Now this makes me wish I were already back in the flying business
A company called AirJourney, "The Flying Adventure Journey Specialist," is sponsoring a joint small-plane fly-in next month along the route of the Lewis & Clark expedition.
Perhaps it is a stretch to claim, as AirJourney does in promos like what's shown below, that this is a deeply historical commemoration. But I flew much of this route in a small plane nine years ago (start in Minnesota, then down to Nebraska, then west) and to this day recall many vivid scenes, which I also described in my book Free Flight. The incredible breadth of the Missouri River, which in many stretches looked as it might have in the days of L&C. The carvings of Mt. Rushmore outside Rapid City, SD, which from above look surprisingly tiny and netsuke-like. The splaying delta and estuary of the Columbia River at the other end of the journey, at Astoria, Oregon, where it meets the Pacific. And a lot in between.
It's not a "rational" way to spend your time or money, but I've never forgotten the experience or regretted spending time and money in a similar venture. If you're not a pilot yet -- there's just barely time!
June 18, 2009
Sigh, out of range again
I am no longer based in China, but am not yet actually based anyplace else. So this might be the last dispatch for the next week, and it's on the fly from yet another airport wi-fi site. Sketchy for-the-record remarks:
1) After 60+ hours in America (and on the way out again): Life is so abundant! Even in a downturn -- and, yes, in Washington, not Flint. Everything looks so comfortable and lush! The air is so clean! (Today's reading in Beijing: "Hazardous.") And the cell phone coverage is so crappy! I can barely recall a moment in China when I was out of signal range. Today alone in Washington, half a dozen dropped calls. Yes, yes, I know the reasons for this. But the difference is impressive.
1A) Bad part of my character as revealed by travel (part 2,847): When approached by spare-change panhandlers I have to bite my tongue to avoid giving the "do you know what people put up with in China?" speech. Yes, yes, I know why this is wrong.
2) Positive aviation development of the week: flight of a new all-electric plane, here.
3) Negative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.
4) "There will always be a China" anecdote of the day. This comes from a Chinese friend I know and trust but, for this person's own sake, will not identify. My friend asked a CCTV producer (whose name I also know) about the mystery I mentioned last week: what on earth the weird ... thing on top of the otherwise-clean CCTV tower was. Reminder:
Here is the report from my friend, recounting a conversation with the producer:
Me [my friend]: Do you know what that huge round thing protruding on the top of the main CCTV building is? Producer: What? Me: It looks like either a misshaped radar or a helicopter landing pad... Producer: Why are you asking? Me: Just curious. Producer: Well, don't be curious. You know it's a very sensitive period here at CCTV, because of Fang Jing's "spy-gate" incident. Don't ask such sensitive questions. Me: Why is it sensitive? That huge thing is right there on the very top of your landmark. Everyone could see it, even from far away. You've never thought about what it is? Nobody asks about it? Producer: No... No one. Seriously, stop asking about it!
Words to live by. With that, I leave you to my Atlantic colleagues for a week.
Good. Pilot of a Cirrus SR-22 gets into trouble while flying over North Carolina but has an option. As the Mount Airy News reports, the pilot
"...was at 6,000 feet when he declared an emergency, pulled the
parachute his plane was equipped with, let go of the control panel and
floated to the ground about one and a half miles into the woods off
Still Water Lane. "[He] was able to walk away from the site
and place a call to 911 to inform them he was searching for emergency
personnel and thought he had spotted some of them looking for him."
There are other recent developments involving Cirrus. (Positive: increasing production rate and recalling workers as worldwide sales pick up. Negative: found partly liable by a Minnesota jury for millions in damages after a crash in which a non-instrument rated pilot took off before dawn in bad weather and was killed, along with his passenger. The NTSB traced the probable cause of the accident to the "pilot's improper decision" to attempt the flight at all. More on these another time.)
Not so good. Beautiful and elegant Beaver float plane crashes while attempting takeoff near Anchorage last week. (Via Eric Redman.) Not-so-bad aspects: No one apparently hurt, and remarkable minute-long YouTube video shot by unbelievably gutsy young cameraman.
Constructive: In response to an airline pilot's observation, here, that he typically has less up-to-date weather info available in the cockpit than pilots of modern small planes like the CIrrus do, former FAA and DOT official Andrew Steinberg writes to say:
"What strikes me on reading this discussion is that
the slow pace of implementation of the NextGen air traffic system -- here
and in Europe -- means that we don't prevent these preventable accidents
(if it turns out that weather caused the demise of this [Air France 447] flight).
As you may remember, providing integrated weather displays to pilots, as
well as controllers, is a key part of the Next Gen effort. It's absurd
that commercial pilots don't have these tools. An article describing
how the weather product fits into Next Gen is attached."
The article in question is here. As for the difference this might or might not have made to the Air France flight itself, which got in trouble over the open sea, another correspondent says:
"You know what we (meteorologists) call the oceanic regions? "The big blue data void. "It is hard to explain that to people who only look at CONUS." [Continental US, which has radar stations and other monitoring tools wherever you look.]
And another airline pilot writes in to say:
Your point on higher-tech and more real-time weather information being available for GA ["general aviation," small private plane] pilots versus airline pilots is well taken, but disregards an important advantage us 121 [airline] pilots have over aircraft with these XM weather uplinks....
I fly for a Northwest, now Delta, regional and we have access to the same ACARS delivered weather updates as the big boys. [ACARS is an automated data-collection service that shares info among planes in the air.] Granted they are delivered in text and require manual plotting, but once done they are very accurate and enormously effective. Base and/or composite reflectivity radar maps can be very deceiving to a pilot flying at FL370, since a lot of the weather depicted on those maps is very low. ACARS coordinates and altitude of cell tops is often much better information, especially when considering whether to pick your way through a line at night or take a long detour. In addition the dispatchers themselves [airline employees who monitor the flights from the ground], being another human in the loop with even more information, can be invaluable in saving your bacon. Between myself, my FO [first officer], and my dispatcher, I've got three eyes on the problem- which I'd take over any Nexrad/XM maps any day of the week.
Now I admit I'm spoiled flying as I do mostly over the continental US. Transoceanic would be somewhat trickier given, as you say, the dearth of other traffic over the same route serving as guinea pigs. That said, given what I know about the resources available to the Air France pilots, I am at a loss for why they found themselves on the midst of such a violent storm.
Also constructive: Carl Malamud, the inveterate crusader for making "public" information truly available to the public, has put online a variety of Federal videos related to aviation, here. This is part of his larger FedFlix effort to digitize films and videos produced by the government, and his even larger PublicResource.org campaign for opening up public data.
June 11, 2009
Winding up
I'm aware of a ton of loose threads to be gathered up (about Air France updates, Obama's speaking style, urban design in China, design in software, boiled frogs, you name it). Soon.
But three years in China have now come down to three days; the movers arrive in nine hours; and I've happily spent my last reporting day -- at least of this stint in China -- in an uplifting fashion, at a tiny airport outside Beijing on a spectacular blue-sky day. Its managers and organizers have the dream of bringing convenient flight to remote communities across China.
I like the many dreamers and visionaries I have met in China, so I liked these people. And I liked that, in addition to their legacy aircraft (first pic), they were building their fleet with the same Cirrus airplanes I had known in the United States.
Legacy fleet:
Cirrus SR-22 (with Cirrus's man in China, Scott Jiang):
Back to packing. Loose ends soon.
June 9, 2009
An Airbus captain on getting into bad weather
Regarding one of the puzzles of the Air France 447 crash -- how a professional air crew ended up in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm -- an airline pilot writes:
As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours. While I agree that it's entirely possible and perhaps even likely that the Air France 447 crew did indeed proceed into an area that they shouldn't have I can say that if his radar isn't up to snuff or if they misinterpreted the presentation there are no other resources for them in that situation. At least over the continental US we have other aircraft reports and ground controllers who can make suggestions.
Most civilians (non aviators would I guess be a better term) are quite surprised to find that they have better access to up to date weather resources while sitting at home on the computer than I do. Once I'm airborne it's just the radar and who I can talk to on the radio (ATC, other aircraft, my dispatcher). While I'm told that modern business jets have satellite links to provide views and weather from various vantage points we who carry the most people do not. At main stations I can pull up numerous local and regional radar presentations which are very helpful. However when operating out of small stations this isn't always possible and once I get into my aircraft I'm blind except for the radar in the nose of the jet. It works well but it isn't foolproof, if I could see the same things airborne that I can while at a computer terminal we, my aircraft and passengers, would all benefit.
If any good can come of this accident I hope it will lead to a discussion and implementation of better weather resources for the airline industry. I'm proud of what we do and our overall safety record but this is one area where we could make great advances.
This is an important area where, strangely, small airplanes are actually better equipped for safety than most airliners. (Airliners are safer in just about every other way, from crew training to redundant backup systems, and despite the recent disasters are amazingly safe overall.) Starting in the early 2000s, handheld or tablet-sized displays capable of showing near-real-time Nexrad weather came onto the aviation market. They got the data via satellite services like XM/Sirius and could display info about storms, winds, and airport conditions that was only a few minutes old. Here's how a popular recent tablet model, the Garmin 696, looks. Its display screen is 7" diagonally, large enough to be very useful.
It can match the airplane's path to nearly-current radar information
(as with the storms shown in central Florida, above). Everyone
emphasizes that such displays are for "strategic" rather than "tactical" guidance
-- giving you a general idea of places to avoid, rather than tempting you to try to slalom your way around the worst parts of a storm.
Other
displays are mounted right on the panel and show how the plane's path
matches the surrounding terrain and any other planes in the vicinity,
along with the weather. This is a Cirrus cockpit, a fancier and more modern version of the kind of small plane I used to fly, with the weather (plus route, traffic, terrain, etc) displayed on the right-hand screen.
I don't know how much good these displays would do over the open ocean -- where, after all, there are no ground-based radar stations to support Nexrad-style displays. But more info, and more recent info, is always better -- and the captain is right about this literal blind spot for most airliners, which should be corrected.
June 8, 2009
Two aviation updates
First, about the battered but durable small-airplane, point-to-point travel movement, chronicled frequently over the past ten years (here, for starters), a retrospective from Bruce Holmes, long time "extrepreneurial bureaucrat" from NASA. Holmes was one of the three heroes of my 2001 book Free Flight and later a force behind the promising-but-doomed company DayJet. (Below, Holmes a few years ago, in a NASA photo.)
Holmes recently returned to his NASA-Langley stomping grounds to give a basically positive "lessons learned" discussion about the DayJet experience. Brief article about his presentation here; his summary below.
[DayJet] was a case of "the operation was successful, but the patient died,"
but it was only a start, Holmes said. It was a glimpse into an aviation
future in which, he added:
--"We need to get to carbon neutral (aviation operation),
--"We need to halve the operating cost and
--"We need scalable airspace capacity."
Godspeed on all fronts.
Second, about the unresolved question of why the Air France 447 crew found itself in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm, this from Bill McHugh, a private pilot in Louisiana:
You may or may not remember some years ago that a
737 flown by TACA Airlines made an emergency dead-stick landing on a narrow
levee near the NASA Michoud facility in eastern New Orleans (Google "taca
airlines levee landing"). It had lost both engines due to hail ingestion while
flying through a severe storm on approach to MSY [the main New Orleans airport]. The landing was successful,
with no loss of life or injuries. The captain was hailed as a hero by the
passengers and in the press (frankly, I was more impressed by the Boeing test
pilots who got the thing back off the ground a few days later).
A couple of years after the incident I was
attending one of those FAA safety courses at NEW [New Orleans Lakefront airport]. This course was about weather,
and one of the speakers was a guy who had worked the NEW and MSY towers for
many years. He told us that he had been working the tower the day of the TACA
incident, and that he had personally warned the TACA captain no less than three
separate times that the storm ahead of him was severe (can't remember what level
it was, but it was high) and that it probably contained embedded hail, but
that the captain had ignored the warnings and had flown directly into the
storm.
Point of the story: Even seasoned, professional
pilots do stupid things on occasion.
June 7, 2009
For more information about Air France 447
I have been preoccupied, or out of range, in the week since this disaster occurred and so hadn't read up on it. But here, for anyone who doesn't know about it, is a source that establishes beyond question one crucial point about the accident, and points to informed discussions of the many other aspects that are for now unknowable.
The source is this long and extraordinarily detailed dispatch by Tim Vasquez, of Weather Graphics in Oklahoma. Vasquez is a meteorologist, and his post is full of "SKEW-T" charts and other arcana that make me nostalgic for the rituals of "weather planning" from my flying days. But even for those baffled by the details, his sequence of charts -- based on very ambitious matching of flight-track data with a variety of innovative weather re-creations -- make this fact clear: AF 447 was passing directly through a large and powerful tropical thunderstorm when it stopped transmitting data (and presumably crashed).
This is Vasquez's Figure 12, showing the plane's likely path through Vasquez's recreated radar model of the storm. He requests on his site that some other charts, including the very clarifying Figure 13, not be copied elsewhere, because they "represent too much
original work." Fair enough. Check for yourself.
An emphasis on the weather as the proximate factor in the crash is important in deflecting attention from some early speculation about meteors, inherent wiring problems in the Airbus, and so on. But it leads to two other major areas of uncertainty, which might be resolved if the "black box" is recovered or might never be known for sure.
One is why the plane ended up inside the thunderstorm. Even big, powerful airliners do everything they can to avoid flying through thunderclouds. Radar problems? (Onboard radar gives a useful but imperfect view of oncoming weather.) Some other reason? No one knows now.
The other is how, exactly, the storm may have brought the plane down -- since most airliners survive such encounters, hard as they try to avoid them. Structural breakup, caused by extreme turbulence? (Imagine ocean liners or freighters having their hulls cracked by hitting huge waves in just the wrong way.) Devastating hail destroying the multiple "pitot tubes" -- the devices airplanes use to measure their airspeed, without which neither the autopilot nor the real pilots can function normally, in turn leading to catastrophic failure of guidance systems? Lightning doing damage in some unusual way, since airplanes are usually designed to withstand it? Some other factor? All this is now unknown. But the Vasquez site will point you toward as much extra discussion as you want. (For even more, the AF447 discussion thread here, on the generally entertaining Professional Pilots' Rumor Network, or PPRuNe.)
Thanks to Parker Donham for the Vasquez lead.
May 22, 2009
Now I truly feel like Mr. Beijing
I know people who've lived here for decades, for their entire lives, and have not had the full immersion in Beijing-ology that I have recently been exposed to: an air journey from Nanyuan Airport!
"Thirteen kilometers south of Tian'anmen, deep in Fentgai district, likes the purgatory of Beijing air travel: Nanyuan Airport. Only travelers with frightening karmic debt end up here -- and all clients of China United Airlines, formerly a military carrier, which bases its operations at Nanyuan."
Probably I have the karmic debt, and for sure I was traveling on CUA -- but I found the experience weirdly charming. It was like a little trip back into the Beijing I first saw in the 1980s: an airport in the middle of a rural neighborhood, trees all around the runways, little hutongs and five-story Mao-era apartments just outside the airport fence. Few intrusions of modernity, like: taxicabs with meters (you bargain) or the for-sissies effect of translated signage. This is definitely not the new Beijing Capital Airport. (Below, my fellow travelers for Linyi, headed toward our CUA airplane on the tarmac at Nanyuan. Linyi, in Shandong province, is another of those Chinese cities few foreigners have heard of but is larger than nearly any city in the US.)
I'll take my nostalgia wherever I can find it. This was an unexpected dose.
May 17, 2009
Finale on Colgan / Buffalo crash
I recognize that it is both heartbreaking and potentially cruel to keep going into details of what exactly led to the commuter-plane crash in February that killed all 49 people aboard the airplane and one person on the ground. (Previously here.)
But this story in The Buffalo News, based on the previous week's Federal investigative hearings, clears up one question and raises others about the flight crew's performance.
The newly answered question is why the plane's airspeed had decreased so much that an automatic "stick-shaker" warning was triggered, indicating that an aerodynamic stall was imminent. Because the earliest reports mentioned that the accident took place in cold and cloudy conditions, I had assumed that ice on the wings and airframe was slowing the plane down.
But according to NTSB evidence, the effect of icing was minimal. Instead, the flight crew had deliberately or inadvertently slowed the plane themselves, by pulling the throttle back to nearly the "flight idle" position -- and leaving it there. Reduced power is normal when descending or deliberately slowing for an approach, but apparently the power was left too low for too long as the plane's speed decayed to a dangerously low level.
The extraordinary NTSB animation of the flight's last 2 minutes and 39 seconds dramatizes how it happened. At time 1:40, the plane begins slowing from its cruise speed of about 185 knots. By 2:04 -- with the autopilot holding a constant altitude and the power setting still low -- it had slowed all the way down to 140 knots. That is where the power should have come back in, because the plane had reached its proper approach speed and shouldn't safely go much slower. But the crew left the power at idle, and within four seconds the plane was slowing below 130 knots - at which point the "stick shaker" gave its warning and, tragically, the pilot reacted in exactly the wrong way. The animation shows how quickly this all could happen, and what it looks like when a plane goes into aerodynamic "stall."
The effect of the pilot's wrong reaction to the stall warning has been frequently discussed in the wake of these hearings. The inattention to approach speed is in a way more puzzling, since it was not an instantaneous, instinctive thing.
About the public hearings on the terrible crash in Buffalo three months ago, in which 50 people died:
- Authoritative wrapup of the situation here by Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, who has had well-informed stories on this topic from the beginning.
- This more-complete information supports the hypothesis Pasztor raised early on, as discussed previously here, that the cause of the crash was a basic and fatal failure of airmanship. That is, at a moment when saving the airplane would have required pushing the plane's nose down -- to regain airspeed and avert an aerodynamic stall -- the pilot apparently fought the autopilot, which was trying to push the nose down, and succeeded in pulling the nose up. This further reduced airspeed and, apparently, put the plane into a full stall, at which point it stopped flying and fell to the ground. If you're not 100% confident on the difference between aerodynamic "stalls" and normal stalls, see the note after the jump.*
- The complete transcript of over-the-airwaves transmissions and in-cockpit chatter, available in PDF from the WSJ site here, has the intrinsic horrific fascination of any document of this sort. You know you are observing the routine preoccupations and chit-chat of people who don't realize, as you do, that they are in their final moments of life. I don't share the total astonishment of some commentary about how much of the en route talk is "unprofessional" -- about career plans and family problems and the rest. Given how things turned out, any banter whatsoever now looks very bad. But none of it would have mattered save for the one horrible error in judgment and reaction. Had the pilot pushed forward on the stick rather than pulled back, in all likelihood it would have been another normal flight -- albeit in rough winter conditions -- and he and everyone else would now be going about their regular lives.
- Of course the big question is how much the loosey-goosey atmosphere in the cockpit had to do with that awful error. Miles O'Brien, a pilot and ex-correspondent for CNN, has his thoughts on the subject here.
- This is NOT crash related, but for a way to see what it is like to descend into a cloud bank on an IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) landing, check out this YouTube video taken from inside the cockpit of a Cirrus SR-22 in the last three minutes of its approach to runway 16R at Van Nuys airport. (The Cirrus is a four-seat single-engine plane of the type that, as it happens, Miles O'Brien flies and that I used to own and fly before coming to China.) The shot does not concentrate on the instrument panel during the descent, which is what the pilot is obsessively scanning when he can't see anything outside the window. Also,the propeller appears to "stop" or move jerkily at times, just because of a strobe effect with the camera. But the beginning and end of the clip conveys something most passengers never see: how it looks to enter the clouds, and then finally to see the runway -- in this case, underneath quite a low cloud ceiling. Really, watch this and you'll have an idea of the mantra drummed into your head a million times in instrument-flight training: that you've got to watch the instruments and trust the instruments, because there is no other guide to where you're headed.
(UPDATE: YouTube appears to be getting Firewalled again in China, as happens from time to time. I posted this link while using a VPN, as I do most of the time to get around the firewall. But after hearing complaints from others, I turned the VPN off and couldn't reach YouTube from Beijing. Oh well.)
- Speaking of runway 16R at Van Nuys Airport, here is the site for a movie called One Six Right, about that very runway and the activity that surrounds it. It's for sale on DVD rather than free download, but it is visually very rich, eye-opening, and fascinating to watch. It also talks about all the routine safety measures that are normally built into aviation, and which in this Buffalo case didn't prevent a huge tragedy.
Here's the news that will make it all worthwhile! According to Mary Grady of AVweb, the easiest (legal) way for Americans to get to Cuba is, under new rules, to fly their own little planes there. Story here.
This has been theoretically possible for a long time, and in 2005, just before coming to China, I spent weeks trying to satisfy the Cuban and U.S. paperwork and preclearance requirements for flying a Cirrus SR-20 to Havana on a Christmas trip. I finally ran out of patience and time. But now...
Grady's podcast interview with the CEO of the company organizing the trips is here; that company's site is here. And for lessons there are little airports all over the place in the US. I'd be signing up for the trip if I were on that side of the world. Just trying to be constructive here.
April 26, 2009
Tech and cultural followups on that Air China flight
Two days ago I mentioned the strange results when an Air China flight headed for Beijing was instead diverted to Tianjin. To anyone who receives these posts by email, the results must have seemed even stranger than they were. Because of a glitch in our web set-up, only the first third of the post went out, omitting everything in the "after the jump" section. Sorry! The full version is available here. (Hint: if you saw the picture of a crash involving a "bread box" taxi, you saw the whole thing.)
Several people who were blessed in receiving the full report challenged its main hypothesis -- which, in a nutshell, was that the Chinese traveling public had learned not to waste energy getting furious about things that were entirely out of their control. Two reactions below.
From reader David:
I enjoyed your post about Chinese having "the serenity to accept the
things [they] can't change," though your hypothesis may need some honing.
A few years ago I was on a plane that landed in Zhengzhou due to a cracked
windshield. We were stuck in Zhengzhou for over 12 hours - including a time in
the middle when we were bussed to a hotel - and the entire time the passengers
berated the Air China reps for not being able to provide information as to when
we would be leaving except that we would not have to wait overnight. At times the
Air China reps were essentially surrounded by a scrum of passengers all yelling
until finally at about 4am we were able to get back on the plane.
I've seen airport rage in the States but never with that kind of herd
mentality, though I do appreciate the fact that Chinese seem to be able to yell
and create a disturbance without actually being all that mad down inside. There
were moments of levity among the passengers in between the rage. Perhaps the
facts in my experience were different enough to give the passengers the sense
that they could control the outcome of the situation whether true or not. Also,
the youtube of the Hong Kong woman going apeshit when she missed her plane
comes to mind. [More about the Hong Kong episode here.]
Next, PT Black, of Shanghai, sends a long and interesting report with a political edge. It begins this way:
Your comments about the delayed flight from SZ to BJ strike a nerve,
though, because just last week I had a very different experience flying
from Chengdu to Shanghai, also on Air China.
It continues after the jump. If you don't see anything more, it means that our RSS system is still messed up. Hope not! ____
In case you haven't heard quite enough about the King Air landing....
... you have come to the right place. For completeness' sake, three more very informative links, the first two of them from immediately after the flight last week:
1) From the federal government's FocusFAA site, interviews with and pictures of the Ft. Myers controllers whose voices you hear on the tapes of the final minutes of the flight.
2) Also from Focus FAA, an interview with the passenger-pilot himself, Doug White.
3) From the unauthorized FAA Follies site, this very informative post by controller Paul Cox. Worth reading for several reasons -- among them the controller mood revealed in the comments; Cox's arguments about how the FAA needs to change under Obama; and his explanation of the mentality with which controllers should face this kind of life-or-death emergency. Cox uses an analogy to sports, saying that as a kid he was only a so-so baseball player:
One thing I didn't really understand was how the coach used to say that you had to be out there WANTING the ball to be hit towards you, because in the infield, I didn't....
One dirty little secret about controllers is that for the vast majority of us, when we hear someone say "emergency", we WANT to be the one plugged in and working that sector or position. We WANT to have someone call with a wing on fire or an engine out or lost or stuck on top of clouds, so we get something interesting and captivating to do while we're plugged in.
Yeah, we consider a "save" to be just part of the job, just another day's work, and it is... but every truly good controller I know WANTS to be in that chair when that call comes in. (And as a side note, to the weak sticks and trainees out there... if you don't want those emergency calls, well, that's a good sign that ATC is probably not the job for you. For the sake of the flying public, go do something else, okay?)
Until I became a controller, and had that almost-jealous feeling watching someone work an emergency, I didn't really get what the coach meant when he said you gotta WANT the tough situation placed in your hands. Now I know just what that feels like.
As far as I am concerned, there is such a thing as Enough about this case, and it's now been reached. (But thanks to John Dowd for these links.)
Back to Beijing #2 (better news, Air China dept)
Twenty-plus years ago, traveling around China by air was anything but a peace-of-mind experience. The planes were mainly leftover Soviet junkers; the amenities were sparse; the general atmosphere called to mind Indiana Jones.
I've done a lot of crisscrossing of China by airlines these past few years, on carriers as big and established as Air China and as exotic as Spring Airlines and Deer. (Note for the uninitiated: never, ever get Air China and China Airlines mixed up. The first is the flag carrier of the People's Republic of China. The second is from the Republic of China, aka Taiwan.) Flights going out of either Beijing or Shanghai are usually late, but that's hardly unique to China. Overall, it's less stressful than the standard airport/airline experience in the US.
Last night, my wife and I were taking an evening flight from Shenzhen to Beijing. Departure 6pm, scheduled arrival 9:15. As we got close to Beijing, the ride became very bumpy, and then a bright light illuminated the whole cabin, simultaneous with a big BOOM. A bolt of lightning had hit the wing! Attention-getting but not necessarily dangerous: planes are designed to handle this, I explained to my wife and surrounding folk, in my most patronizing "let the pilot tell you" mode.
Then my wife noticed on the "your plane in flight" GPS map that we seemed to be heading away from Beijing and toward Tianjin, near the coast. I was warming up for another patronizing "let's settle down" reply, when the attendant came on and said that because "weather in Beijing is bad" (literally "天气在北京不好") we were indeed headed for Tianjin.
From an aviation point of view, what happened after that was more or less normal. The plane landed in Tianjin, maybe 75 miles from Beijing, the standard diversion site in situations like these. I had dreaded the idea of everyone being offloaded there and bused back to Beijing, along a notoriously jam-packed and dangerous road. Instead, periodically the attendants and then the captain came on the radio to say that we were going to wait things out and eventually fly back.
King Air pilot-passenger landing: yet more tape, yet more heroism all around
Via the Naples News in Florida, this update on the first 14 minutes of transmissions between Douglas White, the low-time single-engine pilot who found himself in control of a twin-engine King Air whose pilot had just died, and the controllers who talked him safely to the ground.
The segment released last week covered the final minutes of the flight, when White brought the plane in for a safe landing. These preceding minutes are if anything more dramatic. They open with White's desperate "emergency" call and also include the coordinating actions between Miami and Ft. Myers controllers to try to get White the information he needed. (Last week's audio is here, in a full 21-minute version that includes dead-air time with no transmissions; the new portion is here.) As the Naples News story says about the team effort recorded in this new tape:
Miami air traffic controller, Lisa Grimm, a commercial-rated
pilot with multi-engine ratings, scrambled to coordinate the emergency
with the Fort Myers TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) and with
the other controllers at the Miami air traffic control center...
Fort Myers air traffic controllers Brian Norton and Dan Favio took
over for Grimm, when White's plain reentered Fort Myers TRACON airspace...
Favio then contacted friend and King Air pilot Kari Sorenson in
Connecticut, to help relay the necessary procedure information to
White, so he could land the plane.
That was the hardest part of the ordeal, according to FAA officials,
because the information transfer needed to occur by relaying the
information among four people
The full sequence of recordings make clear the calm, inventive, above-and-beyond, and yes heroic efforts of everyone involved in the process, notably including the controllers. It is too bad the tapes were released separately because they are part of one narrative and emotional whole. Some of the events and tone in the final-approach tape seem quite different in light of what came before.
For instance, the amazing sangfroid of White as he brought the plane to a landing is a credit both to him and to the reassurances and detailed instructions he had received in the newly-released tape. The surreally calm and casual tone of the final-approach controller also seems to follow naturally from the initial segment and be exactly right in the circumstances. Air traffic controllers are not, as a rule, themselves pilots, and talking an inexperienced pilot down to the ground is something they are not trained to or expected to do. That they accomplished it in this case is a credit to everyone involved -- White and all the controllers. Any pilot who got in trouble would thank heaven for this kind of help.
April 17, 2009
Controllers speak on the King Air landing
I know this is not the major news story of the day. But it is what I find now jamming my email inbox, on reconnecting from the frontier of China, so I will note it for the record.
I have always liked, admired, relied on, gotten along with, and been a supporter of air traffic controllers. In the recent passenger-pilot landing mentioned here and here, I first noted that "the calm of all involved is incredible" and then, in a second installment, that the controller involved "was faultlessly calm, supportive, and reassuring, and for that he deserves great praise." I also quoted emails from two pilots about what they noticed in the exchange, including info that they as pilots would have expected to get.
I have received a very large number of responses from controllers who were anything but faultlessly calm. The majority of them take the quoted remarks as an outright slam on the controller, which was not at all the intent. One recurrent theme was: Well, asshole, I'd like to see how you'd have done under pressure! As I've made clear each time, I could hardly imagine handling things as well as the man who landed the plane, Douglas White. As for the controller: I respect people who do this job, and his calm played a very important part in this happy outcome. During probably the worst experience I've had aloft, which involved a thunderstorm over upstate New York a decade ago, the controllers from the Fort Drum site were an enormous practical and psychological help. As I called their supervisor to say, with gratitude, after I landed.
Fortunately one extensive email did arrive from a senior controller who is in print the way I assume him to be in the control room: calm, systematic, etc. His name is Paul Cox, of the FAA Follies site. He is based in Seattle and stresses that while he is speaking as a controller he most definitely not speaking for the FAA. This is the approach I've always respected from controllers. (You other guys, read and learn!) His comments below. Let me say, again, everyone involved performed very well -- in the controller's case, through the combo of projecting an air of perfect cool and finding a King Air pilot to ask questions of. In addition, the pilot performed almost miraculously. Over now to Paul Cox, who says:
Read your recent blog entries about the incident in Florida, and a few of the comments you published deserve some info. [Very long dispatch after the jump, but full of interesting details.]
Another view of the impressive passenger-pilot landing
From Dave Kammeyer, a pilot-reader who was more impressed by the pilot-hero in this recent case than with the much-celebrated air traffic controller.
I heard the audio of the King Air pilot the other day, and found it very interesting. You didn't mention it in your post, but frankly, when I imagined what would happen in a similar situation, I thought that the controller would be a lot more helpful.
It was like pulling teeth just to get a proper approach speed from the controller. As a pilot of little single engine aircraft myself, I was imagining the information I would need to get the plane on the ground, and things that I would want from the controller would be:
1. Flap and gear deployment speeds, which eventually were provided 2. The appropriate flap settings 3. The appropriate power setting for approach, which was never provided 4. How to operate the various controls, which the pilot figured out without any help from the controller
When I read the press accounts of the incident, they were really just NATCA [air traffic controllers' union] press releases, which heaped huge praise on the controller, who kept his cool, but failed to provide timely critical information. In this case I think that basically all of the credit belongs to the pilot, who figured out how to make an adequate approach without much help.
Imagining the situation where a non-pilot passenger was forced to take control in the same situation, I don't think that this controller could have gotten them on the ground. I don't understand why they didn't patch a King Air pilot onto the radio directly...
I will admit that some of the same thoughts occurred to me when listening. The controller was faultlessly calm, supportive, and reassuring, and for that he deserves great praise. But the real above-and-beyond performance here was by Douglas White, who suddenly was in charge of a high-powered twin-engine plane with a dead man slumped across the controls to his left. If Tom Wolfe were re-writing the intro to The Right Stuff, which so memorably begins with evocation of the slow, confident drawl of airline pilots who can't be ruffled by anything, he could do worse than to recreate this recording of a man landing an airplane he had never flown before, while returning from his brother's funeral, with his loved ones aboard.
Update: Jorge Guajardo, a pilot-friend who in his day job is Mexico's Ambassador in Beijing, notices one other intriguing element of the recording.
Dramatic listening: passenger-pilot landing the plane
For real-life drama fans, the air traffic control tapes of Douglas White being talked through the landing of a King Air airplane, after the professional pilot dropped dead at the controls, are riveting and, to put it mildly, admirable. An AOPA Online interview with White, including links to the recording plus the picture below, is here. The recording itself is here.
As news stories pointed out, White had a pilot's certificate but had done his limited amount of flying in an entirely different kind of airplane -- with one engine rather than the King Air's two, with different avionics and control systems, with much slower operating speeds. Plus, he had flown previously from the left seat -- the normal seat for the pilot -- rather than the right ("shotgun"), where he happened to be sitting when the pilot died.
In one sense landing any kind of airplane is the same, in that you're gradually slowing the aircraft as it comes closer to the ground. The most crucial information, which varies by model of plane, is the right speeds for the different stages of the approach. The speed at which you should initially descend. The speed below which you can safely lower the landing gear and the first "notch" of flaps. The speed at which you can fully extend the flaps. The "final approach" speed as you're bringing the airplane right down to the ground. The stalling speed, which you must always keep the plane above so that it doesn't just fall. In the recording, this info is what White keeps asking of the controller -- about an airplane whose basic up/down fast/slow right/left controls he understands but whose speeds he doesn't know.
The calm of all involved is incredible. All the more so after the emotional relief/breakdown you briefly hear from the pilot after he and his family are safely on the ground.
April 12, 2009
Alan Klapmeier on hope for general aviation
One of the heroes of my book Free Flight, and of this excerpted Atlantic cover story, was Alan Klapmeier, who with his brother Dale founded and ran the Cirrus Design aircraft company of Duluth, MN. Ten years ago, when I was spending time with them in a mainly-vacant hangar in Duluth, they had not delivered the first airplane to the first customer and were in promising-startup mode. Through most of the years since then, their mainstay SR-22 propeller plane has been the most popular single-engine plane in the world. More than 4,000 of them are in service in North America, Europe, South America, Australia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other places too. Like all airplane companies from Boeing on down, Cirrus has had to cut way back in the past year.
Manufacturing people are not always eloquent about their work and its implications. Alan Klapmeier is a dramatic exception. He is an interviewer's dream: able -- and all too willing! -- to talk for hours about why he made this decision versus that one, why he believes in his work, what his vision of the future is and how he plans to get there.
Klapmeier is still chairman but no longer CEO of Cirrus, for reasons I'd know more about if I were on scene to talk with him. But via the Cirrus owners' site I found this link to a speech he delivered recently at the Atlanta Aero Club. Index of Aero Club speeches here; direct link to video of Klapmeier's appearance here. From the video:
People who are interested in aviation will be interested in the whole hour-plus presentation. Klapmeier talks about the real-world barriers to the expansion of general aviation; Cirrus's upcoming models including its new jet; the problem of icing in small planes; and many other topics.
People who don't care about aviation but are interested in human nature, innovation, technical progress, and the kind of advances on which future U.S. prosperity depends might want to watch at least a few minutes. I think they give exposure to an impressive person who can not only "do" but also talk engagingly about what he is doing. We're used to encountering this kind of person in. say, the biotech or software world. This is a sample from the world of producing tangible, highly-complex physical objects -- working, by the way, in the only manufacturing category (aerospace) in which the U.S. has long produced a significant trade surplus.
The first eight or nine minutes, in which he discusses why small aircraft became an oddball specialist taste, give an illustration. (Forgive the first 45 seconds, in which he is fiddling with the projector.) From about minute 20 through minute 30 he talks about the problem of icing and pilot safety. From minute 30 onward, he talks about Cirrus's new "personal jet." From minute 45 onwards, an entrepreneur's perspective of Wall Street, derivatives, etc. But right at minute 37:00 through about 43:00 you get a full view of the entrepreneur's passion that I encountered when I first met him. This may give a little taste of why I thought I had come across an interesting story after that first visit to Duluth.
April 6, 2009
A good web site for difficult times
It's Lane Wallace's "No Map. No Guide. No Limits." here.
Lane is well known in the aviation world as a columnist for Flying magazine and author of books on adventure, science, exploration, and so forth. I've known her as a friend over the last decade, mainly through shared flying-and-writing interests. (As noted earlier, not that weird a combination of tastes.) Here's Lane, during some excursion, from her site:
As she has made clear in her writing over the years and in this new site, she has chosen a life of adventure partly in response to personal setbacks and losses. The premise of the site is related to Andrew Sullivan's popular "The View from Your Recession" feature: that many, many people have suddenly seen the "certainties" of their life disappear. The site is meant to discuss the ramifications of and best responses to this fact. And her relatively brief book "Surviving Uncertainty," available as a free .PDF download from the site, talks in detail about how to cope with situations in which you are plunged into the unknown. She uses illustrations from flying and mountain climbing to derive principles that would apply to, say, being laid off or losing a loved one. Worth checking out.
March 30, 2009
Outflanking the cheese beagles
Barring some truly startling new development, this will be the final dispatch about the beagle-enhanced war on cheese that Chinese customs and immigration officials are waging at the spiffy new Terminal Three of Beijing's Capital Airport. For the early chronicles of this war, start here.
A frequent and experienced visitor to China, who prefers to remain anonymous, has found a way to avoid the hostilities. The secret is to come into Beijing aboard Northwest, Continental, Korean, Aeroflot, or one of the other airlines whose international flights land not at Terminal Three but at PEK's plain old unmodernized Terminal Two. My travel expert reports:
I just flew into Beijing on the evening Northwest flight Monday night. They still use the old terminal, and there were no dogs nor, for that matter, anyone looking at luggage, just a guard at the door to keep the people outside from coming in to meet their friends.
So at least for now, that's probably the way to bring in your contraband.
The writer is a distinguished academic. Good to see book-learnin' being put to practical use.
For the record, the human aspects have been clarified. The airplane was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman from Redlands, California. Nine of the people killed were his family members: two daughters, their husbands, and the two families' total of five small children -- the owner's grandchildren. The other five people aboard were the pilot and another young family. (Fourteen people in all, not 17 as in some early reports.)
Again with the caveat that no one knows what happened, the fact that there were so many people aboard magnifies the tragedy but would not seem to have caused a crash. If an airplane is too heavy or has the weight misallocated between the front and rear of the plane, that problem usually shows up on takeoff or early in the flight. (As, for instance, in the crash that killed the singer Aaliyah and eight others in 2001, when the plane was too heavy and its center-of-gravity was too far aft. ) Too much weight can affect the way an airplane handles in turns and increase the risk that while turning it would "stall," or fall out of the sky. But with so little information, any such train of thought is pure speculation.
Deepest sympathies to the families and communities affected by this tragedy.
March 22, 2009
About this tragic plane crash in Montana
Obviously little is known for sure, except that it looks like a terrible tragedy involving a large number of children. Condolences to all affected. Three quick points.
1) The airplane in question, a Pilatus PC12, is a well-known, reliable, admired, sturdy craft. I have a friend who flew his family all around the world in one. I have flown several times in his airplane and once in another PC12. Picture below of a PC12 is from a European site; a picture of the airplane that reportedly crashed, N128CM, is on FlightAware.com, here.
2) The PC12 is a big, comfortable, spacious airplane. But if there really were 17 people aboard, that would be a lot. Cutaway view of interior in "executive configuration," from West Branch Air services, below. I believe that in other configurations it can be certified for a total of 12, two pilots and 10 passengers. Even if passengers are small and light, so total weight is not an issue, certification limits usually depend on the number of separate seats and seat belts available:
3) I have landed at all the airports involved in this flight -- Vacaville, Oroville, Bozeman, and Butte -- but particularly noted the flight's origin at the beginning of the day: Redlands, California (my home town). If it really was a plane full of kids on a skiing trip, this will be a community-wide disaster for some small California community. We don't know which one yet. Sympathies to whoever the grieving town and families turn out to be.
March 20, 2009
Harmonic convergence! Two of my obsessions in one place!
At last, my interests in (a) innovative small-airplane technology, and (b) the evolution of China's economy, come together in one bit of news.
According to Aero-News.Net, in this dispatch, the next owner of the assets, technology, designs, etc of the defunct Eclipse Aviation company could be -- the Chinese government. Rather, the state-run Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, CACC, which is in charge of the country's ambitions to have a counterpart to Boeing and Airbus.
Now, if we could only work in a beer, boiled-frog, or USB-related angle, I would have the world's most completely satisfying news item. And even with just the China+aviation elements, it's fascinating in its implications.
March 18, 2009
On the brighter side: some positive aviation news
I have a long queue of airplane-related items to work through - latest excesses of Security Theater, the still-toppling dominoes of Eclipse Aviation, etc -- but right at the moment, here is a sign of undeterred innovators in action.
A flying car! Or, a drivable airplane! Either way, earlier this month the Terrafugia "Transition" took its first flight.
YouTube footage of the first flight below. [UPDATE: Video has apparently been pulled.] Below that, a surreal "formation flight" shot. I like being in China because it's today's land of excitement, but it is good to see some excitement brewing back home.
Formation flight:
March 5, 2009
More on Newt and airplanes
If you'd like to hear more about Newt Gingrich's plan to "reform" air-traffic control from someone who really knows the subject, I heartily recommend this entry from Don Brown's generally admirable Get the Flick site. Brown is a retired air-traffic controller with a knack for explaining technical matters clearly - and with an attitude, which makes reading his accounts fun. I think he is closer to Andrew Sullivan's original mockery of Newt than to my more respectful reference. In any case, definitely worth considering if you care about the topic.
March 3, 2009
Let a thousand-and-one flowers bloom at the Atlantic!
(Following the previous thousand blooming flowers, here.)
I hear via my aviation grapevine that my colleague Andrew Sullivan is making fun of Newt Gingrich in general, and in specific for this idea about modernizing the US air-traffic control system:
[Newt says:] "One of the projects I'm going to launch -- we don't have a name for it yet -- is an air-traffic modernization project... You can do a space-based air-traffic-control system with half the current number of air-traffic controllers, increase the amount of air traffic in the northeast by 40 percent, allow point-to-point flights without the controllers having to have highways in the sky, and reduce the amount of aviation fuel by 10 percent." [Andrew asks:]
Why would I be even more terrified to get on a plane after that "reform"?
As for making fun of Newt in general, have at it! But on this idea, he turns out to be saying something smart.
To play the role of Mr. Gradgrind for a moment, if you're terrified getting on a plane, it has to be for reasons beyond the realm of the statistical or the "reality-based," since on average this is about the safest way you can spend your time. Often entire years pass without a single death from a crash on US airlines - something that can't be said of riding in a car, walking down the street, taking a bath, lying in your own bed, etc. Yes, when things go wrong, they're grisly, but traffic deaths, random murders, bathtub drownings, etc are also bad ways to go.
(And yes, yes, I realize that Andrew is exaggerating for effect.)
Still, there are risks both real and perceived in flying. The system Gingrich is talking about is designed to reduce at least the real ones.
What he has in mind is no doubt a variant of what is called "NextGen," for Next Generation Transportation. It involves a satellite-based navigation system (think: GPS) called ADS-B. Not everyone agrees on every detail of these new systems. But the approach as a whole constitutes a mature, vetted, sensible, picked-over-for-years proposal that has most everything going for it except the long, slow process of getting it accepted and implemented. I described its potential back in 2001 in this Atlantic cover story and the related book Free Flight. More available here, here, here, and here.
As for why this system is more modern: Today's air traffic control system is essentially like a telephone network in which you must ring up a central switchboard and ask an operator's help in placing each call. The new system would allow a lot more automated routing - with less needless, switchboard-operator-type human intervention but (as with anything in aviation) human and automated safety measures piled on triple-depth.
As for why it could be more efficient and ultimately safer: Today's system funnels a great deal of traffic through a small number of specified routes - which therefore become the only crowded places in the sky. A newer system would allow more planes to take a variety of courses, staying out of each other's way. (It doesn't solve the problem of too many airplanes wanting to land at the same few over-crowded airports, but as a side effect it is designed to make smaller, under-used airports more attractive and practical.) In a sense it's like the difference between cars, which can take a variety of routes through town, and trolleys, which go where the tracks are laid and nowhere else. I am oversimplifying, but there actually is something to Gingrich's plan. It's part of what is good about him, not what's bad.
Should this be the basis of the GOP's new program? They could do a lot worse -- and, as I'm sure Andrew agrees, they probably will.
February 20, 2009
More on China-US climate issues, more on F-22
- About China and the US cooperating on environmental/climate issues:
Yesterday I mentioned this detailed and valuable report from the Asia Society and Pew. It turns out that Brookings has just done something similar. Summary here, with links to PDF versions in both English and Chinese. Transcript of event unveiling the report here. I haven't studied the report carefully, but anything in this vein has to be a plus.
- About Mark Bowden and the F-22:
Yesterday I said that I enjoyed Mark Bowden's current article but disagreed with its implied endorsement of the F-22 fighter plane. It turns out that Sam Roggeveen, of the Lowy Institute's "The Interpreter" site in Sydney, has already taken up this topic and gotten a reply from Mark. Roggeveen's initial critique here; Mark Bowden's response here. I should note that, like Roggeveen, I did a double-take at the sentence in the original article saying that at least five other countries were now flying planes that matched or bettered the F-15. For context on that point, it's worth looking here. Also, this Reuters story from three months ago talks about the real-world difficulties in maintaining the "stealth" systems for radar-evasion that are supposed to be one of the F-22's main virtues.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, Atlantic-style (F-22 dept)
My Atlantic colleague Mark Bowden has produced another of his riveting narratives in the new issue of the magazine. His article is about the former US Air Force fighter pilot who is among the last to have encountered -- and beaten -- enemy airplanes in action. As Bowden points out, American pilots rarely have a chance to demonstrate their prowess any more, because no one is crazy enough to challenge them.
As a narrative and portrait of fascinating characters, this story is great. But for the record, I disagree with its implication that if the US doesn't build more F-22 fighter planes, it will pay the price in pilots' blood. Mark's case for the plane is more sophisticated than what the Air Force has typically claimed. His story doesn't say that if we don't build the F-22 we can't defend the nation. He says it's a choice between paying the price for defense in money -- or in pilots' lives.
Perhaps. I'm glad Mark wrote the story, because what to do about the F-22 is one of the next big defense decisions the Obama Administration must make. But as you consider his argument, you might also consider some of the material below, which offers other ways to think about the trade-offs this airplane represents.
Extra reading possibilities:
- In "Uncle Sam Buys an Airplane," in the Atlantic in 2002, I described the genesis of the "Joint Strike Fighter," now known as the F-35. Its whole rationale was the fear that the F-22 would become so expensive that the U.S. would never be able to buy and field more than a tiny force. The F-35 has had problems of its own since then, and the contract officer at the center of my story has since been jailed for corruption on an unrelated matter, but the economic questions remain. (Excerpt after the jump.)
- In "F-22, Fact vs Fiction," published in 2000, the fighter pilot and aircraft designer Everest Riccioni assessed the F-22's abilities relative to the F-15's and other planes and argued that in the real circumstances of air combat, it would offer few advantages to pilots that would justify its costs -- and that the excessive cost of the airplane jeopardized pilots, since it meant too small a fighting force. The link above opens his paper as a Word document.
- in "Preying on the Taxpayer," published in 2006, the Project on Government Oversight analyzed budgetary and performance questions about the F-22.
- In the new book "America's Defense Meltdown" (described here, no longer available for free download but in bookstores shortly -- and ready now for Kindle) Pierre M. Sprey and Robert Dilger argue that the US could best guarantee air superiority by canceling further F-22 purchases and instead choosing a radically less expensive alternative, which they describe in detail. Excerpts after the jump.
- And just as a bonus, if you've ever wondered what it is like to sit in an F-15 during an hour-long aerial combat drill, well, wonder no longer.
Please do read Mark Bowden's article, which you'll enjoy. Read these others too. Discuss and decide. That's why we're here!
UPDATE: Please see followup posts here and here. ____
One more possibility in the Buffalo crash: "tailplane stall"
Let me start with the same caution as in yesterday's item about this sad incident: it can take months or years to get the full explanation of an airplane crash, sometimes the real answer is never known, and any hypotheses now are tentative.
So my purpose yesterday was not to say definitively what had happened in the crash but instead simply to explain what a "stall" means in aviation, since the implications are so different from the normal sense of that term. And my purpose now is to explain the possibly complicating factor of a "tailplane stall," which is emerging in recent stories about the incident.
The "horizontal stabilizer," or tailplane, is the flat part of an airplane's empennage, or tail. (If this is not clear, check the NASA diagram here.) Like the wings of an airplane, the horizontal stabilizer is an aerodynamic surface, which provides lift. In essence, it is a wing mounted upside down. The curved, airfoil surface is on the bottom of the horizontal stabilizer, not the top as with a wing. The "lift" it provides is downward -- the purpose of which is to raise the nose of the plane. You can think of this like a see-saw: downward pressure at the back of the plane pushes the nose upward. This is necessary for reasons I won't get into, having to do with the center-of-gravity and center-of-lift of most airplanes.
When an airplane stalls, it is usually because the wings, which lift the aircraft as a whole, can no longer do so (as explained yesterday). This is a "wing stall," and when it happens the airplane stops flying and starts falling to the ground.
In an "tailplane stall," the upside-down wing at the back of the airplane can no longer do its job of "lifting" the tail down and thereby pulling the nose up. This usually happens because the tail becomes covered with ice. When it does, the airplane's nose suddenly pitches down. The airplane is still flying (since the wings still work) but is heading for the ground. This 23-minute video produced by NASA does a superb job of explaining the theory and practicalities of the problem. Also, it's a nice sample of the tone and approach of a lot of aviation-training material. (Other discussion of the video here and here.)
Here's why this matters. The WSJ report mentioned yesterday says that in the Buffalo flight's final seconds, the air crew pulled the plane's nose up as hard as they could. In "normal" stalling situations, this is exactly and catastrophically the wrong thing to do -- as every pilot knows through repetitive training. But in a tailplane stall, as the NASA video shows, pulling up is the right first thing to do. So if the pilots thought they were facing a tailplane stall, they could have -- mistakenly -- reacted in a way that made a normal, wing stall worse.
Other reports (including yesterday's in the NYT) suggest that tailplane icing is not normally a problem in the plane involved in this crash, a Dash-8, but that it is more common in the model in which the pilot had previously flown, a Saab 340. If this is true, it might suggest why the crew (may have) reacted in the wrong way for these circumstances. But here we enter the realm of speculation, subject to the caveats with which I began. It is a tragedy, which stalls in some form will probably help explain.
February 19, 2009
Alison Des Forges
Every person who died in the Buffalo airplane crash leaves behind grieving friends and family. I was saddened to learn of the loss of one person whom I knew only by reputation: Alison Des Forges, of Human Rights Watch, who had been a leading international figure in calling attention to the Rwandan genocide. This is old news to the world, but I learned it just now.
In 2001, the Atlantic ran Samantha Power's "Bystanders to Genocide." This passage describes Des Forges's reaction when she heard about the event in 1994 that touched off slaughter in Rwanda: the death of president Juvenal Habyarimana in, as it happens, an airplane crash:
America's best-informed Rwanda observer was not a government
official but a private citizen, Alison Des Forges, a historian and a
board member of Human Rights Watch,
who lived in Buffalo, New York. Des Forges had been visiting Rwanda
since 1963. She had received a Ph.D. from Yale in African history,
specializing in Rwanda, and she could speak the Rwandan language,
Kinyarwanda. Half an hour after the plane crash Des Forges got a phone
call from a close friend in Kigali, the human-rights activist Monique Mujawamariya.
Des Forges had been worried about Mujawamariya for weeks, because the
Hutu extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, had branded her "a
bad patriot who deserves to die." Mujawamariya had sent Human Rights
Watch a chilling warning a week earlier: "For the last two weeks, all
of Kigali has lived under the threat of an instantaneous, carefully
prepared operation to eliminate all those who give trouble to President
Habyarimana."
Now Habyarimana was dead, and Mujawamariya knew instantly that the
hard-line Hutu would use the crash as a pretext to begin mass killing.
"This is it," she told Des Forges on the phone. For the next
twenty-four hours Des Forges called her friend's home every half hour.
With each conversation Des Forges could hear the gunfire grow louder as
the militia drew closer. Finally the gunmen entered Mujawamariya's
home. "I don't want you to hear this," Mujawamariya said softly. "Take
care of my children." She hung up the phone.
The significance of new WSJ info about the Buffalo crash
In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, J. Lynn Lunsford and Andy Pasztor reported that investigators looking into the Colgan commuter-plane crash in Buffalo were beginning to think that the pilots' handling of the situation, rather than the intrinsic perils of "airframe icing" conditions, may have been the immediate cause of the tragedy. (Previously here; also, valuable posts here by Miles O'Brien and here by Patrick "Ask the Pilot" Smith of Salon.) The WSJ article, titled "Pilot Action May Have Led to Crash," quoted unnamed "people familiar with the situation" to this effect:
The commuter plane slowed to an unsafe speed as it approached the airport, causing an automatic stall warning, these people said. The pilot pulled back sharply on the plane's controls and added power instead of following the proper procedure of pushing forward to lower the plane's nose to regain speed, they said. He held the controls there, locking the airplane into a deadly stall, they added.
With all the usual caveats -- that it can take months or years to find out the real cause of airplane disasters, that sometimes the real cause is never known, that these unnamed sources might prove to be wrong, etc -- here is why this information could be significant. What follows is an Aerodynamics 101 explanation that would be obvious to people in the flying world but perhaps not so evident to the general reading public:
"Stall" is a very important word in aviation, but it means something entirely different from what most readers (or passengers) would assume. It has nothing to do with the operation of the power plant. That is, an airplane stall has nothing in common with an automotive stall. A car stalls when something goes wrong with the engine. An airplane stalls when something goes wrong with the flow of air over the wings. When birds flew into both engines of a USAir jet last month, the
engines lost power and stopped -- but the airplane didn't "stall."
The crucial point about aerodynamic stalls is that they occur when the wing's "angle of attack" into the air is too high. That is, the wing is angled so sharply into the oncoming wind that the air can no longer flow smoothly over the wing's top surface to generate lift. When the wings stop generating lift, the airplane becomes dead weight and falls right out of the sky.* A Wikipedia primer on the whole topic is here; a passage on "How a Wing is Flown" from Wolfgang Langewiesche's unsurpassed 1944 classic on airmanship, Stick and Rudder, can be found here,
via Google Books. (Yes, Wolfgang L. was the father of William
Langewiesche, now of Vanity Fair but for many years my Atlantic
colleague and flying mentor.)
For the pilot of any airplane, large or small, the practical implications of a stall center on whether you are pulling the airplane's nose up (by pulling the control wheel or stick backwards, toward your body) or pushing the nose down (by pushing the stick forward, away from you). Everyone who has ever flown an airplane has gone through stall-recovery drills. These involve climbing to a safe altitude; pulling the stick back more and more until you raise the nose so high and make the angle of attack so great that the airplane stalls and begins falling toward the earth; and then immediately pushing the stick forwardas the very first step in getting the airplane under control and flying again.
There are other parts of the recovery process, but "nose down," which means stick forward, is something you drill so many times that it's meant to become 100% reflexive. It is mildly unnatural -- when the plane is falling, the first thing you do is make sure the nose is pointing down -- but it is the only way to reduce the angle of attack, allow air to flow over the wings again, and turn what is a plummeting brick back into a flying machine. Think of the comparison with the "turn into the skid" advice that drivers get for handling a problem on icy roads. Everyone has heard this in driver's ed; a significant number of people have experienced it; virtually no one ever practices it. Even amateur pilots have practiced stall-recovery drills, starting with the all-important "nose down" step, many many times. The point is to make "nose down" second nature.
So if these reports stand up over time, and if the evidence ultimately shows that whoever was controlling the plane reacted in exactly the wrong way, it will be the rare case of a professional air crew, out of panic or for whatever reason, forgetting an elementary procedure that they certainly knew. After the USAir water-landing in the Hudson, many people observed that the casualty-free outcome was both an individual and a collective achievement. Individually, the air crew (pilot, copilot, attendants) reacted with supreme competence. Collectively, everyone involved did exactly what they had been trained to do. If what the WSJ says turns out to be what really happened, the Colgan-Buffalo crash will be a startling case of individual failure, which in turn will raise questions of how a professional air crew could have reacted this way. _____ * This Wikipedia graph gives an idea of how a stall develops -- and how it feels, when you're deliberately stalling an airplane in training drills.
As the angle of attack increases, the lift provided by the wings increases too. That is, as you pull the stick back, raising the nose of the plane and increasing the wings' angle of attack into the air, the airplane climbs. The further you pull the stick back, the greater the lift and the steeper the ascent -- up to a point. For the airfoil charted here, that point is an angle of attack of about 18 degrees. Beyond that critical stall angle, if you pull back further on the stick, the wind no longer flows smoothly over the wings. They suddenly stop developing lift, and the airplane simply falls. I've done that many times in training. Apparently in Buffalo it happened for real.
Update: After posting this, I saw an item from the WSJ's Scott McCartney making a similar point about the contrast between the airmanship on display in the USAir and Colgan episodes.
February 13, 2009
On the Buffalo airplane crash
For connectivity reasons, I am not in a position to write much about this tragedy. Thanks to this comprehensive post by Miles O'Brien, there's no need to. The analysis laid out here seems very, very convincing -- and does an artful job of balancing the necessary "it's too soon to be sure" caveats with the compelling "evidence strongly points in one direction" argument.
Many people know O'Brien from his CNN reports; though I don't know him personally, I think of him as a fellow Cirrus pilot -- he flies the same kind of small airplane I used to back in the US. Very much worth reading.
(Thanks to Jay Brodsky.)
January 26, 2009
Today's Security Theater update
Previously on the Security Theater concept here, here, here, and here, for starters.
1) From the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, or AOPA, a pro-small plane aviation lobbying group (of which I'm a member), indication that the Obama administration's general freeze on last-minute Bush regulations and diktats might stop implementation of one of the stupidest, least defensible, most purely theatric "security" measures, the creation of a permanent Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, over Washington DC. Yes, the Guantanamo orders are more important. But this could be significant too.
2) Conference summary, with video and links, from Cato's conference just before the inauguration on "Shaping the Obama Administration's Counterterrorism Strategy." Wide-ranging, useful to hear as the Obama team considers what, if anything, is worth preserving from the Bush "global war on terror." Useful complementary essay here.
3) Yesterday I drive to DC National Airport for the first time in more than a year and see the same big neon sign I remember so unfondly from days gone by. Security Threat Level: Orange.
Really, what is the point of this? 99.9% of the people who look at it don't even see it any more, since it's just part of the "boy who cried wolf" ignorable background. Anyone who does think about it has to wonder: is there a threat to the entire country? Just to Washington? Is there new information? Is there anything different I'm supposed to do? Does this sign have any purpose other than to make me just a little bit more fearful and a little bit more accepting of anything done in the name of "security"?
Yes, there are serious ongoing genuine threats to the safety of people in this country and many others, and we need to support all shrewd, effective measures to deter them. But does it occur to no one in the government that we do terrorists' work for them by making our own population cower all the time, rather than to be brave in the face of danger? Taking his lead from President Reagan, President Obama can say: "Transportation Security Administration, Tear Down This Sign!"
4) Someone has finally seen how security theater can become part of our economic stimulus plan. Playmobil is offering new action toys:
I grew up playing with little toy Army men who refought Gettysburg and Okinawa. My kids grew up with Star Wars action figures. Isn't it heartwarming to think of today's kids growing up with toy TSA security screeners! (Thanks to Gavin Bradley for this tip.)
January 23, 2009
Trouble in the software business: this time, it's serious!
Via my friend Bruce Williams, an accomplished aviator, flight instructor, and technology guy, I hear that the first-ever, 5000-person cuts Microsoft has just announced in its work force include the team responsible for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Williams himself, who was a major figure on that team across six versions of the program over 15 years, presented the news on his website under the headline: The End of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Of course there are other flight simulators. I've always loved X-Plane, even before its creator, Austin Meyer, started flying a real-world Cirrus airplane (fancier version of the kind I used to own). Still, there was something magical about even the earliest versions of Flight Simulator, with the familiar opening shot of a little plane ready to take off from the sadly now defunct Meigs Field in Chicago. At this fascinating site you can see screen shots from those embryonic versions, which provide a startling reminder of how much imagination you needed to apply when using the earliest computer games:
(See if you can detect any change in graphics in the intervening years: below is a screen shot of Flight Sim X, via Tom Bukowski at Smugmug.com:)
for
I don't mean to make light of real pain and hardship caused by software layoffs and those in all other industries. But the end of the FS era is poignant enough on its own to deserve a mention.
January 16, 2009
Two quick followups about the airplane in the Hudson
1) As mentioned yesterday, the captain of the airplane -- the one you can identify in the cockpit because he or she is in the lefthand seat, and the one you can identify in the terminal because (usually) he'll have four stripes on the epaulet or uniform sleeve rather than three for the first officer - is getting deserved credit for handling the situation with such coolheaded competence.
But, as mentioned in passing at the end of the previous note, he's not the only one who deserves praise. Another reason US airline travel is so safe is that flight crews -- typically, the two people in the cockpit plus the rest of the staff in the cabin, plus dispatchers and others on the ground -- are so systematically trained to support each other, work together, and check or offset each other's errors. Along with the cabin attendants and the New York rescue crews, the first officer, Jeff Skiles, undoubtedly played an important part in getting the airplane down safely and deserves celebration. The safe outcome involved good luck -- the time of day, the nearness of potential rescuers, the absence of congested river traffic at that moment -- but it was mainly attributable to an extremely high level of well-trained professional performance by all involved. That is why it is fine to consider it "heroic" rather than "miraculous." People did what they were trained to do, very very well.
2) I noted the silly error in an initial NYT report saying that "airliners are not meant to glide." Aerodynamically, every airplane is designed to glide - that is, descend gradually and under control even without engine power, rather than plummeting straight down if the engine stops. I mentioned that all pilots routinely practice gliding as part of "engine-out" drills. Several readers pointed out the more obvious illustration: virtually every airplane of any size glides down to the runway when it comes in to land.* Airline passengers can notice this by hearing the dramatic cutback in engine noise and power when the airplane is on its final approach. Yes, there is a difference between gliding toward a landing at "idle power," with the throttle pulled all the way back -- versus gliding with dead engines, with no power to call on for final adjustments or if conditions change. Still, gliding is normal, not an emergency in itself. ____ * Shorthand for the underlying explanation here. An aircraft's "total energy" is the combination of its airspeed and its altitude. When sitting on the ramp, a plane has total energy of zero. While in flight. it can trade one form of energy for another: with no adjustment in engine power, it will speed up if it descends, trading altitude for velocity. Or, again with no change in engine power, it can make the opposite trade off: climbing higher into the air, but at a lower speed. Because gravity is always trying to pull the airplane down, and because wind resistance (drag) is always trying to slow the airplane down, the engine must be running to keep the airplane in "straight and level" flight -- that is, with a constant speed and altitude.
The process of landing the airplane involves steadily reducing the plane's total energy - its airspeed plus altitude -- toward their lowest possible level by the instant of touchdown. As the airplane descends toward the airport, it will naturally speed up -- unless power is reduced at the same time. Mile by mile and then foot by foot, the pilot manages the plane's speed, altitude, and power -- toward the ideal of having it reach its lowest possible flying speed (stall speed) when its wheels are just above the runway's surface. There are variations for different kinds of aircraft, which land with different amounts of power and different margins of speed above their absolute minimum flying speed, but this is fundamentally why typical flights end in a glide.
In case you were wondering, about that airplane in the Hudson
Yes, it is right to view the pilot, CB Sullenberger, as a hero for the mental composure and technical skill he showed after he (reportedly) lost power in both engines.* Plus to celebrate the combination of luck and teamwork by aircrew and rescuers that allowed everyone aboard to get out of the airplane alive.
During my days of amateur piloting, I was always amazed by the rigor and discipline of professional airline crews. Every two years, those of us in the amateur business were required to go through Biennial Flight Reviews in which you'd fly with an instructor who would simulate various problems to see how you'd react. ("OK, you've just lost power, tell me where you're going to land." Or, when you're ten feet above the ground preparing to land, "A deer just stepped onto the runway - GO AROUND [abort the landing] now!") Many amateur fliers choose to get, or are required by insurance companies to get, "recurrent training" every six or twelve months.
But airline crews are drilled and tested and measured again and again and again, without letup, throughout their working careers. In their full-motion simulators, they're trained to respond to every disaster, and combination of disasters, that might possibly befall an airliner. Loss of power just as the airplane is taking off. Engine fire at low altitude. (Contrary to general assumption, problems at low altitudes are usually more dangerous than ones high altitude, since you have less time to deal with them before the airplane hits the ground.) Hydraulic failure along with the fire. Plus, being in the middle of a thunderstorm. And so on.
Some professional pilots are "smart" in the normal sense; some are not. Some are likable and admirable; some are bores or boors. But all of them are made to develop and maintain reflex-like responses to these emergencies. They are also forced to think through the decisions they would make if faced by disasters they will probably never encounter through their whole flying careers.
Why is riding a commercial airliner in the US statistically about the safest way you can spend your time? Partly it's because of the advanced, powerful, and multiply-redundant nature of the machinery, and because of the regulatory standards to which it's held. But the airlines' extraordinarily safe record also says something about the skill, responsibility, and judgment of (most) people flying the craft. As it happens, nearly all flights are routine, and it becomes tempting to think of their crews as glorified bus drivers. But they're conditioned to think, at every stage of every flight, What would I do if XXX went wrong, right now?
And birds? Birds are a much more serious worry for people flying airplanes than you would think, no matter the size of the plane. Obviously it's bad for the bird when it hits a hard metal or composite structure at hundreds of miles an hour. But it's surprisingly bad for the plane too. This detail in a recent NYT story rang true to me: "The impact of a 12 pound bird hitting a plane traveling at 150 miles
per hour is equal to that of a 1,000 pound weight dropped from a height
of 10 feet, according to experts on bird strikes."
Coastal airports are often near water; most airports are surrounded by a lot of grass; the combination means that flocks of birds often assemble where they can do themselves and the airplanes real harm. At an airport in Maryland I once aborted a takeoff in a small propeller plane -- the only time I've had to do so -- because, out of nowhere, dozens of Canada geese suddenly appeared in front of me. It's all too common, when approaching airports near water, to have to concentrate on flocks of seagulls (or crows, even away from water) in hopes that they will, by the very last instant, get out of the way and allow you to land.
And ditching in water? This is something that very few amateur or professional pilots have ever practiced for real.
To deal with an extremely serious problem -- failure of both engines, at least as now reported; to consider various options (on to Teterboro? back to LGA? what about the water?) while the plane is inevitably descending and each passing second narrows your choices; to decide on and commit to a course of action; and then to carry it out flawlessly .. all this deserves admiration, study, and thanks. So, yes, he's a hero. And one of several who emerged that day.
____
* And not to react in the somewhat grudging spirit of an initial report on the NYT site:
In a few weeks, a close comparison of radar tapes and cockpit
audiotapes will establish where the plane was when that clipped, urgent
conversation took place, and other investigators will try to figure out
why this one plane, flying through some of the world's most congested
airspace, was the only one to report a bird problem. [Perhaps because it was the only one that was hit???] The twin-engine
plane is supposed to be able to fly on one engine. But from early indications, it appears the pilot handled the emergency river landing with aplomb and avoided major injuries.
This story also said, as an aside, "Airliners are not meant to glide, although occasionally they have to." In fact, every airplane is designed to be able to glide, and controlling them in a glide, without power, is something that everyone routinely practices (as part of an "engine-out" drill.)
January 15, 2009
Year end pensees: more on security
OK, we're already 4% of the way into the new year of 2009. But there are still 10 or 11 days left in the current Chinese Year of the Earthen Rat, before we welcome the auspicious Year of the Golden Ox. So if I hurry I can get through my list of topics worthy of year end wrap-up. (Previously here, here, here and here.) This time, on security:
- Most important remaining symbolic change: getting rid of the abhorrently un-American, odiously Teutono/Soviet term "Homeland Security," and replacing it with something less Gestapo-sounding. Here is one suggestion: "Civil Security." The Integrative Center for [groan] Homeland Security at Texas A&M has a video on its site in which the director, David McIntyre, argues that "civil security" is both a better concept and a better name. Video is a little over seven minutes long, "civil society" discussion is in last minute and a half. Entire site worth inspecting.
- Latest evidence of the primacy of "security theater" over real security: this assessment of how many lives the U.S. can save and how much havoc it can prevent for each million dollars the TSA spends on air marshals -- versus using the money to harden cockpit doors or take other steps. About air marshals the study says:
An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. As such, the air marshal program would seem to fail a cost-benefit analysis.
More about TSA security theater on an ongoing basis from the Reason Foundation's Airport Policy and Security newsletter, from Bruce Schneier passim, and of course from the Atlantic's loci classici, here and here.
- Security theater takes a holiday in Beijing. Until just before the Olympics, there was no bag-check before you went into a subway station. Then airport-style bag-screening machines were installed at all the stations -- and six months later they are still there. They constitute an imperfect security shield, to put it mildly. Passengers themselves aren't checked at all, so you could get onto the subway with anything you wanted packed under a gigantic winter overcoat.(Picture below shows my standard Beijing winter attire, minus the mufflers, sweaters, big hat, long underwear, etc.)
Now, and heart-warmingly, the people running the system act as if they know it's just for show. Of the last 20 or so trips I've made on the subway, I've skipped putting my bag through the machine about half the times. Once it was because the security station was unattended; twice, because the person who was supposed to look at the x-ray screen was sleeping. The rest, because the attendants just waved me on or didn't give me a second glance. Everyone involved is acting as if this has become a nice public-employment project.
- My own personal act of (legal) Don't Tread on Me-ism, for when I move back to the US and resurrect my flying career. This article, by Dave Hirschman on the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) site, describes the change in the flying environment in Washington over these past seven years. Essentially it's become illegal for most anything except airliners or police helicopters to fly within about 30 miles of the capital - roughly as if cars and trucks could no longer operate anywhere in downtown DC. ( More here and here.) That's perfectly normal in China, where you practically never see flying craft except at big airports. For the US, it's a change. There is an exception, which involves going through Secret Service screening to obtain the right to fly as "close" to the seat of government as College Park, Maryland, whose very nice little historic airport is barely staying in business. As a little symbolic assertion of freedom, I'll go through the screening process when I get back.
(Further on pointless "security" measures involving small airplanes here, here, here, and here. For another time, full explanation of why these won't work.)
There is one more security theme that I'll also save for a separate post. It has to do with the potentially destructive and dangerous conception of "security" that President Bush harped on in his final press conference. Will try to do that while I can still refer to him as "the President" rather than "former President" GW Bush.
December 4, 2008
Aviation buffs only: heartening update on the Cirrus jet
Even non-buffs might be attracted to the several videos listed on this page, where Cirrus Design officials talk viewers through the concepts, trade-offs, and progress stages involved in building the Cirrus Vision, their forthcoming "personal jet."
I enjoy this not just because, in times of overall retrenchment, it's encouraging to see ambitious product development of any sort; and not just because in my dream life, in sharp contrast to my actual life, I would be able to have and fly one of these (~$1 million) airplanes. In my actual pre-China life I did own and fly one of their SR-20 propeller planes.
The extra pleasure for me is seeing the very people I first interviewed in Duluth ten years ago, when they had not yet delivered their first airplane to their first customer, having come so far while maintaining the same sense of excitement and passion. You'll see two of those people on the main video at the site: the CEO, Alan Klapmeier, who introduces the video, and the designer Mike Van Staagen, who when I met him was building models of cockpit interiors out of clay and wood and now is Vice President of Advanced Development. Such people bring us the new things we enjoy, and not just in the world of airplane nuts.
1) Another company covering a lot of territory with propeller-driven Cirrus SR-22 airplanes is Midwest Air Taxi, which is based in Iowa and says it serves 450+ airports in the sizeable area below:
2) As several readers have reminded me, for decades passengers in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, Maine, and a few other lucky, watery places have been familiar with a form of air taxi known as float-plane travel. One of the best-known companies is Kenmore Air, in Seattle -- known in particular to me because I took seaplane lessons at Kenmore in the late 1990s. There are few more enjoyable forms of flying for the pilot -- you go low and slow over interesting scenery, you usually get to land straight into the wind -- and where the topography allows it, it's a great way to travel too.
Attentive readers will be familiar with the trail of tears recounted here, involving the dashed hopes of the small-jet maker Eclipse and the pioneering air-taxi company DayJet. Sigh sigh sigh.
But all along, air taxi companies that have flown passengers not in the spiffy new Eclipse jets but rather in also-spiffy Cirrus SR-22 propeller planes have survived and have steadily been expanding their service. For background on the best known of these, SATSair, see this; for info on another called Miwok, see this. For more on the propeller/jet difference in business models, see the second half of this post.
Recently, there's another entrant, which will use the same Cirrus SR-22s to transport passengers on short-haul trips around the SF Bay area. It's called Indigo Flyer, and its service map is here (detailed pricing and route info at its site):
Will it succeed? Lord knows. But the entrepreneur in me, and the aviation enthusiast, and the person who thinks this air-taxi model actually has a future, all wish it the best. (Thanks to Chris Baker, my instrument-rating instructor ten years ago, for the tip.)
November 26, 2008
Not so thankful in Albuquerque today
It has been coming for a while, and today it came: Chapter 11 bankruptcy for Eclipse Aviation, pioneering maker of the Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet. For more background than you'd want to know, check the posts assembled here.
Gives an additional bittersweet twist to the splash page on the company's site, here, which (as of this instant) still has this message from another era. ________
You might say we're dreamers.
Eclipse
Aviation was formed with the humble intention of transforming the
aviation industry into something better than it was before. You can't
do something like that by half measures. That's why we embrace and
incorporate innovation, imagination, and boldness in everything we do.
There is an intensity and a passion here you just don't find anywhere
else. We love what we're doing, and it shows in all we do.
________
Possible grounds for residual thankfulness? That it's not "abandon all hope" Chapter 7 bankruptcy, as with its poor former client DayJet.
November 24, 2008
DayJet may have struggled in America....
... but its goal, operating plan, and marketing language live on in India!
Check out the site for MyJet, based in Mumbai, and its upcoming "Per Seat, On-Demand" air taxi service in the subcontinent. "Values" rendering from the site:
For background on this whole concept, see this article and this book. For the sad story of DayJet, which has just now filed for Chapter 7 ("no light at the end of the tunnel") bankruptcy, see the long skein of postings here. As for MyJet, I say: Godspeed! Attentation of success! And all other appropriate good wishes.
November 19, 2008
Realms converge: DayJet, VMware. Weird!
Time and again I've praised (or eulogized) DayJet, the radically innovative but now out-of-business air taxi company based in Florida. And I've praisedVMware, the still-in-business California company that lets you run Windows and Mac software seamlessly side-by-side on a Mac.
Now it turns out that one of VMware's main backers is... preparing to invest in the software from DayJet!
In my Atlantic article on DayJet earlier this year, I emphasized that it was, in its founders' view, a software company that happened to operate airplanes. That is, its real strength lay in the sophisticated algorithms for matching airplanes, passengers, pilots, and destinations. The weakness was the real-world big-ticket cost of the airplanes, which brought the firm down when the credit crisis began.
Paul Maritz, a Microsoft veteran who is now CEO of VMware, is according to this TechFlash report, interested in DayJet Technologies, a spin-off company designed to apply the DayJet systems elsewhere As the TechFlash story said:
There are some interesting clues as to why Maritz and others in the technology industry are excited about DayJet.
Georgia Tech professor George Nemhauser, who helped develop DayJet's
technology, said via phone that the system could help airlines,
trucking firms and other transportation companies plan more-efficient
routes between locations. Or, he said, it could be used by government
agencies to plan evacuation routes during public emergencies. The
original promise of the DayJet airline, he said, was to allow travelers
to book flights when they wanted them rather than relying on an
airline's set schedule.
"The whole idea is disruption
technology," said Nemhauser. "You get a plan for something, and then a
disruption occurs -- weather or something else -- and you have to make
a new plan very quickly."
What's left for me to dream of, in the convergence department? Maybe news that a craft-beer company is investing in software that will make it easier for me to speak Chinese.
Something on my desk that might not be on yours
A Chinese fighter plane! At least, a 1:48 scale model of one, the domestically-produced 歼-10, or J-10, courtesy of a friend at AVIC, China's giant aerospace company. Click for larger, including a glimpse of the teeny blue-suited model pilot inside:
And just down the street, at the main AVIC building, the full-sized J-10 itself, in a static display that I watched workers prepare shortly before the Olympics:
No larger theme for the moment; I just like having the model, which is made of metal rather than plastic and feels surprisingly sturdy.
November 15, 2008
Three more ways of looking at Eclipse
... the innovative, Albuquerque-based small-jet company that appears to be in deep economic distress. Background here.
- An irate perspective from a New Mexico political commentator, here. (Sample: "Eclipse has been on the ropes for years, yet our political and economic establishment kept pumping it up.")
- An apologia pro mananagement sua from Eclipse's now-ousted founder, Vern Raburn, here. (Sample: "The reason I got fired was simple: I pissed off the investors.") Note: the link above, to the original AINOnline story, is sometimes slow to load. If it doesn't work, a text-only cached version from Google is available here.
- And after the jump, official word from the Eclipse PR department about the whole dicey payroll situation. (Summary: No one got paid on payday, yesterday. They "will receive their pay" by next Tuesday.)
Here endeth the Eclipse watch for now. Thanks to Mary Grady, Jim Terr, David Strip. _______
Background: the "air taxi" model, discussed in these posts, this article, this book, and this website, is showing viability around the world -- especially with companies using relatively inexpensive SR22 propeller planes from Cirrus, rather than faster-but-costlier small jets. Transportation of every kind is under pressure because of worldwide economic collapse and environmental concerns, but in the circumstances air taxis are doing OK.
And the "Very Light Jet" movement, discussed at all the places above and also here and here, has led to the development of several smaller, cheaper jets that are thought to have a commercial future, of which the best known is the Eclipse 500.
But oh, my, the poor Eclipse company that actually came up with these new planes. As chronicled here frequently in the past, it has had management struggles and financial crises and legal disputes that have called its existence into question. The latest discouraging news is here and here and concerns such ominous subjects as not meeting the payroll and employees emptying their desks. (Update: more end-of-days news here.)
The general economic and credit chaos that is felling older, stronger companies in more established industries is obviously doing no favors to these startups. And anyone who has seen the life cycle of, say, the computer business knows that Wang, KayPro, Eagle, Altos, Victor, Osborne, and other once-promising firms went down but that the computer industry itself surged forward. So it may be with the Eclipse company and the transportation systems it helped make possible. But this is another sad chapter in the era's economic contraction.
September 28, 2008
Putin rears his head and confronts an American air taxi (updated)
From the Albuquerque Journal, this is what it looks like when an American small-jet company (Eclipse) prepares to open a production plant in Russia:
Maybe this is what we've been warned against? Thanks to David Strip.
Update: To clarify matters for several readers who wonder whether I'm alarmed about a Russkie takeover of America's strategically-vital air taxi industry: this whole post is in the "just a little joke" category. It is meant to be a joke concerning Sarah Palin's "Putin rears his head" construct and a joke about my own small jet/air taxi emphasis.
Now if only I could find a photo of Putin boiling a frog while he looks at a Cirrus or Eclipse airplane -- with a Windows Vista computer paralyzed by the Blue Screen of Death sitting in the background.
And, just to round out the joke, here is the standard "Putin Rears His Head" image widely circulating on The Internets:
September 20, 2008
Air taxi chronicles: bad news
Over the months, starting with this article, I have chronicled the ambitions and operations of the most highly publicized of the new air taxi companies, DayJet. Late last year, it began service in Florida and rapidly expanded to nearby southeastern states. This past May, it laid off some pilots and scaled back flights, saying that the worldwide credit freeze kept it from getting the working capital it needed to expand its network. Two months later, in July, it was expanding again, taking passengers to more than 60 cities. (General air-taxi background here and more broadly here.)
Yesterday, DayJet announced that it was flat-out suspending operations, grounding all but one of its Eclipse EA-500 jets and laying off virtually its employees.
The stated reason was the intensifying credit crisis. As the founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci put it in the company's press release:
"Twelve months ago our team launched a new regional transportation model. During the past year, we have demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, that customers will sign-up, purchase, and become frequent users of this new service - the DayJet 'Per-Seat, On-Demand' model works. It is unfortunate that these developments have come at the same time our nation has fallen into the most serious capital crisis of our lifetime. Regrettably, without access to growth capital, we have no choice but to discontinue operations."
To me that is plausible as far as it goes. My posting today, hammered out during momentary access to The Internets, is explicitly a "to be continued" starter entry, because there are so many rich themes worth further exploration. I am already receiving leads about and will pursue them soon.
I mentioned one month ago that a friend in the FAA had warned me in 2006 that there was something funny in the way that Eclipse Aviation, pioneer of the very light, very cheap small-jet movement, had just gotten rush FAA certification for its breakthrough EA-500 jet.
Now a Congressional inquiry into the approval process is underway. Being still mainly off-grid, I am not able right now to go through the ins and outs of the arguments. But this report from Mary Grady of AVweb contains links to all the essential documents --the FAA Inspector General's statement, streaming video of the latest Congressional committee hearing, and much more. And here is Eclipse's statement on the topic.
Until I learn more, I am agnostic on the merits of this inquiry. Updates later, but for now here are the links for those who would like to inquire themselves.
September 9, 2008
Two air taxi updates
1. Miwok: As mentioned recently, yet another air taxi company has started up. This one, Miwok Airways, is using small, posh Cirrus SR22 propeller-driven airplanes and serving Southern California roughly between San Diego in the south, Oxnard in the northwest, and Palm Springs in the east.
The Air Taxi Law blog -- yes, there is such a thing, a sign in itself -- has more interesting info about the thinking behind Miwok. It also includes a service area map and this comment about its strategy:
Miwok's business plan is making several interesting assumption. First,
one assumption is that people will use an air taxi for much shorter
trips. While Miwok has entered a partnership with Enterprise Rental
Car, will the added factor of a rental car (even with a premium no wait
service) or a taxi at the destination outweigh the pain factor in just
driving your own car for such a short trip? Second, another assumption
is that the passenger is willing to trade low fares for a shared
airplane although Miwok will price the trip higher if no one else joins
your trip. Sharing an Eclipse is one thing. Sharing the back seats of a
Cirrus is a little more intimate, but still much more comfortable and
more room than a center seat on an airline coach class flight!
Also, I see that AVWeb has just put up an interview with Miwok's founder, here.
2. SATSair: This note from an employee of probably the best known air-taxi service that uses Cirrus airplanes:
I read your original article about Air Taxis years ago [2001] while I was a UPS driver. Now
I am a pilot at Satsair. They still have a way to go but it is a
brilliant plan almost like when fedex came out with the overnight
letter. Everyone needs the service, sometime they just did not know it, same way with air taxi.
This faith in the "ahah!" potential of the small-airplane taxi model is what motivates people trying to get these companies going. My thinking is: if times get tough enough in the print journalism business, like the ex-UPS driver I can consider other career options...* ______ *Note: this is a little joke, based on my having flown a Cirrus for many years. And things are actually great in this part of the print journalism business!
September 8, 2008
The coming of the air taxis, part 538
For years and years now -- nine years, to be precise, since this 1999 article in the NY Times magazine and my subsequent Atlantic article and book Free Flight -- I've been arguing that the mounting hassles of airline travel, and the emergence of radically cheaper, safe small planes, would make "air taxis" increasingly popular.*
DayJet, the best-funded and most widely-known of these services -- plus the one I have found most interesting -- ran into setbacks this summer during the credit and fuel-price crunch, but it now is expanding again. SATSair, which uses new, small Cirrus SR22 propeller airplanes for routes on the East Coast, has seen a significant rise in business this year.
Now comes Miwok Airlines, run by a software entrepreneur and Israeli AF air traffic controller named Gad Barnea, which will provide short-haul service using Cirrus airplanes in and around the LA basin. LA Times article on Miwok here; analysis by my friend Chet Richards here. The company plans to serve 40 small airports from roughly Oxnard to San Diego. According to a CaltTech professor quoted in the LAT, "It's not competition to the airlines but a competitor to driving."
I am way behind on the small-plane aviation news, because of the dreaded combination of (a) Olympics happening all around me and (b) actual writing to do.
As a place marker, two items: one positive, one.... interesting.
Positive news: Much more information about Cirrus Design's new "Vision" personal jet here, from Flight Blogger, and here, from Cirrus itself.
Among many other things, I love the idea that Mike Van Staagen. who when I interviewed him for Free Flight in Duluth nearly a decade ago was working on the interior for the then-revolutionary SR-20, is now a Vice President for the Advanced Design Group making this plane.
Interesting news: So much is happening so fast at Eclipse Aviation that I'll have to catch up another time. But for later examination: a few months after I moved to Shanghai, in September of 2006. I heard from a friend in the FAA that it was worth noticing the way the Eclipse certification had so rapidly been approved.
Now that there is business turmoil in the company, a Congressional investigation seems to have been opened into that exact topic -- according to this story in the Albuquerque Journal. For the moment I say... interesting. (Thanks to David Strip.)
July 28, 2008
This means something. I just don't know what (Eclipse Aviation)
After the jump, text of a press release just out from Eclipse Aviation, timed for the mammoth EAA Oshkosh AirVenture show, announcing that the company has received a new infusion of capital -- and that Vern Raburn, whose role in founding the company I described in Free Flight and whose airplanes I described in this recent Atlantic article, is out as CEO.
Rumors of something like this have been brewing for a long time. Good for aviation, bad for aviation, good or bad for Eclipse, I don't know and am not in a position to find out at the moment. But here is the press release, FYI. Good wishes to Vern, good wishes to the company, let's see where this leads.
Two months ago, the DayJet air-taxi company of Boca Raton, Florida, which I described in this Atlantic article, announced layoffs and a slowing of its expansion plans.
Today DayJet announced that it was expanding again -- very substantially, adding service to 15 cities in the Southeast, for a total of more than 60. Many of them had recently lost their normal airline service, as airlines (which have generally not raised prices as fast as their fuel prices have increased and therefore lose money every time they fly) have cut back. This business model has a future, I contend -- including companies that use not jets but deluxe propeller planes from Cirrus, like SATSAir.
July 4, 2008
Among the reasons to be proud on Fourth of July
First flight of Cirrus Design's new jet, shown on maiden trip Thursday morning in Duluth:
Background and info here from AVweb, source of the first photo, and here from Aero-News.net, and here from Cirrus itself, source of the second photo. And for background on the Cirrus story, your best source remains this.
I saw a hush-hush mockup of the plane in a hangar at Cirrus headquarters 22 months ago. Congrats on what is, for the business, very rapid progress toward first flight. USA! USA!
May 30, 2008
The one thing my colleagues didn't point out about Sydney Pollack
In theirgraciousencomia to the late Siydney Pollack earlier this week, my Atlantic colleagues pointed many of his admirable traits but didn't highlight* this one: avid pilot! As he said in an interview with AOPA Pilot magazine ten years ago:
"I don't have other hobbies. I've never been on a golf course, I don't play cards, and I don't collect art; but I love to fly airplanes."
Pollack decided to learn to fly when he grew irritated with the hassles of commercial airlines, and that was decades ago, back in what now seems the golden age of comfort aloft. And for better or worse, it was Pollack who convinced Tom Cruise to learn to fly, after Cruise starred in Top Gun. RIP.
* Jeffrey Goldberg mentioned that he "flew his own plane," though this could be read as in "he flew Northwest to Detroit."
May 22, 2008
Aviation buffs only: new model from Cirrus (updated)
The Cirrus Design company, of Duluth MN, brought its first all-new, designed-from scratch small airplane, the SR-20, to the market nearly ten years ago. Through the previous half-century, the other main manufacturers (Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, Mooney, etc) had offered very, very gradual improvements in their propeller-plane lineup. When I was taking flight lessons a dozen years ago, I used rented Cessnas that had been built in the 1970s and designed in the 1950s.
Cirrus said that instead it would keep up a computer-industry-like pace of new products, making each existing model "obsolete" only because it kept having something better for people to buy. More or less it has lived up to that promise, with a series of improvements in engines, engineering, control systems, plus a recently announced "personal jet." (The story of Cirrus's emergence as a high-tech innovator in a previously dormant industry was part of my 2001 book Free Flight.)
This week Cirrus introduced the third fundamental redesign of its cockpit instrumentation. Its original SR-20 airplane had a then-impressive moving map system from the Arnav company. (I bought an early SR-20 in 2000 and flew it for six years, before selling it when moving to China.) Then it offered a snazzier system from Avidyne, with "Primary Flight Display" that in many ways made it easier to fly the airplane. This week it announced a complete new cockpit panel design, based on a partnership with the leading GPS company Garmin. It looks like this (click for detailed version):
Today's NYT story on DayJet and other new air taxi companies makes the important point that what has slowed them at the moment is not (necessarily) a flaw in their own business model but the general collapse of the U.S. credit market. Joe Sharkey of the NYT says of Ed Iacobucci, CEO of DayJet:
Just as his company, DayJet, had proved that there was a business in using small jets for short-haul, on-demand service and was poised to expand its market, the credit market froze.... "All of the metrics are wonderful," [Iacobucci] said. "We're getting repeat buys. We're getting people paying at the price points we want. But we haven't been able to raise the capital.
In case it's not obvious, companies like DayJet need to expand to succeed because of the same network-efficiencies principles that determine the value of cell phone systems, social-networking sites, companies like FedEx and eBay, and modern networks in general. The more people who are already connected, the more attractive it becomes for each new member to join. Thus the familiar Metcalfe's Law, from Bob Metcalfe: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the users it connects.
For an air taxi company, this means: the more cities it can fly to (that is, the more "nodes" in its nework), the more attractive it becomes to new customers and the more efficiently it runs (because fewer wasted return trips and "deadheads.") That is why the DayJet plan called for adding new cities every month. And this is why, according to the DayJet officials and others, their business plan would have supported continued expansion through this year and beyond -- in "normal" credit circumstances. Their plans had allowed for oil at well over $100 a barrel -- but not for an inability to get working capital at all.
Where, when, and whether small-jet taxi services will become successful is impossible to say. But it's worth noting, as this Times story does, that the impediment to date has not been the airplanes or the cost structure or customer demand but rather the current credit freeze, and whoever you want to blame for that.
May 13, 2008
Three more views (last, for now) on DayJet and air taxis
As advertised a while ago, here are excerpts from three additional and, to people following the story, intriguing perspectives on the potential of air-taxi services like DayJet and the problems DayJet itself has just encountered.
The long, detailed, and very-interesting-to-those-who-are-interested full documents come after the jump. Here's the gist, Executive Summary style:
#1 is from a inactive private pilot and very active airline passenger named John Schubert, who argues that air-taxi services like DayJet are already becoming so threatening to the major "legacy" airlines that the airline companies are fighting back as hard as they can, through lobbying and PR.
#2 is from a currently active private pilot and "serial entrepreneur" named Drew Eginton, who argues that DayJet tried to do too much too fast ("hypergrowth," was the term I quoted in my story") rather than expanding more cautiously. He also says that more attention should be paid to a controversial German aviation company named Thielert, which is embroiled in fraud charges now but in principle could have made, and might still, a big difference in air travel.
#3 is from the retired air traffic controller and "Get the Flick" blogger Don Brown, who says that in addition to consulting Russian mathematicians, "ant farmers" [see the story], etc, DayJet should have been sure to include air traffic controllers in its startup team.
To this one I have an answer: My story was long as published, but it started out a couple thousand words longer. Part of what melted away was a description of DayJet's successful interactions with local ATC officials. The key to the success was that DayJet planned -- and plans -- to go where the existing airlines don't; so if a route is already crowded, by definition that's a reason
All the details below.
____________________________
After the jump, via general-aviation news central here at its temporary HQ in Shaanxi province, China, another perspective on the DayJet situation. (Original Atlantic article here; recent news updates here and here.)
This is from Bruce Holmes, a prominent figure in my story (and in my 2001 book Free Flight, about the innovations that gave rise to Day Jet, SATSair, and similar companies.). He presents the "slowdown in growth is good for long-term success" outlook. Several other interesting items have arrived, which I'll add after I check with the senders to make sure they're meant for "publication."
Thanks to my friend Mary Grady of AVweb, an update -- and a somewhat brighter perspective -- about yesterday's news on layoffs at DayJet. The update, from AVweb's Russ Niles, here.
It includes, among a lot of other material, this point, very consistent with what I reported in my current Atlantic piece:
There is a business there. Iacobucci [Ed Iacobucci, CEO of DayJet] signed up 1,500 members, more than 500 actually flew and 50 flew more than 10 times. Whether it can survive fuel prices, the vagaries of the economy and the inevitable attack from the airlines if it gets too successful are questions that will be answered as the company progresses.
There is so much talent, of so many different forms, at the company that I give them the benefit of the doubt.
May 6, 2008
Not about NC/Indiana: significant air-taxi update
The excellent industry newsletter AVweb has just reported that DayJet, subject of this story in the current Atlantic, is scaling back expansion plans and laying off (an undisclosed number of) employees. Here is the story from AVweb:
Start-up air taxi operator Dayjet has announced it will "scale back" its immediate growth plans and lay off employees in all areas of its operations. In an email release today, company founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci did not detail the numbers of people let go. Iacobucci blamed weak capital markets and not the company's early performance for the decision. He said expanding the company to the point of profitability would require a $40 million capital infusion and he apparently couldn't find that money. "I won't dwell on this point, but suffice it to say that given the current state of the U.S. capital markets, the timing of our planned financing could not have been worse," he said.
Iacobucci said the "proof-of-concept phase" the company is now in has proved the market is there for the small-jet people mover system he envisioned but it has to grow from its current fleet of 28 aircraft serving 11 "Dayports" to as many as 50 aircraft branching out from up to 30 hubs to be profitable and that's why it needed the $40 million. While DayJet seems confident that it will eventually find the money and markets it needs, the larger question might be what the delay in doing so will do to Eclipse Aviation. DayJet is reported to be Eclipse's largest customer with orders for 1,400 of the estimated 2,500 aircraft on Eclipse's order book. Calls requesting comment from Eclipse were not immediately returned.
When I was at the DayJet headquarters three and a half months ago, the company was hiring like crazy and talking about its month-by-month expansion plans in cities served, passengers carried, and aircraft in the fleet. At the time it had five (I think) "DayPort" centers -- bases from which flights go to a variety of smaller cities. Apparently it has now grown to 11 DayPort centers serving 60-plus cities. The plan that was laid out to me was to get to 30 DayPorts serving 100-plus cities by the end of the year.
Whether this is a "growth slowdown" or an actual cutback, and what it portends, I obviously don't know. For now just passing on the news.
May 5, 2008
Air-taxi update, propeller plane division
My article on DayJet in the current Atlantic is about an air taxi service that uses new, efficient, relatively cheap small jets.
For several years, other air taxi companies have opened up using new, efficient, and relatively fast and comfortable small propeller planes, notably the four-seat Cirrus SR-22.
I've paid particular attention to SATSAir, which like DayJet is based in the Southeast. This week it announced that it had flown 16,000 such Cirrus trips in 2007, a 60% increase over the year before. Its press release made a point similar to what I heard at DayJet:
Traditionally, the use of the air cab service has been a remedy for driving trips of 2-5 hours, not a replacement for other forms of air travel. However, 2007 saw a shift with a significant number of new SATSair customers using the point-to-point air cab operation as a solution to their hub-and-spoke airline frustrations and woes, in fact decreasing the door to door travel times.
Several economists and aviation experts have written me to say that, in principle, the air taxi model just can't work in the long run. Too expensive; market too small; and so on. Could be. I'm just reporting that at several companies it's working now.
April 22, 2008
Two airplane-related items
1) My article from the May Atlantic, about Day Jet, is now up at the web site. Narrated slide-show available here. This is kind of a high-concept narration, in that what I'm talking about doesn't have all that much to do with the pictures displayed. But maybe you can look at the pictures with one half of your brain and listen to the words with the other.
2) Last month I mentioned that the first microbrewery in Redlands, California would soon open -- and right at the local small airport! Now I can attest first-hand that the Hangar 24 craft brewery is up and running and making very good Pale Ale and Orange Wheat Beer indeed. Its output is still mainly for restaurants or bars or a few local retailers, but on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons it offers on-site tours and tastings. Next events: Air Show/Beer fest on May 10; formal Grand Opening on May 31. I expect to miss them, but think of me if you attend.
The brew vats:
The beer taps, operated by Jessica Cook, wife of brewmaster Ben Cook:
March 23, 2008
I was born too soon, part 9,482
This week my home town of Redlands, California, (a) opens its first craft/micro brewery, which (b) is in a hangar right at the local small airport!
Ah, had this been true in the olden days, when I was in California and using this airport. Back then, the hangar was the headquarters for a flying-missionaries' group which has since moved to Idaho. Who says there is no theory of human progress.
I've had my complaints about this airport's management, which I'll now put in the Easter Sunday permanent-forgiveness file. If, unlike me, you are within driving or flying range of Redlands and its little KREI airport, go check it out. (And yes, yes, yes -- keep the people doing the drinking separate from those doing the driving or flying. Perhaps with this in mind, the brewery will mainly be a sampling-and-sales outlet, not a sit-down-and-guzzle site. No joke: I love my beer but have been fanatical about never having any for at least 12 hours before getting in a small airplane.)
Redlanders, enjoy!
January 23, 2008
Why is your flight so late? Another excellent explanation
Previously I mentioned this column by Salon's "Ask the Pilot" writer Patrick Smith, which laid out the fundamental reasons U.S. airline flights run into so many "unexpected" delays.
Here is another clear, logical, and authoritative explanation of the obstacles that simply aren't going to be removed by any of the frequently-discussed "solutions" to airline congestion. (Including the totallybogus idea that "opening up" military airspace would make any difference.) What would make a difference? Well, you'll have to read it for yourself and see.
This latest account comes from Don Brown, long-time air traffic controller who now writes his "Get the Flick" blog about aviation. It's long, but it's clear and interesting. Here's a hint about its point: if a runway can handle at most 60 planes an hour, and the airlines schedule 70 for that same hour, the planes will be late.
Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle. In fairness to the airlines, it’s not in their interest to limit themselves. It is easier to sell the tickets and blame the delays on the weather or the “antiquated” air traffic control system. Especially if the flying public doesn’t understand runway capacity limits and therefore fails to notice that the “antiquated” air traffic control system is delivering more airplanes to the runways than the runways can handle.
Think you'll go crazy trying to figure out how much a flight will cost, depending on whether you travel on a Wednesday in a month containing "r" or are willing to change planes in Tucson?
Yet another reason to come to China! (I say this as a fan of Chinese airlines.) Making a trip tomorrow from Beijing to Shenzhen. Four different airlines to choose from; a wide range of aircraft models; departures conveniently spaced through the afternoon. And fortunately the one factor I don't have to worry about is the price:
This is via CTrip.com, one of the main online travel sites. Yes, Ctrip often shows a range of fares; and yes, travel agents often have special deals for less than this official price. But this is s an interesting contrast to a similar array of US fares. In its own way it is weirdly comforting not to have to run the differential equations to see which is the best deal.
December 5, 2007
Aviation buffs only: Japan-Taiwan snapshots
After the jump, several more pictures from the recent Tokyo-Okinawa-Taipei flight in a Cirrus SR22. If you're not interested in small airplanes, never mind! (All photos clickable for larger version.)
There is no huge joke value to this one, but here is how the refueling crew at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport (outside Taipei, and known until recently as Chiang Kai Shek International) looked this afternoon. Kind of a midpoint between the Japanese and mainland Chinese approaches contrasted yesterday:
Some safety gear and a mechanized pump, as in Okinawa, Japan. A certain individualistic variation in stances and posture, as in Changsha, mainland China. And the cold-looking part of people's stance is because a ferocious post-typhoon wind was howling down the runway. For another time, how the Tokyo->Kagoshima->Okinawa->Taipei flight crew looked after the trip, standing in the same wind.
November 27, 2007
"The" way vs "a" way (Japan v China dept)
This is not a scientific comparison, but when i saw one scene I remembered another.
This is the recent scene: yesterday afternoon, Naha airport, Okinawa, Japan. Line crew gassing up a Cirrus SR22:
What I saw out my window around 11am today, from 8000 feet:
Why I'm in Japan
To travel "right-seat" with my friend Peter Claeys, who is Cirrus Design's China representative, as we ferry a Cirrus SR22 from Honda Airport outside Tokyo in Saitama Prefecture, past Mt. Fuji and down along the southern coast of Japan's main island, Honshu; past Kyoto and Hiroshima; to Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu; and, after a stop, from there down the island chain to Okinawa.The next day, to Taiwan. Peter eventually needs to get the airplane to Macau; I will probably get off in Taiwan for some Chinese-manufacturing interviews. This is the planned route.
A year ago Peter and I had our challenges ferrying an SR22 from Changsha, in Hunan province, down to Zhuhai on the southern coast, for the Zhuhai Air Show. This time: we're not going to fly at all at night; we don't "need" to get anywhere by a particular deadline; we're going to big airports that we know have "AvGas" for planes like this one; and we're not flying in mainland China. This should be interesting.
Update: Actually, it was interesting. This update is from Okinawa, after two long flying legs on the first day. The rest of the journey, to Taiwan, might or might not happen, depending on how things develop with a typhoon now knocking around in Taiwan's area, and whose northern fringe we crossed on coming into Okinawa. (For aviation buffs: 30+ knot straight crosswind at 500 feet of elevation inbound on the ILS at Naha airport, which diminished to 11 knots at runway level. Quite a crab angle on the ILS, and quite a wind shear.)
The picture below shows how it looked this morning, soon after sunrise, as Peter walked to the plane at Honda airport and we prepared to scrape the rime-frost off the wings and head to the south.
November 22, 2007
Thankfulness is great, but what is the NYT thinking?
The Thanksgiving-day lead editorial from the New York Times, mindful of the difficulties many of its readers may have had in traveling to join their loved ones, praised President Bush for his wise and timely efforts to provide "Congestion Relief":
President Bush’s announcement this week of measures to reduce air traffic congestion was welcome news, especially his decision to open military air lanes along the Eastern Seaboard to commercial planes from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to the Sunday after. The administration deserves credit for not ignoring the mess...
Not to violate the spirit of Thanksgiving, but: are you kidding me???
First, military airspace is at best a minor factor in holiday air-traffic congestion. The worst air traffic congestion is around New York City. As mentioned earlier, there's not much military airspace there to begin with. Chapter-and-verse details after the jump. Anyone who has ever looked at an aviation chart knows this. (I know about it from flying small airplanes on the East Coast over the past ten years.)
Second, controllers already can open up the military airspace during peak holiday travel periods. See this blog by former controller Don Brown for more. To be clear about this: the new order gives controllers a power they already have and have used for years.
Third, the decision did nothing at all about the real problem: too many flights scheduled to take off or land at the same time from a limited number of runways.
So this decision has made, and will make, no difference in holiday travel congestion. Zero. This weekend's traffic will flow well, or poorly, depending on weather, and unanticipated screw-ups, and many other factors. But it will have nothing to do with this plan.
On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful not to have to wonder what kind of research went into a lead editorial like this.
About that plan to "speed up" Thanksgiving air travel
Sorry to ring in the Thanksgiving travel week on a discouraging note, but: the plan announced with fanfare from the White House last week, to reduce airline delays by opening up military airspace, is preposterous. It will not make the slightest difference in airline delays or the general neuralgia of Thanksgiving travel. You think the media were gullible about Administration claims five years ago? Gee, it's good to see that that will never happen again....
What's wrong with this plan?
1) Military airspace is not that big a factor in NYC area or BOS-WASH corridor travel, which is where the worst of the delays originate. The FAA has a great little website, here, which shows you the status of "special use airspace" (including military space) pretty much in real time. Here is how it looked mid-afternoon Friday EST last week -- a busy travel time!
It's not worth explaining all the details here, but the main point is: there aren't that many "special use" areas near the big East Coast airports. If New York City were where Camp Lejeune is, in North Carolina, then military airspace might be an issue.* But, umm, it's not. The NY-area special airspace that looks biggest -- the brown thing off Long Island, which says ZNY (meaning that its airspace is controlled by "New York Center") -- is a "warning area," which differs from those off-limits to airliners and is way out over the ocean anyway.
Luggage-cart rental stand, Tegel Airport, Berlin, this afternoon:
So, if you want to rent a cart, you can pay: one Pound, one Euro, one Swiss Franc, or one shiny American quarter, which at today's rates means:
Brits pay ~ $2.06
Europeans in general pay ~ $1.44
Swiss pay ~ $1.16
And my wife and I paid $0.25 each for our two carts, delighted as we were to find two quarters wedged into our pockets after the redeye from the U.S., en route to our new home in Beijing.
Is this legacy pricing from the days when the dollar really was strong? A means-tested scheme, reflecting Europe's patronizing view toward the puny dollar of modern times and what Yanks can afford? An expression of karmic gratitude for the American role in defending Berlin through the long decades of the Cold War and the intense months of the Berlin Airlift, when planes full of supplies for hungry Berliners landed at this very Tegel airfield?*
Could be any of 'em. But -- oooops! Five minutes later it turns out that when you return the cart, you get back whatever coin you put in. So technically all the chart means is that the quarter is physically about the same size as the other, mightier coins. Still, in the era of the shrinking dollar, something about this chart sticks in your mind.
* Before anyone feels obliged to mention it: Yes, I know that Tegel was in the French sector of Berlin, while Tempelhof was the main airport in the American sector. But you get the point. Footnote update!!: Andrei Cherny, who has a book on the Berlin Airlift out next year, reminds me that the airport was in French-controlled territory but most of the airplanes were of course American. I guess this is why we don't hear so many references to "the vast French air force darkened the skies" in accounts of the post-war era...
October 18, 2007
Beijing-Shanghai, DC-Boston: compare and contrast
Three weeks ago my wife and I flew China Eastern from Beijing to Shanghai and, thanks to traffic miracles on both ends and the absence of the usual Beijing departure hold, made it door-to-door in about four hours.
Today I flew US Airlines from Washington to Boston, a more-or-less comparable route, in just about the same door-to-door time. One difference: Beijing-Shanghai is more than half again as far (576 nautical miles, vs. 343). Another: often I've been loaded onto a 747 for the Chinese route, versus the Airbus 319 that is standard for US Air. But here's the general compare/contrast rundown:
1) Cost: Roughly $150 advertised fare on China Eastern, vs $385 for USAir. Edge to the Chinese, especially considering that the trip is longer. On the other hand, given the 7- or 8- fold difference in national per capita income, the US fare is obviously more "affordable."
2) Amenities: No contest. China Eastern is way nicer. Hot meals on all flights -- standard choice is "rice" or "noodles," meaning a choice of the side dish that will accompany chicken, fish, etc. Plus, free beer. (Yes, Chinese beer, but still.) On USAir today, tiny pack of pretzels and a soft drink. On the other hand, the "seat pitch" in Chinese airplanes seems an inch or two shorter than even for US economy class, with that much less leg "room."
Why is your flight so late? Finally, the explanation
An excellent analysis, by Patrick Smith in his latest "Ask the Pilot" column in Salon, is the most realistic description of the air-travel mess I've seen in the general press (if that term applies to Salon).
You should read the whole thing, but mainly: the culprit is not unusually stormy weather, aggravated (or not) by climate change. It's not antiquated air traffic control, though antiquated it certainly is. It's not a plague of little private planes.
Instead it's the collision of two big and contradictory facts: one is that the U.S. is short of runways in big-city airports, and isn't building any more. (Do you want another airport by your house? I do, but that's me.)
As mentioned two days ago, the DayJet company of Florida has just carried its first paying passenger on a small-jet "air taxi" trip. The trip was from Boca Raton to Tallahassee.
Dan Hobby, of Coconut Creek, Fl., writes to point out an implication that probably was obvious to those who have more Florida reference points in the brain than I do:
The DayJet from Boca to Tallahassee may be even more viable once the Florida Legislature convenes next year.
During session the direct flights are usually booked up, and one is often forced to fly to Tallahassee through Orlando or Tampa, adding additional time to the flight.
While legislators may be hesitant to be seen taking a DayJet flight, I suspect many lobbyists will make it their first choice.
The "for lobbyists only" image is one the air taxi business would presumably like to avoid -- their goal is to make the fares economically competitive, not Corporate Excess Lite. But the basic point is exactly right: Tallahassee, like Sacramento (an example that springs more readily to my mind) is a place a lot of people have to get to during certain periods, and where normal connections are not so convenient.
I'm still curious about what DayJet will charge in the long run, though presumably this first passenger knows.
September 16, 2007
Free Flight update #5: first DayJet flight
Six years ago, I was on the book-tour circuit discussing my book Free Flight, which had just come out. It was about several parallel innovations in the aviation biz -- more efficient engines, cheaper and better ways of building planes, safer ways to navigate and control the planes -- that might together make "air taxis" part of the solution to the misery of hub-and-spoke airline travel.
A standard interview question was: OK, when is any of this going to happen? And my standard answer was: I don't know, maybe the next five to ten years?
Last week -- right on my schedule! -- it happened. The DayJet company of Florida, mentioned here earlier when NASA pioneer Bruce Holmes went to work for them, carried its first paying customer of its first on-demand, priced-per-seat* trip.
In one way, the air-taxi era arrived even sooner than that. For a few years now, companies like SATSair have been offering a much cheaper form of previous air-charter services, using spiffy new propeller planes, mainly the 4-seat Cirrus SR22.
But DayJet's news is significant because it involves air taxis of a form most customers would feel comfortable with: namely small twin-engine jets (Eclipse 500 VLJs, whose evolution, like the Cirrus's, I described in the book).
This first trip was from Boca Raton, Florida, to Tallahassee, and its details show when and how the air-taxi model might work.
I am a fan of Chinese domestic air travel. The airplanes, Airbuses or Boeings, are new enough and safe-seeming, unlike the alarming Soviet-made castoffs we rode here in the mid-1980s. The attendants are chipper. It's hard to be sure, but the pilots seem fine. Every flight I’ve been on has offered a hot meal, and by U.S. airline standards the food is great. Buying tickets is easy – you can walk into the airport and pay in cash, or order online through a unique high-tech/low-tech process I’ll describe some other day.* Flights in China are usually late, but they’re late everywhere.
Most amazing of all, the airport experience itself – a phrase that makes you feel bad just hearing it in America – is as low-stress as it can be. Check-in lines move fast – OK, there’s no “line,” but once you get in the spirit you can fight your way up pretty quickly. Getting through security takes five or ten minutes tops.
There's one problematic exception, illustrated by this picture of the 900-person taxi queue, snaking back and forth like the line for U.S. security screening, earlier this evening at Shanghai's Hongqiao airport, but it is an exception, as explained below**:
What’s the trick with things (apart from Shanghai/Hongqiao taxis) moving as well as they do in China? I’m not sure, but this may help: Chinese airlines don’t encourage a lot of fussing around with “do these look like good seats?“ or “is there any space in the exit row?”*** My wife and I saw this in its pure form today when checking in for the five-plus hour flight from Urumqi back to Shanghai.
In case anyone doesn't know this: new flight sim in Google Earth
From the start Google Earth has been fascinating in its own right. But since its introduction about two years ago, it has been additionally interesting as a "development platform" -- a layman's glimpse at the sophisticated world of "geographic information systems," which are essentially ways of mapping complex data onto a real, visible map. (More info here. Subscribers only.)
The latest and in a way most surprising application to be laid on top of Google Earth is its new, semi-hidden flight simulator. You call it up with Ctl-Alt-A in Windows systems, and Cmd-Opt-A on the Mac. If that doesn't bring up the simulator, you don't have the current release of Google Earth. which you can find here. I haven't played with it enough to know whether it matches the best real flight sims, from Microsoft and X-Plane. Also, any flight simulator, IMHO, requires a joystick rather than control-key operation to be any good. But that it exists at all is interesting, and its connection to the worldwide terrain coverage of Google Earth is a plus.
Nice touch: the two aircraft it offers are the Air Force's F-16, its design influenced by John Boyd and his "fighter mafia" allies; and Cirrus Design's SR-22, its design determined by the Klapmeier brothers and their colleagues in Duluth. More info about the flight sim, which has already been extensively publicized in tech blogs, here and here.
August 28, 2007
Recognizing generosity: David Valentine and Raider Ramstad
This week in his Wall Street Journal "Middle Seat" column, Scott McCartney* compliments Denny Flanagan, a United Airlines captain who goes to unusual lengths to make sure his passengers enjoy rather than endure their flights with him. (Placing mass orders for food from McDonald's if passengers are stranded for hours, calling the parents of children traveling unaccompanied on his plane, etc.)
I have compliments to pass along to two of Flanagan's colleagues, United captains David Valentine, whom I have met, and Raider Ramstad, whom I haven't.
Last Saturday morning China time, when I was in the rural hinterland, I got a very early-morning mobile phone call from a friend on the U.S. east coast, where it was Friday night. For medical reasons I won't go into, it was a matter of life-and-death importance that a close friend of his in New York receive a certain medical supply, available in Shanghai, as soon as possible.
He had contacted the international courier companies -- DHL, UPS, FedEx -- and had learned that, between weekend-service issues and time allowed for customs clearance, they could not deliver it fast enough. Also, it wasn't clear that they could keep it cold, in its insulated box, long enough to survive all the stages and formalities of the journey Did I happen to know anyone flying from Shanghai to the US in the next day, who might hand-carry it?
Aerodynamics 101 (following JFK Jr crash discussion)
Four main questions from readers about previous post on the recent crash in Nantucket:
1) Was I suggesting that JFK Jr. was somehow negligent in not using this kind of parachute-equipped airplane? No. The very first Cirrus SR-20 was delivered to the very first customer within days of Kennedy's crash in July, 1999. Before that, FAA-certified planes with parachutes not for passengers but for the entire airplane didn't exist. The initial waiting list for these airplanes was very long. I placed an order not long after, and got mine in November, 2000.
2) If this kind of plane is so great, why don't I have one any more? Sold it before moving to China. For a while I fantasized about flying here. Hah.
3) Is it really true that, if you are in the dark or in a cloud and can't see the horizon (and are not flying by instruments), you will crash? Yes. Explanation after the jump. It has nothing to do with the risk of running into something you can't see.
4) Is it really true that, as claimed in William Langewiesche's article The Turn, if you have your eyes closed you can't tell if a plane is right side up or upside down? Yes. Explanation also below. Visual proof in this famed clip showing Bob Hoover, world's greatest pilot, pouring iced tea continuously into a glass while performing a barrel roll.
A small plane apparently crashed last night on Nantucket Island. First reports are never quite right, but it appears that the weather was terrible -- dark; very low clouds; mist and fog; sea, sky, and land in a blur. These are deadly conditions to fly in, and the same conditions in the same area killed John F. Kennedy Jr. 8 years ago.*
Here's the difference: the two people in the plane over Nantucket lived. They (reportedly) pulled the parachute on their small Cirrus airplane and came down safely on the island. A lot of hard-boiled aviators say that pilots shouldn't "need" a parachute, that if you're good enough you can always "glide it in," that they'll lose their edge if they have this security blanket, and so on. Anyone outside aviation thinks: that is nuts! If John Kennedy's plane had a parachute, he might have been scolded for being reckless and getting himself into a bad situation. But he would be alive to hear the scolding, and so would his two passengers.
Alan Klapmeier, president of the company that makes these parachute-equipped Cirrus airplanes (one of which I used to own), likes to say: The penalty for bad judgment should not be death. Amen.
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* Short explanation of the problem: if you can't see the horizon when you are flying, eventually you will lose control of the airplane and crash. Details for another time -- see William Langeweische's classic Atlantic article "The Turn" for more. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) In practice this means that you don't fly in such circumstances -- unless you have an instrument rating, which teaches you to fly without seeing where you are, and you're on an instrument flight plan, with controllers telling you where to go. Kennedy did not have an instrument rating, and the Nantucket plane appears not to have been on an instrument flight plan.
Both are based in Florida and have rundowns of news from Eclipse, Epic, Cirrus, Dayjet, Cessna, etc. and commentary on trends in the small-jet and "air taxi" industries.
One blog:
Esther Dyson's Flight School blog, about the annual for-pay conferences she holds on the industry.
One article:
In the new issue of Portfolio, Gabriel Sherman's report on the most controversial person in the small-jet movement, Vern Raburn of Eclipse Aviation. One of the two companies I focused on in Free Flight has gone on to be an out-and-out success: Cirrus Design, which has sold thousands of its innovative, parachute-equipped small propeller planes and dominates its part of the market. The other, Eclipse, has had a much rockier path. Many people still think it will transform the world of travel; many others think it's a house of cards. This article explains both sides.
One sample skeptical post:
From (my friend) Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, who hints here at the reasons he appears in most VLJ stories as the "but there are critics" expert who says, "This is all a dream."
One video:
OK, this is to look at rather than to read, but still: Honda's new light jet in flight. Site is slow to load but interesting.
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The blog world is brimming with other VLJ-related information -- for instance, try the VLJ tag at del.icio.us -- but this is enough for now. (Past Free Flight updates here, here, and here.)
August 2, 2007
Writing, Flying, and Saint-Exupery
I've started reading Stacy Schiff's 1997 biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, about which I've heard only rave reviews and which indeed is wonderful so far. Every good omen that it will join A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh and Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville on my list of first-rate biographies of fliers. I suppose that list should be extended to include Robert Coram's Boyd, about the military theorist and one-time fighter pilot John Boyd, and The Right Stuff, and....
But on the second page of her book, Stacy Schiff says something that rings completely wrong. Rather, it suggests to me that while she has admirably researched her subject, she has not made the imaginative leap to understanding what flying is about. She notes the obvious -- that Saint-Exupery was both a renowned writer and a career aviator -- and says:
Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events; the other must nimbly accommodate them.
My experience and observation suggest exactly the reverse.
The pattern is too strong to be ignored: traditional conservatives (Heritage) and libertarians (Cato) have done a better job of of thinking about how a free society can defend itself without giving up its freedom than the Democratic or Republican establishment has. Unlike Democrats, they're not so worried about looking "weak" that they have to posture about every conceivable threat. Unlike the Administration -- well, they're sane.
Two well-known examples: Cato, for sponsoring the work of John Mueller, of Ohio State. (His influential 2004 essay, "A False Sense of Insecurity," is here in a large PDF file.) And, oddly enough, AEI, which apparently harbors an actual conservative among its neo-cons and "surge" enthusiasts. This is Veronique de Rugy, who has looked very critically at the homeland-security- industrial complex. I won't even get into Ron Paul....
A recent entry in the honor roll: James Jay Carafano, a West Point graduate who works at Heritage. His new essay, concerning the potential terrorist threat from small airplanes, is the first I've seen that both acknowledges there is some threat and proposes reasonable, proportionate steps to deal with it. Perhaps I'm biased because Carafano calls for elimination of the stupidest "homeland security" measure of all: the creation of a Potemkin air-defense zone called ADIZ, covering thousands of square miles around Washington. Even beyond my bias, this is a very good analysis.
Update: Ah, now this makes more sense. Veronique de Rugy is no longer at AEI but instead at a non-neocon, "classical liberal" plus libertarian stronghold, George Mason University's Mercatus Center. Phew!
July 16, 2007
Free Flight update #3: Bruce Holmes to DayJet
A hero of my book Free Flight was a civil servant named Bruce Holmes. He was a career pilot – he’d paid his way through graduate school at the University of Kansas by flying cropdusters for a commuter airline, towing banners, hauling caskets for funeral homes, etc – and a career civil servant, for NASA. For at least two decades he has prided himself on being an “entrepreneurial bureaucrat.” In effect this meant that he put existing big companies in touch with little startups, and both of them with government regulators, in hopes of fostering the growth of a new small-airplane industry. I often think of him as a counterpart to Tim Berners-Lee* – the man who, by creating standards for the World Wide Web, helped countless other people to become filthy rich.
Here is Bruce Holmes, in a more-bureaucratic-than -entrepreneurial-looking NASA portrait:
Yes, it could seem strange to include a $160-million-per-copy airliner as part of the revolution that may lead to more convenient air travel via smaller, less expensive airplanes. But the Dreamliner qualifies as an honorary part of the "Free Flight" movement in two ways:
The making of loyal Bose customer (unsolicited plug)
Product plug: It's hardly novel to sing the praises of active noise-reduction headsets for airplane travel. I first learned about them in my piloting days, when the Lightspeed 20K headset made the difference between retaining at least some hearing and having to yell "Whaaat????" "Say that again..." for the rest of my life because of the literally deafening engine noise inside most small-airplane cockpits.
I didn't buy Bose aviation headsets because they cost twice as much as the Lightspeeds or other models, but the Bose "Quiet Comfort 2" model for airline passengers is a much better deal -- and not only because I got it as a Christmas present from one of my sons. I almost never see Chinese passengers wearing these on Shanghai Air or China Eastern flights (which, by the way, have much better meal service than most US lines -- topic for another day). But among American and European passengers on domestic or international flights they are of course more and more common:
The book I had most fun writing was Free Flight, which came out six years ago. At the time, the hub-and-spoke nature of the airline system was driving passengers crazy with inconvenience and delay. Also at the time, a variety of entrepreneurs and innovators -- some in little garage-scale businesses, some within the federal government itself -- were dreaming up a system of decentralized, flexible, point-to-point air travel based on radically more efficient and less expensive small aircraft.
For a while after the 9/11 attacks, some people thought that nothing other than air-marshal-laden airliners would ever again be allowed in the sky. But the innovation continued, and the crowding, hassle, and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system have become worse than ever. Many of the projects that were gleams in the eye when I wrote the book are now going enterprises: for instance, Cirrus Design, which was then a little family operation, is now by far the most popular maker of small piston-engine planes in the world. (Disclosure: I bought one of Cirrus's earliest planes, at list price, after writing the book -- and sold it, for not that much less than I paid, on the used market when I moved to China last year. As reported earlier, my one experience in flying a plane in China was so chastening that I will not try that again.)
A whole string of other updates awaits. To begin with: the news last week that this same Cirrus company has entered the "personal jet" market with a new model of its own. More details from Cirrus here and from AVWeb here. Official portrait below:
the probable cause of a small airplane crash in Manhattan last October was the pilots' inadequate planning, judgment, and airmanship in the performance of a 180-degree turn maneuver inside of a limited turning space.
Because I was at the time en route to Burma, land of (among other things) little internet coverage, I did not then see two graphics-rich parts of the NTSB's proceedings. Recently I took a look at them: they are usefully, if tragically, clarifying.
Fighters planes over Shanghai (cont): Back to DEFCON5
According to a Shanghainese friend (whose name I’m omitting because, really, how much good can it do a Chinese citizen to be seeing discussing anything fighter-plane related with a foreign journalist?), the planes I saw zooming overhead recently were probably just on a training mission from a local air field.
Sure enough, a quick check with Google Earth shows an obviously- military airfield just north of town, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze.
I've spent most of my life in places with lots of airborne activity to notice and watch. I grew up near a major Air Force base. We heard sonic booms every day on the school playground and learned how far to "lead" the sound's origin when looking at the sky, so as to spot the jet traveling much faster than its sound. The base was also a center for B-52 operations. During the Vietnam War years, I'd see news footage of the unmistakable "Stratofortress" silhouette over a jungle and think, Yes, that's just how it looked over our house.
Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you'll find in books.
For example: during a recent voyage-of-the-damned style long-haul overnight air trip, from Bangalore to Shanghai via Kuala Lumpur, I decided to read a book about aviation.
Cory Lidle crash: Maybe this will shame the lawyers out of the lawsuit
As mentioned earlier here and here, the Cory Lidle airplane crash last October was a tragedy through and through. The young wives of Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, no longer have husbands. Very young children may never be able to remember their fathers. My heart goes out to these families for the losses they will always feel.
But as also mentioned earlier, the case compounded tragedy with bitter farce when a lawyer representing the families sued Cirrus Design Corporation of Duluth, Mn., which made the small SR-20 airplane the men were flying, for “wrongful death” in somehow having caused them to crash the plane into a building on the Upper East Side. (Disclosure: I owned and flew the same kind of airplane for six years, until I sold it before moving to China last fall.)
At the time, everything about the lawsuit seemed like ambulance-chasing in the purest and crassest sense.
Matthew Wald has long covered the aviation-disaster beat (among other topics) for the New York Times. Through his stories he has struck me as being very, very conscious of all the things that can go wrong in the air. A healthy appreciation of the risks of flight is actually a desirable trait in pilots, but I had assumed that when he thought about pilots, especially amateur pilots, he would be in the "why would anyone take such a risk?" camp.
His story today in the New York Times is actually quite fair and calm sounding, which makes its conclusion the more sobering.
Many pilot-enthusiast forums (including my favorite, the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association site) are buzzing about this audio file, which indeed is quite incredible, plus incredibly embarrassing.
Basic plotline: at Sanford airport, just north of Orlando, a commercial jetliner tells air traffic control that it has a problem. The plane is coming in for a landing, with 100+ people aboard, and the pilots can't be sure whether the nose wheel has come down.
I had two things in common with Charles Simonyi when I lived in Seattle in 1999 and 2000: an interest in flying, and a friendship with Michael Kinsley, who introduced us at lunch one day in a dining hall on the Microsoft campus. The distance in all other ways was vast.
Simonyi was one of the company's true titans, second only to the incomparable BillG on the general-esteem scale. According to a recent article in Technology Review, Gates himself calls Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." I was a lowly short-term contractor at Microsoft, going to work each day adorned with the "orange badge of shame," the orange-colored ID for temp workers, as opposed to the blue badge for "real" employees. For six months I was on the team preparing the next upgrade to Word -- a program Simonyi had invented. From the (very nice) house my wife and I had rented in Seattle's Leschi district, on the slopes of the west bank of Lake Washington, we could see Simonyi's (futuristic and stupendous) destination-spa/home being finished on the opposite shore. Simonyi has frequently dated Martha Stewart. I have been more fortunate in my love life.
United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort.
While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:
Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead.
Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!
Lidle lawsuit update: the myth of "aileron failure"
As mentioned earlier, the families of Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger are suing the Cirrus Design corporation for "wrongful death" in the crash that killed both men last year.
Also as mentioned earlier, those families deserve every bit of empathy and condolence for the lasting consequences of their losses. If you know what it can mean to children to lose a parent this way, you can only wish these families the best.
But in light of extra details about purported grounds for the suit, I have no sympathy at all for the attorneys who, I can only assume, have used the families' grief to talk them into taking this misguided step.
To say it up front and clearly, the airplane crash last October that killed Cory Lidle, of the New York Yankees, and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was a terrible tragedy. In an instant everything changed not just for these two men but also for their wives and small children. Their families deserve the deepest sympathy. Their children deserve to hear through the years that their fathers were widely admired and well-liked men.
The dentist whose condo the airplane hit has now sued the families (really, the men's estates) for damages. On that I have no opinion. But according to this recent AP report, the families themselves have also sued the airplane's manufacturer, Cirrus Design, for "wrongful death," because of product liability, negligence, and other problems.
The pilot in the Rulon Gardner air crash has spoken, and has confirmed what seemed obvious about the crash from the facts. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:
The plane's pilot, Randy Brooks, sheepishly admitted Sunday night that their ordeal was the product of a moment of carelessness.
"I just got too close to the water and went in," said Brooks, who lives in Highland and is the owner and CEO of Barnes Ammunition in American Fork. "There was nothing wrong with the airplane or anything. I just screwed up."
Good for him for saying so. As for the screwing up itself....
February 26, 2007
Here we go again: Rulon Gardner plane crash
Another famous person has been in another publicized crash involving the same kind of small airplane I used to own and fly. Rulon Gardner, the charming, bulky, and admirable-seeming wrestler who pulled off an astonishing upset in the 2000 Olympics, was hurt when the Cirrus SR-22 carrying him and two other people hit the water in Lake Powell. All three got out of the plane before it sank but could easily have succumbed to hypothermia after their hour in the frigid water and night on the lakeshore waiting to be found and rescued.
Main point: I'm very glad they're all alive and (relatively) well.
Next point: What's going on here? Why so many high-publicity crashes in this kind of airplane?
A new record for stupidity in the "Global War on Terror"
All right, I am biased. The most egregious empty-symbolism measures to "protect" Americans often involve aviation -- because airplanes attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because airplanes scare many people, and because the inconvenienced community of aviation enthusiasts is so small. Because tens of millions of people take commercial airline flights, some sanity eventually returns to TSA airline-screening rules. For example: allowing tiny tubes of toothpaste or hand cream back onto flights. The measures that affect small-plane travel tend to get stuck at their lunatic extreme, since so few people are exposed to them and see how nutty they actually are. When I was flying in the United States, I was one of that small number; that's why I'm biased.
I had thought that the rules for "defense" of Washington DC airspace against small planes set the standard in foolishness. But we have a new winner.
Recently I mentioned that the Hobbesian nature of public life in China was bringing out parts of my character I would rather leave concealed. I have received a variety of responses, ranging from "stop whining" to "you don't know the half of it." Here is the strangest complementary anecdote, from an unexpected source.
This is why, after one crack at it, I won't be doing a lot of small-airplane flying in China any more. Here is how a Cirrus SR-22 got fueled up at the main airport in Changsha, capital of Hunan province. (Man in the truck is Peter Claeys, intrepid Cirrus salesman for China. Other men, including the luckless one working the siphon, are involved in local aviation.)
Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.
The post-9/11 "security" restrictions in airspace around Washington have always been pointless. Now they may actually have killed people -- or helped to, and the ones who perished were not terrorists.
Good item in Slate on Cory Lidle, with one crucial error
Slate's "hot documents" feature has an informative item about the sad Cory Lidle crash. (Disclosure: "hot documents" was created, and most of the time is written, by my close friend Tim Noah, although not this item.) Unfortunately the item has one innocent but major error of logic, or of understanding how airplanes work.
The one significant fact to emerge about the Cory Lidle crash is that the other person killed was aboard the airplane with Lidle (rather than in the apartment building or on the ground), and was indeed an experienced flight instructor, or CFI. As mentioned yesterday, the whole effort to understand what went wrong goes in different directions, depending on whether Lidle, a newly minted pilot, was known to have had help in the cockpit. For one thing, the presence of a CFI makes the weather that day seem a less significant factor.
For the second time in a month, I have woken up (in China) to news of a fatal crash of exactly the kind of airplane that I used to own and fly. The plane was the Cirrus SR-20; the previous crash, which killed two prominent and respected Italian businessmen-designers, took place in bad weather over the Rockies; and this latest one, which of course killed Cory Lidle of the Yankees (and many other teams -- I saw him pitch for the A's in Oakland), took place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Such events are terrible and heartbreaking, and the people left behind never get over them. (My mother's father died in a car crash when she was three years old. The remaining 73 years of her life were full and happy and wondrous, but I believe there was never a day in which she did not think about the effects of that accident.) Anyone's first reaction has to be sympathy for all involved.
The second reaction is to wonder what it all means. Some things are obvious about airplane crashes from the start. Some seem obvious, and then change. Others never become clear. Here is what seems knowable, and not, about this crash at the moment -- with updates as known-facts change.
San Francisco isn't always sunny and isn't often warm. But it was both on Saturday afternoon, for the airshow portion of "Fleet Week." There is something dapper and 1940s-ish about the groups of sailors patrolling the streets in, yes, their Navy blues and white sailor hats. There is something I can only think of as pre-2001ish about the general public enjoyment of the air show -- and I mean that in a good way.
Early this week the New York Times carried the obituaries of Ivan Luini and Sergio Savarese, two Italian designers and entrepreneurs in their 40s who had been both successful and highly esteemed. I did not know either of them -- although close friends of mine were very close to Luini, and heartbroken by this news -- but I paid particular attention. The two men died in a crash of exactly the same kind of airplane I had owned and flown for the past six years.
Further travel adventures to be reported in the Atlantic.
