I fly a Cirrus SR22 and I have tried a few simulators over the years, but I think this one looks pretty cool. As GA aircraft become more and more complex, the buttonology is going to get ever more important. Available near London from IP Aviation with or without an instructor.
A fraction of a jet for a fraction of the cost
If god had meant us to fly he’d have given us more money. Buying a jet is expensive. Even an ‘entry-level’ jet like the lovely Cessna Citation Mustang is just under $3m.
This is where fractional ownership operators like NetJets come in. (Full disclosure, NetJets is a client of my company Articulate Marketing.) Like timeshare holidays, you don’t pay for the whole plane, just a share of it and you get to use all the planes in the network. If you’re flying less than 300-400 hours a year, this makes a lot of sense.
The same concept works well for smaller planes. For example, I fly a Cirrus in the Freeflight group which works on a similar basis and I wrote about AirShares Elite recently.
But you still have to stump up a big chunk of capital to buy your share plus fixed costs and per-hours costs like fuel. Cheaper but still not cheap. Now, NetJets Europe has launched a direct financing product that lets companies and individuals bridge the gap between leasing and acquisition with a 25% deposit and competitive interest rates.
This approach could cut the capital cost of buying a fractional share in a jet and sidestep potential problem in an illiquid lending market by going to the vendor for finance rather than the banks.
I asked my bank manager if he’d lend me $58m for a new Gulfstream G650. He just laughed. So I know what I’m talking about.
Taking people flying for the first time
This is a great guest post from Rich Wellner, of the Left Base blog.
Intro
A lot of people have never been in small planes and there is a certain apprehension about going up in one for the first time.
Some of this is understandable; these people have only been exposed to general aviation as a result of news reports when an accident occurs. They just don’t have the familiarity with the thousands of flights a day that take place without incident.
In a way, it would be like asking someone who was only familiar with driving cars from reading the accident reports of 30,000 fatal accidents in the US each year to sit down, strap in and have fun.
So, as pilots, we have to look for signs of nervousness and figure out how to put those fears at ease.
In the past two weeks, I’ve had a chance to take four airplane virgins up for their first flights. This is the story of those flights.
Getting Settled
The day begins by gauging the mood of the passenger. This is always easier with someone you’ve known for a long time. Since I’ve known all three people for more than a decade, and one for more than twenty years, this was easy. All were talkative and laughing nervously.
One told me that he had gotten to edge of the airport property, seen the planes on the ramp and almost turned around to go home.
Like most general aviation airports, ours has some smaller, older planes on the ramp and he panicked because I hadn’t prepped him for what kind of airplane we would be flying.
Our plane is small, to be sure, but it’s a nice looking late model Cessna. If I had prepped him, then he wouldn’t have had trouble making the turn into the parking lot.
I’ve found that highly technical people like to be involved in the pre-flight. For them data is important. So for one of my passengers we spent nearly 30 minutes doing the pre-flight together. Other people want you to have an air of authority. Do you job quickly and efficiently and get the plane off the ground.
Takeoff
Sitting at the end of the runway looking out the window is stressful for a lot of people even when they are flying commercially. While I have always gotten excited to feel the jets push me back in the seat, a lot of folks worry about what can happen in the worst of circumstances.
Now take that same person and put them in a small airplane where they are looking forward so that the can see the end of the runway, the edge of the airport and the trees beyond and their stress factor is amplified.
Pilots are obligated to give a passenger briefing that includes things like keep your hands and feet off the controls, where the exits are and that there is a fire extinguisher between the seats. Many airports have marker beacons at the ends of runways and verifying VORs and such will create unusual noises. It’s great to make sure to give the passenger a heads up that they will hear those kinds of noises from time to time and that they are normal.
Aside from comforting the newbie, it also is good to let them know to expect those noises so that as you are passing the middle marker they don’t ask what the beeping is at the same time tower is requesting a turn or handing the flight over to center.
I like to add a few things that are designed to give my passengers something to keep their minds on. A panel has a dozen or more flight instruments on it. I’ll sometimes show the passenger the airspeed indicator and tell them they can watch as it rises and we’ll take off when it says 65.
Making sure people bring a camera is another fun distraction. Remind them to get it out and take photos or video as the plane leaves the ground.
Cruise
Once in the air and established in cruise it’s good to match the flight plan against the time you noted before takeoff and give an estimated time to the destination. This lets people know that the takeoff phase is over and they don’t need to expect anymore excitement for awhile.
Ask again if they have any questions. Often people will have noticed something during takeoff and want an explanation.
Be ready for anything.
I’ve had people ask what various buildings are, how do wings work, questions about various instruments are, how does one become a pilot, how old is the plane and if I’ve ever had an engine fail. Just to name a few.
One of my recent three flights was IFR because I knew the persons personality and that the skies would be quite smooth despite the clouds.
This flight was extra fun as we took off on a dreary, modest visibility day and quickly popped through the 700ft ceiling into bright sunny skies at 2,000 feet with unlimited visibility.
Landing
On the way to the destination I showed him how the ILS would work and, as with the airspeed indicator on takeoff, told him about the crosshairs and how he could watch those and if we kept them pretty close to center then once we got below the clouds the runway would be right in front of us.
After the Flight
The last thing to do after the flight is to make sure to give people something from which to remember the trip. That same camera comes in handy at this point. If you can do so while stopped at an intersection, grab a quick shot while they are still excited from the flight. Then make sure to take more in and around the plane after you’ve parked on the ramp.
Those photos will be something that they look at for weeks to come, so make sure to take enough that a few of them turn out well and you’ll have helped them make a memory in more ways than one.
Well, that’s my introduction to introductory flights. Now find someone who’s never been in a small plane before and go out there and fly!
Radio navigation iPhone app
I remember doing my IMC training and struggling hard to get my head around VORs and NDBs and how to interpret the instruments to figure out where I was in relation to them. I used a program called RANT to try to figure it out and it help a bit. Now there’s an app for it – Radionav Sim – written by a friend of mine, Vincent Lambercy. It’s pretty cool and much cheaper than RANT. Well worth getting if you’re studying for an IMC or IR or just trying to learn radio navigation.
What happens if GPS stops working?
The more dependent we become on GPS, the greater the risk that terrorists will use it to cause disruption and damage. It also puts aviation and large parts of the economy at risk from a single point of failure.
It may not be terrorists. Those morons who point laser pens at cockpits may have a new toy. New Scientist reports that a $30 GPS jammer can kill the signal.
Even accidents and mistakes can cause severe outages. New Scientist cites several examples. For example:
IT WAS just after midday in San Diego, California, when the disruption started. In the tower at the airport, air-traffic controllers peered at their monitors only to find that their system for tracking incoming planes was malfunctioning. At the Naval Medical Center, emergency pagers used for summoning doctors stopped working. Chaos threatened in the busy harbour, too, after the traffic-management system used for guiding boats failed. On the streets, people reaching for their cellphones found they had no signal and bank customers trying to withdraw cash from local ATMs were refused. Problems persisted for another 2 hours.
It took three days to find an explanation for this mysterious event in January 2007. Two navy ships in the San Diego harbour had been conducting a training exercise. To test procedures when communications were lost, technicians jammed radio signals. Unwittingly, they also blocked radio signals from GPS satellites across a swathe of the city.
The Royal Academy of Engineering has just released a detailed report (PDF), Global Navigation Space Systems: reliance and vulnerabilities that underlines the risks. While there is a risk of gross errors, the more insidious threat is “dangerously misleading results which may not seem obviously wrong.”
A significant failure of GPS could cause lots of services to fail at the same time, including many that are thought to be completely independent of each other. The use of non-GNSS back ups is important across all critical uses of GNSS.
Is it time to consider planning a non-GPS alternative as part of an IFR flight plan. For example, could you divert to an airport with a VOR or ILS approach? Could you fly a procedure or missed approach with just a VOR and no GPS guidance? As new GPS-driven glass cockpits take over – I just flew an Avidyne R9 Cirrus to Antwerp, for example – do we need to keep our old-fashioned NDB/DME/VOR/ILS flying skills current as a backup? It’s certainly something to think about.
Flying the Avidyne R9
I just did my conversion to the new Avidyne R9 avionics on the Cirrus I fly regularly at Denham (EGLD). I trained with the excellent John Page from TAA.
John Page at RGV, Gloucershire
The system is a big improvement on the regular Avidyne system that I normally use; like going from Windows XP to Windows 7. It’s not quite as good as the Garmin Perspective system that I flew in January with Max Trescott in San Francisco. I suspect that the Garmin system benefits from a few years’ headstart and that the R9 will continue to improve with future releases. I hope so because it’s already very nice.
Avidyne R9 in N147LD
Things I like about the R9:
- Keypad and Geofill makes it easier to enter flight plans.
- Feels very intuitive; it feels like it was designed by pilots. The press-rocker switches are especially elegant.
- Good response rate and higher resolution – this is important and will make accurate instrument flying easier with a glass screen.
- Vectors mode in GPS is a smart idea especially when you use it intercept mode so you can fly headings into your flight plan segments and have the autopilot automatically transition from one to the other
- Duplication and redundancy
- You can split the screens in lots of different and flexible ways.
There are some defects which may be fixed in future releases:
- Autopilot integration with the S/Tec isn’t as good as with the promised integrated digital autopilot
- It’s great when everything is GPS but it slightly fails with radio navigation – DMEs and VORs. For example, it doesn’t autodetect every VOR or ILS because the ident transmissions are slightly different in Europe than the US, which means that it can throw up an error message at the last minute rather than auto-sequencing from the enroute GPS navigation onto an ILS.
- Geofill isn’t so good if you have duplicate waypoint idents. For example, BNN is a VOR near Denham but there’s another one in Norway or something. This confuses the system even though it should be ‘obvious’ which one I’m going to.
- The go-around from a missed instrument approach is hideous. Not like the one-button TOGA button on the Perspective Cirrus. Here’s the sequence you have to follow at 200’ if you want the autopilot to fly the missed approach: press VS on the autopilot, dial up 800 FPM on the climb bug, throttle up, disarm the approach on the PFD, change the nav input on the PFD from the ILS to FMS, go back to the autopilot and press NAV twice to re-engage GPS steering. Ouch.
- I got caught out by the intercept mode on the vectors mode. After going missed, I forgot to disarm it and it takes quite a few key strokes to delete the approach from the flight plan, so the plane decided to go off and try to reintercept the approach. If I had been in IMC and not quite on the ball, the plane would have flown right back over the airport or something. Ouch. I think the default for vectors mode should be not to intecept – I’d rather be asking myself ‘what do I do next’ than asking the plane ‘what the hell are you doing?’
- I wish we had satellite weather in the UK. One of the planes I fly has a satphone in it that downloads weather and I would say that it is a huge safety benefit.
After a long day of flying, we did some night circuits for currency and to get on the night list at Denham. A friend of mine used to be a US Navy pilot and he said that landing on a carrier at night was the scariest thing he ever did. Denham’s a bit like that, but at least the runway isn’t moving. But all you see is runway lights in a black hole. But flying at night on a clear evening is one of the great joys of flying – still, smooth, different and familiar at the same time.
