bad boy Andy Roddick took the champ to the limit and then beyond, pushing Federer into historic territory before bowing out, with Federer taking the title in a five-set victory, winning the ultimate set 16-14.

The NetJets' ad that ran on NBC and ESPN throughout the tournament showed Federer hauling his many Grand Slam trophies to his waiting NetJets plane, with the tag line that NetJets congratulated Roger on his record-tying 14th Grand Slam victory. Upon the long awaited win on Sunday, NetJets had a new ad at the ready, congratulating Roger on his 15th and record setting victory. They then showed him relaxing comfortably in flight in his jet along with his trophies.

The messages were unstated but impossible to miss. Private jets are a great way to travel. They are comfortable, convenient and fast. And people like Roger Federer, who have reached the pinnacle of success deserve such things. And they should have no qualms about it.

And I have to congratulate NetJets for spending the money to make that statement and then making it unapologetically. Good for them. (Here's Roger speaking at length on NetJets site about why he has a share.)

And Roger deserves a lot of credit too. At a time when the use of private jets has come under unprecedented scrutiny, he was there to say it, that he flies a private jet and not only does he deserve it; it has helped to drive his success.

Is your airplane out to get you?

It was around the middle of the 1980s that it occurred to me that I just didn't understand my car the way I once did. The vehicle that I owned and attempted to manage was a 1983 Ford Ranger pickup, a car that just never ran right from around 10,000 miles on until I finally gave up on it at 40,000 miles. And that was only after numerous repairs that never did anything to make the truck run better, though they did succeed spectacularly in draining my bank account.

Starting with that Ranger, there were two trends I noticed. The first was, I could no longer see what was going in inside the engine compartment, never mind do anything about it. It was packed. I don't remember the exact details, but I'm pretty sure I had to remove the transmission to change out the headlights.

The second trend was that a computer had taken to running my engine. In theory, that was fine. Like many pilots, I'm an early adopter and at the time was the proud owner of an actual personal computer on which I could write letters and such.

But the computer on the Ford was causing me no end of grief. It used to be that I could, like a country doctor, listen to my car's complaints and then determine the probable cause of the malady. If the engine was running rough, I'd look into things like fouled plugs, a clogged fuel filter or a gummy carburetor. More often than not, I'd get it on the first or second try. But that didn't work with my Ranger, in part, I now know, because the computer was the likely culprit. It was, sadly enough, also the chief diagnostician. To get the bottom of its problems, I'd dutifully bring my lemon into the shop, have them hook it up to their machine, which would tell them which part to replace and, presumably, how much to charge me. This dance continued for a few years until it became clear to me that this was not an improvement over my previous ownership experience in any way. Long story short: I bought a Honda. My car problems were solved.

Computers aren't everywhere yet. In fact, we get emails on a fairly regular basis from readers who take the aviation industry to task for living in the past. And it's true. Airplanes, especially light airplanes, are technological relics in many ways, not the least of which is the design of their engines. Though they've been updated in detail in a hundred ways, their basic design is still very old school. From carburetors to magnetos, they are a veritable museum of 1940s technology.

There are good reasons for this. Certification regulations make it expensive to develop a new-technology engine, for sure, and it piles on after that, making it hard to put that updated engine in an airframe that was previously certified for older technology. For the FAA, it's a classic case of the devil you know. And I do get that. We know what the risks are to the old technology. Why mess with limited success?

As you know, there is one place where new technology has flourished in light airplanes, in their panels. Avionics design has been completely revolutionized by the computer age, and the result is more affordable, capable and reliable options than we've ever had before.

But as was highlighted by the still-mysterious crash of Air France 447 last month, there is always the concern that computers will do too much, that they will do things we didn't ask them to, and once they do, we'll be unable to wrest control back from them. This, in a nutshell, is what some pilots and other observers suspect happened with the Air France Airbus. For some, the general fear is that making our cockpits more and more computerized will eventually, if it already hasn't, remove human pilots too far from the flight control loop. When that happens, they argue, the pilots might be unable to save the day when the computers fail.

And there's no doubt that, despite their designers'attempts to make them as fail-safe as possible, computers do introduce new failure modes into the equation. The question is, do they make up for that by being more reliable overall, by improving safety in other ways, and by allowing us to do things more efficiently than before? Most pilots, me included, would say that they do.

But it also true that we simply don't know our airplanes the way we once did. How does a vacuum powered attitude indicator work? Most pilots would be able to explain, I'd wager. How does an ADAHRS work? They'd probably be at a loss there. And that's without going into the fact that there's code everywhere. What pilot could possibly know their airplane's code inside and out?

And that trend of our airplanes getting more exotic will continue. Within the next 20 years, and that's not a long time, our airplanes will be safer, more capable, more efficient, more reliable and, in some ways, more economical.

But they will almost certainly be more mysterious to us. Make no mistake. Complexity is part of the deal with this thing we call progress.

But it's also the part I like the least.

Robert Goyer