"…not supposed to be used for commercial flights…"

Posted on August 27, 2006 by David Megginson

Today saw the worse air accident in the U.S. since 2001: Comair Flight 191 — a Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ) — crashed in Lexington, Kentucky. According to an NTSB official quoted in a CBC news story, the jet took off from a 3,500 ft runway. Is that OK for a fully-loaded CRJ (50 passengers and crew) under the wind and density-altitude conditions at the time? I have no idea, either of the prevailing conditions or of the CRJ’s typical takeoff roll.

Commercial flights?

What does strike me, though, is how the CBC article paraphrases the NTSB spokesperson:

The Comair commuter flight was on the shorter of two runways at Lexington’s Blue Grass airport, a 1,066-metre-long strip not supposed to be used for commercial flights, Debbie Hersmann of the National Transportation Safety Board said.

Something’s broken down in the communication chain here. Since the article paraphrases, it’s hard to know what the spokesperson actually said, but I doubt she said (or meant to say) that the runway couldn’t be used for commercial operations like air taxi, banner towing or flight training. Even if she meant to refer to scheduled air transport, wouldn’t that depend on the aircraft in use? A 3,500 ft runway would be plenty for a Piper Navajo or a DeHavilland Twin Otter flying a scheduled route, and might even meet the legal requirements for a Dash-8.

Which runway?

I’ve never been to Lexington/Blue Grass Airport (KLEX), but from reading the airport diagram, I see that the two runways are 04/22 (7,003 ft) and 08/26 (3,500 ft). The thresholds of 26 and 22 are very close to each-other — from the apron, you cross 26 (the short one) first, then almost immediately turn left onto 22. I have no idea what happened, but it’s very easy to line up on the wrong runway in a situation like this, at least for a 500 hour private pilot like me. I always have to double-check in Kingston, where runways 01 and 07 have their thresholds together, and at Toronto/City Centre, where 24 and 26 start from the same spot. My Warrior, however, has such a short takeoff roll that almost any paved runway is adequate, so my biggest risk (as long as the other runways are not in use) is being yelled at over the radio; perhaps not so with a CRJ carrying 50 souls.

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Physical limitations

Posted on August 23, 2006 by David Megginson

Update: Aviatrix is not a quitter — see below.

Update #2: I think the comments are better than my posting, so you might want to skip ahead and read them first (especially the third one).

Update #3: She got back behind the yoke and did great.

After learning the basics of handling an airplane and working in the system, flying is largely about two things: weather, and personal physical limitations. Weather (which I’ve discussed in other postings) is something that you can learn by studying, but personal physical limitations are things that you stumble upon, sometimes fatally, but always unexpectedly.

Finding limitations

Some limitations are obvious — we all know that we cannot live more than a few days without water, that we cannot jump off tall buildings and fly to the ground, and that we will not survive a collision standing in front of a speeding train. Other limitations are trickier, because they are not the same for every person, or change for different times and circumstances. After four hours at 10,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, is your flying impaired? Never? Always? Sometimes? It’s a crap shoot. Put two pilots side by side, and one might be able to solve differential equations in her head, while the other can no longer remember his girlfriend’s last name. Maybe tomorrow it will be the other way around. Ditto for spatial disorientation, fatigue, and the other physical limitations that sometimes sneak up and kill pilots. How long can you hand-fly in IMC and moderate turbulence? Once I did eight hours with no problem; another time, I was physically trembling after four, and had to ground myself and call in help to get a Hope Air patient back home. Good flying is learning to fly safely and well as the pilot you are, not trying to force yourself to become the pilot you wish you were.

Aviatrix and the smoke

All of this is leading up to the latest posting from my favorite blogger, a Canadian commercial pilot who goes by the pseudonym Aviatrix. In her posting Effects of Smoke, she describes the end of a long series of events that led to her decision to resign her job and quit flying altogether being fired from her job and deciding to take time to consider her future in aviation. Flying low, through dense forest-fire smoke (she reported less than a mile visibility) without supplemental oxygen, her sense of judgement became impaired and she had trouble flying the plane, to the point that her first officer had to take over control to make a safe landing.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news, obviously, is that she lived to blog about her experience. The bad news is that she blames herself and has lost some of her confidence to fly. She never even considers the smoke itself (hypoxia or CO poisoning) as a cause, probably because her first officer seemed unaffected by it, and even now she does not want to admit any physical weakness in the face of the male-dominated world of northern flying. The thing is, personal limitations are kind-of random. For example, consider another male-dominated world, firefighting, where the participants are much more physically fit than the average pilot. Here’s an excerpt from an article about firefighting hazards:

Over 50% of fire-related fatalities are the result of exposure to smoke rather than burns. One of the major contributing factors to mortality and morbidity in fires is hypoxia because of oxygen depletion in the affected atmosphere, leading to loss of physical performance, confusion and inability to escape.

Compare that to Aviatrix’s posting. Sound familiar? Huge, muscular, testosterone-soaked male firefighters exposed to smoke sometimes become as helpless as babies, and their buddies have to pull them out. It’s not a girl thing.

Next steps?

As far as I can tell, without knowing Aviatrix personally, she’s a highly-skilled and experienced pilot who ran hard into a physical limitation for dealing with hypoxia. Does that mean she’s now unsafe to fly? Of course not. If anything, it means that she can become an even better pilot, because she’ll know herself more thoroughly than she did before. She’ll know the early signs of hypoxia from bitter experience, and will (perhaps) grab a small portable oxygen bottle from her flight bag or, if up high and not in smoke, choose a lower altitude before things deteriorate. She’ll cancel a flight that she might have decided to fly before, and will be more confident about her decision. And her passengers will have a much better chance of a safe landing than they would with most of the bold, young male northern pilots who yet to discover how non-negotiable their own personal physical limitations will be.

I think I’m safe in wishing Aviatrix luck from all of her readers. I, for one, would not hesitate to get onto a plane where she was PIC — odds are, she’ll be the safest pilot at any base — and I hope to read more of her flying stories soon.

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Disjointed notes on my Gaspé trip

Posted on July 31, 2006 by David Megginson

I flew my family of four to Gaspé last Monday 24 July, and flew back yesterday (Sunday 30 July). Here are some disjointed notes, since I’m too far buried in work-related e-mail and demands to construct a continuous narrative.

  • Flying four adult-sized people plus luggage plus full fuel in a 160 hp Warrior is legal, but it’s a huge challenge. You have to treat every takeoff as a short-field takeoff, and have to be bang on the numbers to make the thing leave the runway and climb at all on a hot day (I’ve posted before about how flight training fails to prepare pilots for heavily-loaded, underpowered planes). Expect to see frequent negative climb rates above 7,000 ft (4,000 ft if there are any mountain waves): just hold Vy and be patient.
  • Deviating around thunderstorms in a slow plane is also a huge challenge because of the distances involved. I guessed wrong and deviated south when all the airliners were deviating north, and ended up giving my family a grand tour of the Eastern townships of Quebec (which we couldn’t actually see, but no matter). I’m looking forward to having radar images available for Canada.
  • Bilingualism is a good thing, except in a busy circuit at an uncontrolled Quebec airport. I do speak some French, and I managed to understand that an incoming pilot behind me was bound and determined to land on 05 when I was already in the circuit for 23 and Unicom was insisting over and over that 23 was the preferred runway. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand enough French to realize that he was cutting me off after I switched 180 degrees and joined the downwind for 05 to accomodate him. He was behind me, but when I turned base I saw him right in front of me on a straight-in final (which isn’t even legal for VFR in Canada at an uncontrolled airport). Life’s too short to argue with morons, especially in another language, but I have another good reason to prefer controlled airports. The other pilots at the airport were decent, no matter what language they were speaking.
  • With fuel prices so high, I’m glad to fly a plane that doesn’t burn too much of it, even if our trips are sometimes a couple of hours longer. I found some good prices in Quebec, though, sometimes in unexpected places.
  • I always worry about emergency landing spots when planning a flight over completely deserted areas, such as the interior of the Gaspé peninsula (where the St. Lawrence River meets the Gulf of the St. Lawrence). No need, really. It turns out that the interior is criss-crossed with, literally, hundreds or thousands of wide logging roads. I imagine that the surfaces are rough, and it might take a while for someone to find us, but even though I flew for over an hour out of range of towns, farms, roads, airports, etc., if I had lost an engine I would always have had a choice of literally dozens of easy, straight landing spots right under the plane. They might not have been nice on the landing gear, but they’d be a lot better than trees or plowed fields.
  • It’s very hard to resist cheating when you’re IFR in actual IMC, have a VFR-only GPS and ATC offers you a direct routing that will shave 15 or 20 minutes off your trip (and vectoring isn’t possible, because you’re below radar). I won’t say whether I resisted successfully or not, but if I hadn’t, it would have been easy to verify my position periodically using VOR/DME fixes.
  • I have a decent amount of actual IMC now, all of it hand-flown, and much of it in rough conditions. In a simple plane like a Warrior, I don’t think there would be any real benefit in having an autopilot, because the plane is draggy and unresponsive, giving me lots of time to fold maps, talk on the radio, etc. without going off course or tilting the wings. I know that things would be very different in a retractable.
  • A long, non-stop flight is always tempting, especially when you’re flying back home westbound and might not have serious headwinds. The upper wind forecasts suggested that I could do the return flight (503 nm) in only 4:10, while my Warrior holds enough fuel to fly over 5:30 lean of peak at 75% power (8.5 gph from 48 gallons usable). When the actual winds indicated 4:30-4:40, however, I decided that I didn’t want to be one of those morons who runs out of fuel, even if the GPS said that I would have minimal legal VFR reserves, so I added a fuel stop. It turned out that I did have enough fuel, but family bladders appreciated the stop all the same.
  • Flying an underpowered plane over hills makes me appreciate that the air moves in three dimensions: in addition to headwinds, tailwinds, crosswinds, etc., there’s always an updraft or downdraft. I was high enough to avoid the rough stuff, but at 8,500 feet over the mountains (3-4 thousand feet still make a mountain) I was constantly aware of the gentle waves (5-10 minute cycles) that were adding or subtracting about 5-10 knots of airspeed. I notice that flying over the Adirondacks as well. Some people just hold a constant airspeed and ride up and down on the waves, while others hold constant altitude and let the airspeed climb and drop. I chose the latter, since I was in an area of no radar coverage, and didn’t want to crowd the IFR altitudes.
  • I had my first experience flying a significant amount of IFR in class G airspace (green on the map), but it wasn’t actually uncontrolled. Because I was going to be crossing a controlled airway, ATC kept talking to me and never said that I was uncontrolled, even though I was flying no-radar. I could legally have flown about an hour of my route IFR without a clearance, though, as long as I could have crossed the airway VFR.
  • My family has almost 4 years experience with the airplane now, and they’re all extremely light packers and unfussy travellers. How many teenaged girls can pack enough for a week in a 10 lb suitcase? That alone is probably enough to justify the expense of flying.
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Easier phone access to U.S. flight services

Posted on July 13, 2006 by David Megginson

Update: Alas, no longer — by August 2006, my cell phone was not working with U.S. flight services again, and a reader left a comment to the same effect. It was nice while it lasted.

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a posting linking to a PDF list of local U.S. flight service numbers. At the time, the U.S. 1-800-WXBRIEF number did not work with Canadian land lines or even Canadian cell phones roaming in the U.S., so without a list of local numbers, there was no way to get a briefing or even to close a VFR flight plan in the U.S. using your cell phone — as a result, I always carried a printout of the list in my flight bag.

Recently, the U.S. privatized its flight services, outsourcing them to Lockheed-Martin (though ATC is still public). I decided to try the 1-800 number again, just in case things changed with the privatization. BINGO! The call goes through from my Canadian land line or my cell phone with no problem (and the specialist knew what he was talking about — I take that for granted in Canada, but have not always been able to do so in the U.S.).

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Big flap: the ornithopter finally flies

Posted on July 10, 2006 by David Megginson

Ornithopter C-GPTR

This happened two days ago, but I only just saw the news on Wikipedia: the venerable ornithopter at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies sustained flight for 14 seconds (2 seconds longer than the Wright brothers) after taking off under its own power (flapping its wings) with a pilot on board at Toronto/Downsview airport. Here’s the Toronto Star story, at least until the link migrates to the archives.

In the past, ornithopters with a crew have flown after being tow-launched, but this is the first confirmed flight of an ornithopter, with crew, taking off under its own power, analogous to the Wright brothers’ achievement with fixed-wing powered aircraft (though probably much less historically important). It looks like Prof. DeLaurier is ready to retire C-GPTR to a museum now, and to let others experiment with bigger wings and better engines.

Transport Canada created a special ornithopter category just to accomodate C-GPTR, though it looks like the Certificate of Registration was cancelled in 1997.

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Wikipedia on surviving summer storms

Posted on July 6, 2006 by David Megginson

If you fly much in the summer, thunderstorms are a huge concern. You might want to take a look at the new Lightning detector article on Wikipedia — I started the article, but then “Pierre cb” (a meterologist from Environment Canada) came in and not only corrected some of my errors, but added his own custom-drawn diagrams showing how a developing thunderstorm shows up on weather radar during each of its stages, and why lightning often appears outside of radar returns. Consider this required reading, especially if you fly IFR in the middle latitudes during the summer and routinely bet your life on your weather radar or lightning detector.

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Another contact approach

Posted on July 4, 2006 by David Megginson

I’m writing this posting from the courtesy computer at the Esso FBO in Toronto City Centre airport (CYTZ). I just finished a Hope Air flight from Sault Ste. Marie (CYAM), my fourth consecutive day of flying. Fortunately, I was able to fly in along and through today’s cold front before much CB developed, and what there was, I dodged with the assistance of my eyeballs, ATC, and my StormScope.

Coming into City Centre from the north, in and out of scud at the cloud bases, I had a chance to pull out and dust off a rarely-used tool: the contact approach. I flew a contact approach in anger two years ago, after blundering into and escaping a small storm cloud — I had no desire for any further IMC that day, so I dropped low and followed the St. Mary’s River into Sault Ste. Marie. This time was much more benign: after turning over the lakeshore heading towards City Centre, I was still unable to accept a visual approach due to restricted visibility (I got out of the scud by descending to 2,000). To make both my life and the busy controller’s easier, I offered to fly a contact approach. I could see the Scarborough bluffs clearly below me, so I simply followed the shoreline in until I saw the runway about 3-4 miles back.

This is exactly the situation that a contact approach is designed for. The arrival controller was able to hand me off earlier to City tower, easing his workload. Visibility underneath was adequate (>3 SM), and the landing was a complete non-event. I knew the shoreline (and the two big smokestacks) well. In marginal VFR, a full approach would have been much more hairy, since I would have had to fly about 5-10nm out over the lake.

Controllers aren’t allowed to offer a contact approach, but it’s a useful thing to ask for sometimes. This afternoon, unfortunately, there’s a line of severe thunderstorms conveniently extending from here to my home base in Ottawa (CYOW), so I guess I’ll spend a couple more hours checking e-mail and refreshing the radar page.

[Update: I made it home late in the afternoon, by picking my way along a wide corridor that opened up between two storm lines.]

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3D airnav data: Google Earth/DAFIF mashup

Posted on June 26, 2006 by David Megginson

Google Earth is a 3D geographical visualization program available for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux.

DAFIF is a free (soon-to-be-closed) database of major airports, airways, airspace, etc. around the world.

Now, the Russian Academy of Science has created a mashup of the two (via the Google Earth Blog), so that you can see airways, navaids, etc. while you’re flying around Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed, here’s the link to the DAFIF information.

How long until we can get satellite weather overlayed on Google Earth?

Caveats

  1. You need a good video card with 3D acceleration to run Google Earth.
  2. The amount of information is huge, and will easily swamp even a high-speed network connection, so be careful to enable only tiny bits of it at once.
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Excess of thrust

Posted on May 29, 2006 by David Megginson

A big engine can cause problems: it burns lots more gas, resulting in higher operating costs and a shorter range (relative to a smaller engine on the same plane); it weighs more, reducing your useful load and complicating weight and balance; and it has more cylinders and other parts to inspect, repair, and overhaul, resulting in higher ownership costs.

A big engine can also bring a lot of joy: it gives you the option of climbing above problems (icing, turbulence, clouds, mountain waves); it can let you fly faster into a brutal headwind (by trading off some range); it gives you more power for takeoff, reducing distances and increasing your useful load; and most importantly, if your airplane is a radio-controlled model, a grossly overpowered engine allows you to do some pretty neat tricks, as shown in this video on YouTube.

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Crosswind landings

Posted on May 27, 2006 by David Megginson

Aviatrix’s latest post on flying up north talks about crosswind landings. When I was a student pilot, and for a while after I got my PPL, I found crosswind landings fairly difficult. Then, one day, I suddenly realized that I’d just landed in a strong crosswind without thinking about it. Much of what I learned during initial training turned out to be of limited value, so I decided to post what actually works for me:

  • Almost every landing is really a crosswind landing to some extent, so don’t think of The Crosswind Landing as a special procedure.
  • Don’t set up the slip until you’re well below treetop/roof level, and preferably, not until you’re in the flare. The winds at 100 ft (or even 50 ft or 20 ft) may have little or nothing to do with the winds you’ll be landing in. I’ve often had a ferocious crosswind on the turn from base to final that faded to almost nothing by the time I touched down (even the windsock is too high to get the touchdown winds for a 172 or PA-28).
  • In the flare (for any landing), think of the controls differently — use the ailerons to slide the plane left/right so that it stays over the centreline, and use the rudder to keep the nose pointing straight forward. Don’t worry about a slip per se — it will just be the natural result of these inputs.
  • (Advanced) If the crosswind is very strong, back off on the rudder a bit and flare in a crab, then kick the rudder hard to straighten the nose just before the wheels touch. Don’t try this until you’re pretty comfortable (and probably never in a taildragger, unless you enjoy ground loops).

By the way, I always land with full flaps, even in a strong crosswind. The only time I don’t use flaps is when I’ve seen any trace of icing during flight — if, for some reason, there’s undetected ice on the stabilator/horizontal stabilizer, dropping flaps can cause a tail stall [video], which is almost never recoverable close to the ground.

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