Tietco kindly sent me a MyClip Thigh iPad and iPad 2 kneeboard. It’s a neat little strap that goes round your thigh and clips onto your iPad so you can use it as a kneeboard. It’s very comfortable and easy to use. The strap itself is also very compact so you can fold it away into your flying bag when you don’t need it. Order online for $39.95. Let’s face it, this is going to be the cheapest iPad accessory you’re going to buy and probably the most useful.
Thomson Airways became the first UK airline to fly customers on sustainable biofuel when flight TOM 7446 flew from Birmingham to Arrecife on October 6th. To celebrate they prepared this cool infographic.
There was a really interesting podcast about the future of energy on NPR’s Planet Money recently which suggests we need to make some really big changes to make any kind of dent in CO2 output.
Until recently, if you flew a private aircraft into Amsterdam Schiphol the only FBO there was KLM Jet Centre. They weren’t particularly cheap and compared with their snappy sister FBO in Rotterdam, it all seemed a bit too laid back and unwelcoming.
Now, Aviapartner has opened a new FBO at Schiphol and you have a choice. The prices doesn’t seem to be much different. They charge about 400 euros for a Cirrus SR22, including airport fees but they can cope with aircraft up to an A380, so perhaps a Cirrus suffers from being on the first rung of a very tall ladder.
The place seems less like a scaled-down passenger terminal and more like a VIP lounge, which gives a more luxurious experience, I think, especially for passengers. I hope to visit in person later this year and then I can give a more complete report.
The contact details are:
Aviapartner Executive Operations
Thermiekstraat 16, 1117 BC Schiphol, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (0) 20 2066780
Fax: +31 (0) 20 2066790
SITA: AMSAPXH
E-mail: ams.executive@aviapartner.aero
Internet: www.aviapartner.aero
A priest dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates. Ahead of him is a guy who’s dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt, leather jacket and jeans. Saint Peter addresses this cool guy, “Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?”
The guy replies, “I’m Jack, I am private pilot ”
Saint Peter consults his list. He smiles and says to the pilot, “Take this silken robe and golden staff and enter the Kingdom.” The pilot goes into Heaven with his robe and staff.
Next, it’s the priest’s turn. He stands erect and booms out, “I am Father Bob, pastor of Saint Mary’s for the last 43 years.”
Saint Peter consults his list. He says to the priest, “Take this cotton robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom.”
“Just a minute,” says the good Father. “That man was a pilot and he gets a silken robe and golden staff and I get only cotton and wood. How can this be?”
“Up here we go by results,” says Saint Peter. “When you preached, people slept. When he flew, people prayed.”
This is a guest post from my friend Hani Dabbagh. He says: “I am a private VFR pilot based in Geneva, I started flying about the time I became a father, some 19 years ago. I always try to combine my passion of flying with my family, going on trips together. I enjoy seeing the world from above and discovering new places, the journey itself being as important as the destination.”
We were not used to such luxury. There was someone waiting for us in a “Follow Me” car; another brought the fuel truck right to our plane while his colleague was tying it down, all of which was capped by the courtesy bus to the terminal.
We had just landed in Pula, Croatia, after about 3 hours of flying over a stunning and varied landscape of mountain passes, lakes and the sea – not to mention the unique view of Venice. It’s been a long time that that my 19 year-old son Nabil and I had been intending to fly to Croatia. As the flight required particularly good weather to cross the Alps, however, we were constantly postponing it. Finally the weather gods smiled on us and the forecast for our date of departure as well as the next few days was nothing short of gorgeous. There was a question about some instability a few days later, but nothing was certain that far ahead as far as weather was concerned. It was thus time to give Croatia a try. We had heard much about its crystal clear waters, beautiful coastal flying, and the VFR-friendly airspace – as well as its beautiful historic towns. It would be a good change from our more “conventional” destinations.
Our friends and fellow pilots at the Aeroclub de Genève gave us some good hints and tips about where to go and we planned a flight that would take us from our home base of Geneva, over the Simplon Pass, to Lugano, then north of the various controlled zones of the two Milanos, Bergamo and Brescia towards Venice. This covers a beautiful landscape in a juxtaposition of mountains and lakes. Our Piper Dakota took us over the lakes of Maggiore, Como (with a seaplane aerodrome) and Garda. We wanted to avoid entering and exiting the numerous controlled zones in order have a little more freedom of movement. This consequently required some careful zigzagging, specially around Milano, where airspace restricted us to 1000ft, as well as some deft conversations with all the controllers. Luckily Nabil took over this task, which helped me concentrate on flying and navigating. Nabil has become very confident in his radio skills and it was a pleasure to hear him speak with such assertiveness and authority.
Once over Verona and Padova, the radio chatter calmed down a little and we were able to relax some more and simply admire the gorgeous view surrounding us, specially the one approaching Venice. We flew at 5000 ft and had a clear view right across the horizon, showing Venice jutting out of the sea. We could clearly see the runway at Venice Marco Polo airport – in fact we were flying just above its approach path. The Italian controllers were very friendly and cooperative all the way up to the point Rotar, upon which they handed us over to the Croatian controllers. We adjusted to a new accent, but the friendliness and cooperation did not alter. This was typical of all our flying in Croatia. Controllers were always helpful and efficient, very often expecting us upon handovers, and identifying us on radar before even getting the chance to contact them. Pula Tower cleared us to land on Runway 09, minutes before a Boeing 757 from Russia.
The Follow-Me car directed us to our parking slot and the marshal tied down our plane, as the fuel truck arrived. We were given a VIP treatment at the airport terminal, where we cut through the long queue of Russian tourists at passport control – the same people we had just overtaken on landing!
We took the taxi to town and asked to be driven to the Tourist Information Centre. The taxi driver deposited us nowhere near there, and was our first encounter with a less-than-warm Croatian welcome. We experienced this at a couple of other places later during our stay, most notably with an obnoxious lineman at Mali Losinj airport who was downright impolite. But these encounters were more than compensated by the positive experiences we had elsewhere and overall we came out with a positive perspective. It was clear to us that Croatia is doing its best to attract tourism, manifested by a good infrastructure and service.
Pula, and indeed Split which we visited the next day, reminded us very much of small Italian towns. Narrow streets with a teeming evening life, coffee shops with outside tables, all accentuated this feeling. That wasn’t the case with food however. Italians won that score easily. Perhaps it was the touristic restaurants we frequented, or simply bad luck, but we can’t say that we were overwhelmed by the cuisine – with a notable exception at Mali.
The flight down the coast to Split was memorable. It followed a VFR route called AD1 that took us over a coastline of crystalline waters of varying shades of blue, sprinkled with boats that seemed to hang in mid-air, their shadows visible on the sea floor, and islands galore. We were flying at 1500ft with visibility as good as the eyes can see, and a sky a slightly different shade of the sea, the engine humming along with all instruments in the green and the radio happily quiet. We were in flyer’s heaven. This was a poster-image of flying and we nearly had to pinch ourselves to make sure it was real.
The arrival at Split followed the same service as Pula, but where Pula was extremely helpful in filing our flight plan for departure, Split was very heavy and frustrating in administration and we lost considerable time there. Our next stop made up for this, however. Mali Losinj is a beautiful island resort with a small aerodrome for light aircraft. Just the way we like it. It was a welcome, refreshing, change from the large airports of Split and Pula. Although small, it had all the required amenities including fuel and Customs. The latter was very useful as it allowed us to leave the island straight to another country, without needing to divert first to a larger airport.
At Mali we swapped flying for a program of deck-chairs at the beach. We broke our rhythm with a little bit of ping pong, and ended the day with an evening stroll at the leisure port, where we had a very good dinner. It’s a tough Life!
The pending storm finally arrived the next night. It was pouring down heavily and contrasted so much with the previous few days of sunshine. Luckily the forecast called for the storm to pass through by early afternoon, leaving the way for the return of sunshine. This comforted us and we whiled away the hours by watching a movie on Nabil’s PC. True to form, the clouds started to break up as predicted and a quick view of the metars and tafs of the airports on our return path comforted us in our decision to commence our flight back home.
We took the same route back, thought this time we decided to take the short cut and flew straight into the controlled airspaces of the major airports along the way. This was no problem with the friendly controllers. A little stop at Lugano for customs, fuel and coke (I mean the coca-cola variety) gave us a welcome respite before crossing the Alps. Another gorgeous evening awaited us for another memorable – though very different – flight over imposing and beautiful mountains, coming up very close to Mont Blanc. The air was stable; there was no wind, and visibility was again unhindered. From 1500ft at the Croatian coast to 9500ft weaving in between Europe’s highest mountains, we were reminded of how incredibly privileged we were.
Four days and 9 hours of flying later, we heard the familiar voices of the Geneva air traffic controllers again, and we felt at home before even landing. It was 4 days of adventure, 4 days of discovery and 4 days of invaluable complicity with my son. What a blast!
I am looking forward already for next year with my daughter!
I’ve been a space enthusiast for as long as I can remember. I was born in the same year as Apollo 11. I made my family interrupt a holiday in France so I could listen to the launch of the first Space Shuttle mission. And just a couple of days ago, I watched the Shuttle land from its last mission. The Space Shuttle is my own personal space programme. I’m sorry it’s over and I’m anxious and excited to see what’s next.
But in 2002, I got closer to it than I ever expected – I went to Houston and flew NASA’s full-motion Shuttle simulator. Here is an article I wrote back then. If you want to fly the Shuttle today, I recommend X-Plane, F-SIM Space Shuttle or Orbiter.
Tired of X-Plane? Had enough of Flight Simulator 2002? Want the ultimate flight simulator? Well, how about NASA’s unique Space Shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Centre? Used to train every Shuttle commander and pilot and to rehearse missions, the sim occasionally has some unallocated time and NASA uses this to give VIPs including Tom Hanks, Bill Clinton and Charles Schultz and not-so-distinguished members of the press a chance to experience flying the Shuttle. It took six months to set up the clearances, but one Friday, I got a call from the Public Affairs Office in Houston: ‘we have a free slot with your name on it. Can you be here at 8am on Wednesday?’ Since the thing is in use 16 hours a day, every day of the week I didn’t want to miss my chance and so I was on the plane to Texas two days later. This is my review of the world’s ultimate flight simulator.
Aided by jet lag, I pitched up at the security office to be badged at the unreasonable hour of 7am. Also waiting were two Texas rangers with their distinctive ten gallon hats and creased denim uniforms and a dozen fighter pilots in full Top Gun outfits. After a short wait, my escort arrived and took me to the simulator hall. I was shown the various control rooms where the instructors and technicians run the simulations – not just the Shuttle, but also the International Space Station sim. These are not vast mission control rooms you see on films. They look more like the offices of bond dealers with lots of screens and expensive swivel chairs. The simulator group employs 135 people in total but our flight only needed five operators. A full-up integrated mission simulation might have hundreds working on it in Houston, Moscow and Florida. Inside the hall itself, there are several simulators: a couple of procedural simulators, a fixed base simulator, which is used for flight training but which doesn’t physically move and my ride for the morning, the motion base simulator. This looks like the sort of thing an airline pilot might train on. There is a platform raised up on hydraulic rods, lots of pipes, cables and tubes.
I took my place in the pilot’s right hand seat and my instructor, Bill Todd, took the commander’s left hand seat. We put on headsets so we could talk to one another and the team of five controllers who were operating the sim for us. Bill issued the order over the radio and the whole platform shook into life. “Make sure you’re strapped in tight” said Bill with more sang froid than a guards officer on a cold day. “Why?” I asked. “Because the whole thing’s going to tilt now.” As he said it, I could feel the pressure on my back increasing and after a few seconds I realised I was lying flat. This was Bill’s little surprise: unlike airline simulators, this sim has a unique ability. It can tilt back ninety degrees to simulate the launch attitude. It felt very realistic. Lying on my back, it was hard to reach the buttons overhead and in front of me. All the controls are Tonka-sized so they can be used by gloved pilots but it is hard to reach them even with one gravity bearing down on me. With a pressure suit helmet on, the overhead toggles cannot be seen, so the pilots must know which switches to throw from memory. Luckily, a third crewman, sitting between and behind the two pilots, checks that they hit the right ones. Then the screens came alive and I could see the launch tower out to the left behind Bill’s seat, the sun up ahead and, by lifting my head a little, I could see a bit of coastline. ‘Welcome to Kennedy Space Centre’, I thought.
The first sortie was to be a launch and ‘return to landing site’ abort. Bill called this a “twofer” because the spectators get a launch and landing at the same time – ‘twofer the price of one’. In other words, we’d blast off from Kennedy Space Centre, reaching the edge of space over the mid-Atlantic, at which point the operators would simulate a main engine failure and we’d have no choice but to jettison the solid rocket boosters, external fuel tank and glide back to Kennedy.
Bill pressed started the launch sequence and everyone in the cabin did the ritual countdown. 3 … 2 …1 …. Lift off. The cabin vibrated and rocked back and forwards as the main engines and then the solid rocket boosters ignited then the launch tower slide smoothly. Shortly after takeoff the Shuttle rotates and flies inverted giving an extraordinary view of the entire Florida peninsula below and soon, the curvature of the Earth. There was a jolt as the solid rocket booster separated and then it was very smooth.
A few minutes into the climb, the pressure on one of the engines visibly dropped and Bill initiated the abort. This is an extremely complex ballet in the upper atmosphere that turns the Shuttle around and uses the remaining engines to slow it down and then free falling almost vertically for about 100,000 feet until the aerodynamic surfaces become effective and the thing can begin to glide back. The computers on the simulator (which, incidentally, run the same flight control software as the real Shuttle on the same hardware) control the whole thing. Luckily, my sole job on this first flight was to deploy the air data probes once we had re-entered the atmosphere (60,000 feet and 280kts) and then lower the landing gear and release the slow-down parachute, while Bill hand flew the last few thousand feet for a perfect touchdown.
The motion base really comes into its own on approach and landing. After Bill’s demonstration, the sim was reset to put us at the top of drop for the approach into Kennedy after an abort. “You have control,” said Bill. Earlier he had commented that “people who play video games tend to do better at this than real pilots.” Since I’d spent most of my adult life designing video games and I have a PPL, I figured I had the best of both worlds and took this as a challenge. The approach bears a surprising resemblance to a standard overhead join, which you might do at any small airfield in England, in that you fly west to east over the top of the north-facing landing runway then turn and descend on the ‘deadside’ before looping back over the runway, turning downwind and then onto finals. The differences are: you start at 50,000 feet (not 2,000), the crosswind leg is over 25 nautical miles long (not half a mile or so) and the rate of descent is DRAMATICALLY faster. Put another way, I don’t normally make sonic booms on my approaches into Denham or turn base over Cambridge.
Needless to say, the Shuttle is a glider and the trick is to land first time, every time. Consequently, the Shuttle flies a very steep glide slope – not the 3-4 degrees of a commercial airline. It lands at 195-200 knots, significantly faster than a jumbo jet, in part because of its fast approach and in part because of its delta wing. Concorde lands fast for the same reason.
For the approach, Bill explained that we needed a steep nose-down attitude only pulling up on finals. The ‘picture’ of the runway (the aspect ratio of the runway which shows whether you are too high or too low) is dramatically different from what I am used too. In fact, it is more like the view a dive bomber might get. Because of the delta wing, Bill explained “you can’t fly it to the ground.” Instead, once over the threshold, you pull back on the stick and flare the aircraft, pop the chute and let it settle on its own cushion of air. Once in the flare, it’s not too dissimilar from landing a normal plane: “look at the end of the runway and hold the nose relative to that.”
I hand flew two full approaches. On the first, I managed to get it onto the runway (just) but I wasn’t terribly straight and this prompted Bill’s comment, which he delivered with a laconic Texan accent: “steer onto the centreline for the cameras – it doesn’t matter where you touch down, it’s where you end up that impresses the journalists.” My second approach was done in cloud down to about four hundred feet and I got onto the runway and held the centreline until I came to a complete stop. Bill’s comment: “pretty good, but the real astronauts have to do it in a crosswind, in pressure suits, under stress and after two weeks of weightlessness in orbit.” He told us afterwards that on the first shuttle flight, just before launch, the commander, veteran John Young, had a heart rate of 80 while his pilot, first timer Bob Crippen, was up to 160. I was definitely in the Bob Crippen camp! However, the NASA minder who was escorting me had a go and landed in the swamp. According to Bill “that was as far from the runway as I have ever landed.” This made me feel better about my performance.
As a flying machine, the Shuttle feels very stable. The joystick controller drives a fly by wire control system which triggers reaction control rockets in space and aerodynamic surfaces in the atmosphere. The controller feels very solid, like it was built by Mercedes rather than Microsoft, and it resists hasty or aggressive manoeuvres. The whole vehicle has considerable inertia and the two combined make it fly very smoothly and precisely. I’ve flown 767s and 747s on British Airways simulators and the Shuttle feels similar to them, but perhaps a little sprightlier. The simulator is fitted with the latest in Shuttle avionics including new multifunction displays. The flight control software has to cope with a number of different modes: launch, abort, orbital, docking, re-entry, approach and landing and the screen displays match the mode. The approach display is broadly similar to an airliner display but the gauges are subtly different: angle of attack assumes a higher importance and the airspeed is displayed in KEAS, which stands for knot equivalent airspeed. In the upper atmosphere, there isn’t enough air pressure to get a meaningful airspeed and this is an analogue used to give a sense of the vehicle’s speed. Where you might expect something like a direction indicator or HSI, there is a strange display which shows three small circles moving inside a constantly changing geometric shape. The three circles are predictors of the vehicle’s position at different points in the future and the shape is the HAC or heading alignment cone. This is like a funnel down which the Shuttle must fly. Luckily, the head up display (HUD) simplifies everything by giving you an incredibly simple flight director display. There is a square which represents the actual heading of the Shuttle and a diamond which indicates the desired heading as calculated by the computers. If you keep the diamond inside the square on the HUD, you’re doing fine. I suspect this is why Bill thought that people who play video games were better than trained pilots at landing the sim. The head up display also shows rate of descent, speed, angle of attack and – on finals – a projection of the runway itself to give the pilot a ‘picture’ even in cloud. For instrument approaches, this is an easier presentation than a traditional ILS.
“It is the most sophisticated simulator in the world, by far,” Bill explained after the sortie. Besides simulating all the different ways a Shuttle flies, every subcomponent is modelled so that different kinds of failures can be thrown at trainees. Finally, the whole thing is part of a worldwide simulator network and it can link to mission control in Houston, launch control in Florida, Russian mission control and mission or ISS-specific simulators. It would be like a virtual airline that plugged into a virtual operations system, other aircraft and three different air traffic control simulators.
So how does it rate as a simulator? If I were reviewing it as a consumer product I would have to say that the visuals are not as good as Flight Simulator 2002, although they are reasonable for a system that was first built in 1980 and they compare well to commercial flight sims. The accuracy of the flight models and flight control software is, of course, as good as is humanly possible. The panels, displays, seats and controllers are flight-rated and again as accurate as possible. The motion base, the piles of checklists and manuals everywhere and radio chatter from the controllers through the headsets add to the sense of ‘being there’. A particularly human touch was the half dozen kitchen timers velcro’d to every empty surface and the pens and pencils that are attached at various points. These touches reminded me that this is a simulation of a real flying vehicle and these are the sorts of things that real pilots have in their aircraft. When you consider that a pilot in training for a mission would fly several four hour profiles a week prior to launch and that they are graded by computer on the accuracy of their landings and even the amount of tyre and brake wear they cause, it is easy to imagine that for most pilots the Shuttle simulator in Houston IS a real aircraft.