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Pilotless aircraft: A great idea for Michael O’Leary (and a bad one for co-pilots)

Over the next few weeks, a twin-engined Jetstream will fly from the Warton Aerodrome in Lancashire towards Scotland but it won’t be an ordinary flight as the aircraft will be pilotless according to the Economist. That’s not entirely accurate as there will be a pilot. Its just the pilot will be flying the aircraft from a control room on the ground (but just in case things go wrong with the experiment, there will be a pilot in the cockpit to take over). The flight itself is part of a project to develop the technologies and procedures that ultimately will allow large commercial aircraft to operate pilotless.

No doubt such an idea would have airline executives like Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary salivating because after all, think of how much cost savings there would be if there were no pilots in the cockpit? Or better yet, how much more cost savings there would be if you had one guy on the ground “piloting” a couple of aircraft?

But jokes aside, we are nearly at that point already as modern aircraft are already perfectly capable of taking off, flying to a destination and landing automatically. Its just there are a couple of (very expensive) pilots in the cockpit to keep an eye on things and make sure the rules of the air are complied with.

So part of the experiment is to test how well air-traffic controllers can communicate with a pilot on the ground through the aircraft and how to make the radio and satellite links both secure and reliable. However, the engineers behind pilotless aircraft will still need to be prepared for the inevitable break in communication where the aircraft will have to figure out how to safely operate or land on its own.

The Economist also made the point that while pilotless aircraft may not be here just yet, such experiments are are improving aircraft systems while in the early days of commercial aviation:

Many early large aircraft had a crew of five: two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio operator. First the radio operator went, then the navigator, and by the time the jet era was well under way in the 1970s flight engineers began to disappear too. Next it could be the co-pilot, replaced by the autonomous flight systems now being developed.

So if you are a co-pilot who has not made Captain yet, you better work on getting that promotion before your job goes the way of the flight engineer and the navigator!

Bonhams to auction the Gipsy Moth from “Out of Africa”

Bonhams has issued a press release to announce they will auction off the 1929 De Havilland DH 60GMW Gipsy Moth bi-plane flown over the Kenyan savanna by character Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford) in “Out of Africa” – the seven-time Oscar-winning 1985 film. Moreover, the aircraft is in excellent condition with a permit to fly and it still has its yellow-and-black livery seen in the movie with the registration G-AAMY in homage to pioneering English aviatrix Amy Johnson.

In the movie, character Finch Hatton would take Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (the real name of the book’s author, Isak Dinesen), played by Meryl Streep, flying over her farm and other parts of Africa (Dinesen herself would describe the flights as “the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm”). However and when her affair with Finch was likely over for good, he is killed when the Gypsy Moth crashes after takeoff at the Voi aerodrome.

So where has the Gypsy Moth been since “Out of Africa” was filmed? Late last year, someone under the user name of EnoAeroPics on FlightGlobal found her in back of the hangar of the Flying Museum at Seppe airport in The Netherlands (EHSE). EnoAeroPics also snapped this picture of her:

The Gipsy Moth itself measures 24 ft long by nearly 9 ft high (7.3 meters by 2.7 meters) with a 30ft (9 meter) wingspan and its capable of a maximum speed of 105 mph (169km/h). It will go on sale at the Bonhams auction during Rétromobile week (from February 6-7th) at the Grand Palais in Paris where bidding is expected to be in excess of €150,000 (£120,000 or $180,000).

(And let’s hope whoever buys the aircraft chooses to not keep it parked in the back of a hangar somewhere…)

Digging up World War II aircraft in the British countryside

We have been following the story of one man’s quest to find dozens of buried and hopefully well preserved Spitfires in Myanmar (Burma) but a lengthy BBC News article has reported that there could be hundreds or even thousands of World War II aircraft still buried in the British countryside. More importantly, many of these aircraft are remarkably well-preserved while searching for and then digging them up is the hobby of hundreds of people across Britain – including Dave Stubley, the secretary and "general dogsbody" of the Lincolnshire Aircraft Recovery Group (LARG) as well as a self proclaimed "wreckologist."

Stubley estimates that a few thousand aircraft crashed in Lincolnshire because the area had enough airfields during the war to be nicknamed “bomber county.” And while many crashed aircraft were recovered or recycled, some would have hit the ground with such force that they buried themselves. In fact, Stubley believes that 10% of the crashed aircraft are still there in the ground being preserved by soil, oil and lack of air exposure.

The first step Stubley’s group takes to recover such an aircraft is to visit an area to talk to the older generation who might remember an aircraft crashing. Metal detectors are then used to narrow the search and then the group must get permission from landowners along with a licence from the MoD before digging up any fields. However, the MoD will usually not give licences to dig up sites where there might be human remains but there was a LARG excavation involving a Mustang where the American records were wrong and a body was found – bringing closure to the family.

The Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 also prevents recovery groups from contacting relatives of those killed but often its the families themselves who come forward seeking information. Moreover, the British Aviation Archaeological Council (BAAC) is now working on a database of crash sites which it will make available to the public to further help families piece together how their relatives died.

Unfortunately, souvenir hunting has become an issue with downed aircraft but LARG will display much of its recovered wreckage at Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre and the group has given additional pieces to other museums. The group has also recovered both US and German as many German bombers were downed on their way to attack the area. In other words, you don’t need to go all the way to Myanmar to dig up aviation history as there is still plenty buried right here in our own backyard.

The two types of tailwheel pilots…

There are two types of tailwheel pilots: Those who have ground-looped and those who (eventually) will…

Pilot was untrained in fatal Clackmannanshire microlight crash

Earlier in the month, the BBC reported the results of an Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report about a fatal microlight accident last April in Clackmannanshire. According to eyewitnesses, the 23-year-old Gemini Flash microlight entered into a steep climb shortly after take-off and then the nose dropped suddenly before it struck the ground – killing the pilot. The accident investigation revealed that:

The microlight was not registered with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and had not been inspected by the agency for three years but it appeared that nothing had malfunctioned at the time of the crash.
CAA records showed a “No Flight” declaration was made on the microlight back in February 2011. That usually occurs when an aircraft is not insured and the owner has declared it will not be flown until evidence of insurance is produced.
The pilot was not a member of a microlight club, there were no records of him attending any formal flying lessons and did not have a medical declaration.

In other words, it appears that a “pilot” was attempting a solo flight without undertaking the required flight training as no doubt he must have thought that flying was just like driving a vehicle or sailing a boat.

Gordon Douglas, the chief flying instructor and owner of East of Scotland Microlights, a microlight flight training school based at the East Fortune Airfield in East Lothian, had told the Daily Mail at the time the accident occurred that microlight accidents were “very rare.” However, anyone wishing to fly one in the UK still must have a proper pilot’s licence (along with some commonsense).

What IFR flight simulator software should you buy?

A pilot named George has recently posted a question on on Ask a CFI about what the best flight simulator software to buy for home computer use:

My set up now is CH ruder CH yoke CH avionics panel windows XP.
Looking for software to practice IFR
Don’t care about the big airplanes just single engine steam gages user friendly.

Carl Tyler responded by writing that he personally uses Microsoft Flight Simulator (FSX) because it supported all his plugin accessories right out of the box e.g. rudders, radio panel etc. He had also tried XPlane but he didn’t like the user interface while trying to get it to work with his pedals and other accessories was “way too difficult.” Of course, Microsoft has ceased development on the Microsoft Flight Simulator but Carl still thinks its a great piece of software and perfect for practicing those IFR approaches.

A quick Internet search reveals a few other sources for commentary about flight simulators for IFR practice, including a Best IFR Sim software thread from the Pilots of America Message Board and another webpage entitled Using Flight Sims for IFR Practice which appears to date from over a decade ago but made the interesting observation that:

In real IFR flying, radios must be retuned in real time. Sometimes there isn’t a lot of spare time to do this. You can’t pull over and stop while you twiddle knobs. (But you may be able to activate an autopilot, which is almost as good.) Very high end sims have radios that work just like the radio stack in a real airplane.

Finally, another good and very comprehensive source for information about flight simulator software is AVSIM Community Forums which calls itself the largest repository of flight sim information available as it has over 2 million messages and over 200 forums.