Land and Hold Short

This time, it was a Canadian plane’s turn to violate the DC ADIZ, the enormous restricted airspace around Washington, DC (the plane did not go anywhere near the White House or Capitol). In fact, planes violate the ADIZ all the time, usually without news coverage.

I wonder if all of this hassle for pilots, air traffic control, the military, and ordinary U.S. citizens brings any public safety benefits. It’s telling that New York City, which suffered more than Washington in the September 11 attacks, has almost completely reopened its airspace and does not require any special codes or preclearance (you can fly VFR right into Teterboro, for example, without filing a flight plan or talking to any ATC unit but Teterboro tower). Private planes are even allowed back into the Hudson River VFR corridor, where they can fly at 500 feet MSL between Manhattan and New Jersey, looking into the windows of skyscrapers moving past the wing.

In Ottawa, our nation’s capital, we briefly had a no-fly zone over most of the city core (including Parliament Hill and Rideau Hall) up to 3,000 ft MSL after the September 11 attacks, but that has been scaled back so far now that you’d actually have to be buzzing the Peace Tower to get busted. The airspace restrictions during President Bush’s visit last fall gave us a brief taste of what life must be like for pilots in some parts of the U.S., and I can confirm that the flavour was pretty bitter.

I was recently reading yet another review about the glass cockpits starting to appear in general aviation aircraft, when one comment struck me — the review mentioned how much pilots rely on the position of needles on analog (steam) gauges, rather than actually reading them. That makes a lot of sense (and everyone else reading this probably knew it already) — I hand fly all of my IFR, since I don’t have an autopilot, and there’s no way that I could maintain altitude in turbulence, talk to ATC, look up approaches and scan my instruments if I had to actually read numbers on each of them.

Altimeter

The altimeter is a very straight-forward example. In the following diagrams, I’ve drawn an altimeter face with all of the numbers removed and only the big (hundreds) hand. For IFR, you’re almost always going to be flying on an even thousand, so while you certainly want to look at the little hand once in a while (a lot, if you’re in moderate-to-severe turbulence), most of the time all you’ll be doing is trying to keep the big hand pointing straight up. If you glance quickly and see the needle in the first position, you’ll know that you’re slightly low, so you’ll add back pressure, power, or both. If you see the needle in the second position, you’re fine (though it won’t hurt to glance at the VSI and ASI for trends). If you see the needle in the third position, you’ll know that you’re slightly high, so you’ll release back pressure and/or reduce power until the needle looks like it does in the middle:

Note how little brain power this requires — the effort required to interpret the needle can be measured in tenths, if not hundredths of seconds, and you can often watch it with your peripheral vision while worrying about something else. Exactly the same thing applies to a VFR cruise altitude, except that your goal is to keep the needle at the 6:00 position (since VFRs cruise at altitudes like 3,500 feet, 4,500 feet, etc.):

Airspeed Indicator

I think that the same kind of approach works for the airspeed indicator. While I’ve flown only a small range of very slow planes, from all the photos I’ve seen, approach speed is nearly always around 3:00, cruise is around 6:00, and middle of the yellow line (i.e. you’re close to tearing your wings off) is around 9:00:

For my Warrior, 6:00 (straight down) is about 105 knots indicated, which is the expected IAS for 65% power. Normally I cruise at 75%, which is about 114 knots indicated, or somewhere around 6:30; if I wanted to cruise at 55% power, I’d want to keep the needle a bit on the right side, around 5:30. Normal approach speed is 70 knots (less for short field work or a light plane), which is almost right on 3:00. 9:00 is halfway between the yellow line and the redline, at 140 knots indicated. Again, all I normally have to do is make sure that the needle is a bit past 6:00 — something I can check almost subconsciously and using peripheral vision — and I’ll know that my speed is OK.

Vertical Speed Indicator

The last major analog gauge with a needle is the VSI, and absolute position applies here just as much. In the following diagram (again, without numbers), any pilot will recognize quickly that the first position shows a screaming dive, the second shows a normal descent, the third shows level flight, the fourth shows a normal climb, and the fifth shows a rocket-like climb (i.e. you’ve hit a mountain wave or blundered inside a big cumulus cloud):

That’s the Trick

We spend a lot of time during IFR training on using the attitude indicator and turn coordinator to keep the wings level, and on using the VOR/ILS gauges and the ADF needle to navigate, but I think that the real breakthrough for each IFR student probably comes when he or she no longer has to think about these other needle positions, but can simply deal with them reflexively while thinking about the bigger problems. IFR students feel rushed having only 10 minutes to get ready for an approach — a couple of years later, the biggest problem is how to entertain yourself during the extra 8 minutes.

Bugs

I’m not going to go into detail about glass cockpits, since I’ve never used them and would just be repeating things I’ve seen other people write. However, it is worth noting that, for all the numbers and fancy graphics, the most important part of a glass display is the bug — it’s too hard for the pilots to keep reading numbers, so they set a bug (a triangle graphic usually, I think) on the ribbon displays for altitude, heading, airspeed, descent rate, or what-have-you, then work just to keep the bug in the correct position. Analog-type pilots sometimes have bugs on their heading indicators and use those the same way. It all works out the same in the end, I guess.

That’s how my plane has been for a full week now, in the shop, waiting for parts to arrive from Piper via a supplier in Memphis via a second supplier in Montreal. Owners tend to say that the annual is the most unpredictable part of aircraft ownership — after all, it’s pretty straight forward to predict how much gas you’ll burn, how much your insurance will run, how much parking will be, how much your new Garmin 530 will cost installed (just dreaming), etc., but nobody knows whether the bill after an annual inspection will be US $1,500 or $15,000 (fortunately, mine have always ended up well in the first third of that range so far).

In fact, the annual inspection itself is very predictable — it takes about 25-30 hours for an experienced mechanic to run through the full Piper Warrior II annual inspection list properly, and maybe a couple more hours for run-of-the-mill AD and SB inspections. It’s just that most of us don’t have our (private) planes looked at in detail any other time of the year unless something is obviously broken, so it’s the annual inspection that finds most of the hidden problems. I’m considering adding an unofficial semi-annual inspection — maybe 4 hours in the shop late in the fall, when I need to change the oil and jack up the plane to get the wheel fairings off anyway. Just taking off the cowling and propeller spinner and letting the guys in the shop poke around for a few hours might find a lot of small problems before they become big ones.

After all, we get the family minivan inspected twice a year, and I can just pull over to the side of the road if something breaks on it.

Even a relatively patient person like me eventually gets tired of deleting comment spam. I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1, and installed the highly-recommended SpamKarma plugin. Hopefully, this will allow legitimate comments to appear immediately, without waiting for moderation, while filtering out all of the Online Poker ads. Please let me know (somehow) if your comments are being blocked incorrectly.

An avionics story on Slashdot?

JP Instruments sells a line of engine monitors that is popular among owners (at least, owners who spend more on their planes than I do). Engine monitors help you to find problems before they get serious, by detecting (say) an unusually high temperature in one cylinder hours before it actually fails — that’s important for safety, of course (think single-engine plane over mountains in IMC), but also also for the pocketbook, since engine maintenance and overhauls are one of the most expensive parts of flying.

One particularly cool feature of some engine monitors like JPI’s is the ability to download saved data to your computer and analyze it at home. A few months ago, however, JPI decided to encrypt their data to prevent owners from using any software other than their own. Owners, of course, are furious. Now even Slashdot has picked up the story.

Could the movement for open source and open standards make it as far as the dusty, cobwebbed corners of the avionics market?

Nav Canada has a whole bunch of proposed changes in its National Level of Service Report from last October (which I’ve noticed only now — here’s a link directly to the full 96-page PDF report). The report proposes revoking many approaches and decommissioning navaids (mainly low-powered NDBs), changing some hours of operation, eliminating some LF airway segments, changing weather reporting for many airports, and — perhaps least controversionally — eliminating VHF direction finding from more airports.

The beginning of the report summarizes the proposed changes, alphabetically by airport, then provides details, objections, etc. for each one. For example, here are the proposed changes for Montreal/Trudeau (formerly Dorval):

The only change of interest in the Ottawa area is the planned revocation of Ottawa/Gatineau NDB 27 (there’s still an NDB/DME 27 approach) — I don’t think that anyone uses the NDB 27 except for training, since the minima are so high, so that shouldn’t hurt. Sooner or later, though, with all these vanishing NDBs (in the U.S. even more than in Canada), I’m going to have to grit my teeth and shell out for an IFR GPS in my plane.

If you’re a Canadian pilot (or a pilot who flies to Canada), take a peek at the list and see if anything interesting is proposed at the airports you use, then leave a comment or mention the changes in your own blog.

In his most recent posting, Moncton Centre controller Michael Oxner makes some friendly but justifiable complaints about summer recreational pilots who don’t bring paper charts in the plane and tie up ATC time when their handheld GPS’s fail (for those pilots’ sake, I hope that their GPS’s had terrain information when they were working — there are mountains pushing above 5,000 ft MSL in Maine on the way from central Canada to the Maritimes).

Here’s a trick I thought of after arriving at the airport once for a long (VFR) family trip, loading up the plane, then realizing that I had left my charts at home: I always, always, carry a couple of 1:1,000,000 scale World Aeronautical Charts (WACs) in my flight bag. WACs have lousy detail but very wide coverage — just two Canadian WACs (F-21 and F-22) cover nearly any single-day trip I’d fly inside Canadian airspace, and add no appreciable bulk or weight. The problem with Canadian WACs, though, is that they’re not updated very often — they may be legal, but most of them haven’t been amended for 10 years or more, so their airspace information is of historical interest only. For that reason, I actually carry American WACs (CF-18 and CF-19), which are updated regularly and happen to include a lot of Canadian airspace.

Since I own my own plane, I also keep a bunch of charts and approach plates for Ontario and Quebec in a small bag under the pilot’s seat — the WACs are actually the backup to my backup now — but for a renter, a couple of WACs in the flight bag seems like a no-brainer, though 1:500,000 scale VNCs/Sectionals and 1:250,000 scale terminal-area charts are, obviously, preferable.

For anyone with time to kill, a high-speed Internet connection, and no concept of the cost of inkjet toner, you can download the U.S. sectional charts here and print them out on your own.