The FAA vs. General Aviation

Posted on March 29, 2007 by David Megginson

[Update: Boing Boing bought into the airlines’ side on this and went even further, confusing airport development funds with ATC costs and somehow making it sound like 25% of the cost of each airline ticket subsidizes rich people in bizjets. To their credit, they ran a couple of follow-up corrections from readers. Thanks to Mark for the tip.]

In this speech, U.S. FAA administrator Marion C. Blakey defends a new, fee-based U.S. system on these grounds:

“Tell you what. If the FAA really wanted to kill GA, as our critics claim, we’d just sit back and do nothing. We’d leave the air traffic system just the way it is, and let congestion slowly squeeze them out.”

What pilots know (but the public doesn’t) is that we have procedures for handling every part of a flight without help from air traffic control (ATC), and that thousands of flights every day go from point A to point B without ever talking to an air traffic controller, just like car drivers can manage a four-way stop without the help of a traffic cop. We have rules for departing (landing traffic gets right of way for the runway), rules for enroute (different altitudes for different directions of flight), and rules for arrival (everyone joins a circuit or pattern and takes their turn to land). In the Canadian north, as Aviatrix can attest, we even manage IFR just fine without ATC help.

These rules work great, but they do require that everyone slow down and get in line, and that’s where ATC comes in. Sure, a 737 could slow down to (say) 180 knots, fly a wide pattern, and wait its turn to land, but the airline doesn’t want it to (gas is expensive, and passengers hate being late). When the weather goes down, the airlines don’t want their jets and commuter turboprops stacked 20 deep in a hold following the one-in/one-out rule for uncontrolled airports in IFR. They don’t want to have to slow down to near propeller speed in terminal airspace in VFR so that they can see and avoid other traffic reasonably.

Because of all that, we have a special system in place to help the big guys out. There are controllers at busier airports, terminal controllers, and enroute controllers to help them get in and out of airports faster, without having to get in line and wait (at least, not as much). Huge amounts of airspace are reserved so that only aircraft talking to ATC can use them, again, almost entirely for the benefit of the airlines.

Remember that the sky belongs to everyone, and all this special accommodation for the airlines this is a bit of a pain for us G.A. pilots (long waits for clearances around class B/C or long detours, etc.), but we can get used to it, just like drivers get used to bus lanes. And sometimes (rarely), we even get our own tower at airports with extremely heavy G.A. traffic, just to help things along. It really adds insult to injury, though, when airlines complain that G.A. is not paying its fair share of the cost of this system (even though we already pay a fuel tax on both sides of the border, and a small fee in Canada, to subsidize a system designed largely for the airlines’ benefit), and it’s even worse when organizations like Nav Canada or the FAA start acting as lobbyists for the airlines.

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Wednesday afternoon, 1:36 pm, Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier Airport

Posted on March 16, 2007 by David Megginson

On the way home from Teterboro Airport after a March break family trip to New York City, after 2.6 flying hours mostly in IMC with light to moderate turbulence. My older daughter in the copilot seat whipped out her camera and took this shot on short final on the ILS 32 at Ottawa/Macdonald-Cartier Airport.

We had been racing down the approach at 110 knots to get in ahead of an approaching level 2 cell (though we’d been through a few of those already), and tower turned the lights up to maximum to make sure we wouldn’t have to go missed. The airport was reporting RVR 4000 ft (in other words, you could see less than a mile forward on the runway), but the approach lights were bright enough that I made them out at 800 AGL and started to slow the plane. The runway itself popped into view at 600 AGL, and my daughter took this picture a bit after that.

As ominous as this looks, it would not count as anywhere near a low approach for an ILS. However, it’s worth mentioning that Ottawa was forecasting 3,000 ft ceilings and 5 miles visibility when we left Teterboro.

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Assault by battery

Posted on March 9, 2007 by David Megginson

Recently, in the cold weather, my Warrior’s battery has barely managed one try starting the plane — any more, and it goes flat. Most recently, it happened after I’d just been flying 1.7 hours and tried to restart after a short fuel stop. I had to figure out whether the problem was the battery or the alternator (or regulator).

Battery/alternator diagnosis checklist

I phoned my AME, and he gave me a short checklist that I could run myself using only a multimeter (this is for a plane with a 14 volt electrical system and a single battery):

  • With the engine off, a reading at the battery terminals (master off) should give at least 12.5 volts, and a reading at the cigar lighter (master on, radios off) should give at least 11.5 volts.
  • With the engine idling, a reading at the cigar lighter should give 12.5–13 volts.
  • With the engine running at 1500 rpm, a reading at the cigar lighter should give at least 13.5 volts.

Analysis

I left the plane tied down for extra security (in addition to the brakes), and ran the tests. Here’s what I got:

  • Engine off: 12.42 volts at the battery terminals, 11.6 volts at the cigar lighter.
  • 600 rpm: fluctuating 12.7–13.1 volts
  • 1000 rpm: 13.71 volts
  • 1500 rpm: 13.7 volts
  • 2000 rpm: 13.7 volts

After running the engine for a few minutes then shutting down, the battery read 13.03 volts at the terminals, but the charge had dropped to 12.61 only 10 minutes after I shut down the plane, and would presumably keep dropping to around 12.4 again.

Diagnosis

My alternator is obviously producing full power even at only 1000 rpm, and the regulator is kicking in to cap it at 13.7 volts. There’s no reason that battery shouldn’t be charged; however, 12.4 volts is fairly low, and more disturbingly, after only one start attempt, the battery drops to 12 volts and can no longer turn the propeller.

I think I’m facing a bad combination of cold weather and a weak battery. I’ve decided to replace my wet cell with a newer, high-cranking-power sealed battery, but I need to wait for a new battery box cover to arrive from Concorde; in the meantime, I’m using a loaner wet Gill battery for an upcoming New York City trip. If you see someone carrying a dead battery into the FBO to be charged while his family waits impatiently in the plane, it’s probably me.

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Canadian aviation publication make-over

Posted on March 8, 2007 by David Megginson

My 15 March (2007) editions of the Canada Flight Supplement (airport directory) and Canada Air Pilot (approach plates) just arrived in the mail, and they have a new look. Just before I started flying in 2002, the CFS had a green cover (I saw old copies lying around), then it switched to blue. Now we’re going to have to get used to grey with fancy gradients.

More seriously, Nav Canada sent a letter along with the new pubs promising significant changes beyond just the cover colours. I wonder what they have in store for us. Up-to-date information about landing fees? Better diagrams for airports without instrument approaches? We’ll have to see.

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Brantford airport petition

Posted on February 20, 2007 by David Megginson

The city of Brantford, Ontario, about 50 nautical miles west-southwest of Toronto, is running a review to determine the consequences of closing Brantford Airport (CYFD), and Brant Aero would like you to sign an online petition of support for the airport.

Brantford’s official motto is “The telephone city”, because, according to the city, Alexander Graham Bell lived there in 1874 when he first came up with the idea for the telephone. Bell is also famous, however, for founding the Aerial Experimentation Association, which produced the Silver Dart, the aircraft that made the first controlled, powered flight in Canada (and the British Empire). Bell devoted a huge part of his life to aviation, and it would be a sad irony if the city who uses him as its main claim to fame were to close its only airport.

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Airline cheers and jeers

Posted on February 13, 2007 by David Megginson

This time, my cheers and jeers are for the airports and airlines (yes, there are cheers), since I decided to leave the Warrior at home and fly to Newark, New Jersey this week.

Jeer: Us the voters
We have no one but ourselves to blame for the ridiculous security procedures in place at the airports now. The poor screeners are doing only what the politicians order them to do, and we’re the politicians’ bosses, so the buck stops with us. I guess it’s good to know that civilization is safe from my shoes, belt, toothpaste, and shaving cream for at least one more day.
Jeer: airline advertising
It’s scummy for an airline to advertise, say, a $99 one-way fare when they know that the real fare is going to be something like $250 with security fees, airport fees, sales taxes, and so on. People want to know what they have to pay, not what the airlines will receive. In the UK (or all of Europe?), it’s already illegal to advertise fares that way. Also, a jeer for the governments (and that means us the voters, again) who treat airlines like cash cows by taxing tickets into the ground.
Cheer: the crew of CO 2686, Monday 12 February
Nothing heroic here, but on descent and approach, they dealt with moderate turbulence all the way below the cloud deck — I shudder to think what the turbulence would have been for my Warrior. I appreciate having someone else worry about weather, routing, clearances, turbulence, etc., just for once.
Cheer: anonymous Continental Airlines ticket agent
Sure, my last-minute ticket here cost far too much, but it still came with a $100 change fee. With heavy snow and freezing rain coming Wednesday morning (OK, I admit that I checked the TAFs — I’m not very good as a passenger), I called to move my return flight to this evening, and Continental waived the change fee without my even asking. Cheers for an airline smart enough to understand that I’m doing them a favour by giving them one less irate, stranded customer to deal with tomorrow.
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Cheers and jeers

Posted on January 30, 2007 by David Megginson

Over the past couple of months, I had two exceptionally good experiences with aviation-related businesses, and one exceptionally bad one. As a service to my fellow owners, I’m going to name them all here.

Cheer: Great Lakes Aero
This company makes windows for light, unpressurized aircraft that are roughly triple the quality of the original manufacturers’ at a third the price. As if that weren’t enough, I bought a new windshield in May but didn’t get around to having it installed until December, when I found out that I’d bought the wrong thickness. No problem: Great Lakes was happy to take it back and give me a refund (minus a trivial restocking fee) and ship me a new one.
Cheer: Sutton Aviation
This won’t be of much interest unless you keep your plane near Ottawa, but this year Sutton Aviation at Rockcliffe Airport showed me that an annual inspection (and associated upgrades, rectifications, and repairs) can be fast, thorough, and (relatively) inexpensive. Maybe I can afford to keep this plane after all.
Jeer: Aircraft Spruce
I was excited when I found out that Aircraft Spruce would be opening a Canadian operation, even if it’s just a transhipment point, because I’m tired of the cross-border mail order hassles. I called Aircraft Spruce first to confirm that their deal with UPS meant no brokerage fees (“just tax”, said the man on the phone), then discovered when my package arrived that Spruce had simply collected the infamous, non-refundable $60–70 brokerage fee on UPS’s behalf before shipping you the order — how is that a benefit to Canadian customers? They refused even to apologize afterwards, much less make good on their mistake (at first, they tried to claim that the fee was sales tax, until I pointed out the sales tax on a separate line). Until we have a real Canadian source, other mail order companies like Chief Aircraft will be happy for your business, and will treat you better in the bargain.
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Threats to general aviation

Posted on January 26, 2007 by David Megginson

According to AOPA, the biggest issue facing general aviation in the U.S. is the risk of user fees. I agree with Phil Boyer that user fees could hurt GA, especially if they are per use (as in Australia) rather than flat fees (as in Canada, with one misguided exception); however, I think that there are even bigger issues facing North American general aviation. Here, on no scientific basis whatsoever, are my top five:

  1. The end of AvGas: Almost nobody makes AvGas any more, it’s expensive to transport, and environmentalists rightly hate it because it’s leaded. Watch for it to get rarer and more expensive, with more and more shortages, over the next few years, at the same time as ethanol in MoGas renders it unsuitable for the few aircraft engines that could use it. The solution? Diesel engines, but they’re still expensive to install (nearly the whole cost of my plane), probably won’t ever be approved for all existing models, and do not yet have a significant North American maintenance network in place. Most old planes will have to be retired, and most pilots won’t be able to afford to replace ’em, so they’ll retire with their planes.

  2. (In)Security: It’s there, and it’s not going to go away. The general public has always been afraid of airplanes (I’ve posted in the past about how we exacerbate the problem by promoting air shows), and general aviation in particular scares them because it’s so lightly regulated. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of the candidates was a GA pilot and went out of his way not to cause problems for his fellow pilots; in 2008, we probably won’t be that lucky. And the next time something bad happens, watch for GA to be the scapegoat even more than in 2001: we could be regulated right out of existence on either or both sides of the border.

  3. Airport closures: New residential neighbourhoods, either on reclaimed industrial land in the city or former farmland in the country, almost always mean bad news for general aviation. Airports are useful only when they’re near somewhere you want to go, so the most useful airports are typically also the most threatened: Toronto City Centre Airport is constantly under seige from nearby condo dwellers, for example, and even little Rockcliffe Airport struggles with community noise complaints (note that both of these airports have been there since before World War II). Airports aren’t the only ones who suffer from the soccer-mom onslaught: in rural areas farmers have to deal with complaints from new subdivisions about noise and smell, hunters have to go further away to hunt, and so on.

  4. Maintenance: Most of the GA fleet is, and will remain, old — very few of us can shell out $300K-$1M for a new light plane, so we have to settle for spending $20K-$150K on something older. It would take only a couple of expensive Airworthiness Directives from the FAA or Transport Canada to knock a huge part of the fleet out of the sky by requiring a repair worth more than the planes’ resale value. Furthermore, the shops that maintain these planes for us often operate on a shoestring, billing much less per hour than an auto shop, and in the U.S. a few of them are starting to refuse to work on older planes for liability reasons (U.S. law protects manufacturers from being sued once the planes are a certain age, so the shop would be the only one to go after in a crash).

  5. User fees: We’ve been paying these in Canada for a while now, and since they’ve remained low and fixed (thanks to COPA), they don’t seem to have had any impact at all on GA. However, that could change easily. If either Canada or the U.S. introduced a pay-per-use system, flying could quickly become too expensive and/or too dangerous for most GA owners. For example, if you had to pay $100 each time you filed IFR, scud running might become a bit more tempting; if you had to pay $25 for a weather briefing, you’d be less likely to talk to a specialist about icing. Realistically, I don’t think this is as big a threat as the others, but I’m still grateful that COPA and AOPA (I’m a member of both) are looking out for our interests.

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Winter Warrior wrangling

Posted on January 23, 2007 by David Megginson

My plane’s back on the line today. After doing some high-speed taxi checks to make sure nothing was leaking or running too hot or cold, I had to try to push the plane back into its spot through snow and a small ditch, cover it up, and plug it in. Call me slow (seriously — go ahead), but it took me until my fourth winter owning a plane to figure out some very simple tricks for moving, covering, and plugging in a plane in a snowy, slippery, uneven parking spot.

Fulcrum

It is hard to move a plane by yourself on a slippery, paved surface; it’s very hard to move a plane onto uneven, snow-covered dirt and grass when standing on the slippery surface; and it’s extremely difficult to do so when there’s a small ditch where both the mains will get stuck.

A long time ago, I learned a trick for moving the plane when all else fails: use the ends of the wings for leverage. If you push near the wing tip (on a spar rivet line, please), you can exert a lot of force on one side and move that wheel back while the nosewheel slides sideways on the ice or dirt, pivoting around the other main. Keep alternating sides, and eventually you can wiggle the plane back into a spot. Unfortunately, with the wheels in a ditch, the plane was pivoting around the wrong wheel and I wasn’t able to make any progress.

Today’s solution: chock the wheel on the opposite side so that it doesn’t slide forward when you want the wheel on your side to slide back, guaranteeing a secure fulcrum for your pivot. Two or three runs back and forth with the chock, and I easily had the plane back in its spot. I’m starting to think about buying a boat winch and using it to pull the plane back by its tail tiedown.

Fishing

Covering a low wing plane in the winter is tricky, because as the wing gets closer to the fuselage, you actually have to slide down on your back to get the strap from the back of the wing cover and pull it through. This gets old, fast.

Today’s solution: Hook the strap by reaching under the wing with a telescoping snow brush or towbar and pulling it to you (I flew how many winters without figuring out this one?).

Cable ties

As much as possible, I want to keep the extension cord I use to plug in off the ground, because as the snow thaws and refreezes, the cord can end up buried under several inches of solid ice. I’ve tried running it over the stabilator and wing, with a couple of loops around the step for good measure, but it still ends up drooping to the ground.

Today’s solution: run the electrical cord underneath the straps for the canopy cover and wing covers, so that they act as cable ties, holding the cord tight to the fuselage.

Cord routing

On the 1979 Warrior, large doors open on both sides of the cowling, so that you can actually see the whole ending compartment easily during preflight (you can even change the oil, oil filter, or a vacuum pump without uncowling the plane). The receptacle for my engine heater is behind one of those doors, but I have to leave the door unlatched to bring the plug in.

Today’s solution: now that the electrical cord is securely strapped to the fuselage and won’t droop down, run it through the opening at the bottom of the cowling where the exhaust and oil tube are located, then pull it up to the receptacle. Now the door can be securely latched.

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Up a tree

Posted on January 16, 2007 by David Megginson

Plane in tree.

[Update: see below.]

According to Snopes, this photo is legit — it’s a Cherokee 180 N6487J that crashed into a tree during a forced approach near Meadowlake Airport in Colorado last month after the engine lost power (the pilot, who was the sole occupant, had no serious injuries).

The picture is circulating around the Internet because of the funny juxtaposition of a flight school sign and a small plane crashed into a tree behind it. However, American Aviation uses Cessnas as its primary trainers (and a Piper Arrow for complex training), and the PA-28-180 in the picture is registered to a real-estate company, so unless it was on a lease-back, it really has nothing to do with the flying school or flying lessons. Still, it is hard not to come up with funny captions …

Update

I received an e-mail from Mark at Meadowlake Airport pointing me to the story on the airport’s web site. The story clears up a few points:

  • The pilot was practicing night circuits (I’m surprised by that, since the crash happened at 5:30 pm, at a relatively southerly attitude, and official night doesn’t being until 30 minutes after sunset).
  • The plane was a rental, but not from American Aviation (it just happened to crash into a tree near their entrance).
  • The pilot suffered no injuries at all in the crash, but was slightly hurt climbing down from the tree.
  • The plane hit power lines (visible in the picture) first during an attempt to glide to the runway, then ended up in the tree.

The tree probably did a good job dissipating the plane’s energy and saving the pilot. If it was already dark (say, because the sun had gone behind mountains), the power lines would have been awfully hard to see.

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