Land and Hold Short

Over the past couple of months, I had two exceptionally good experiences with aviation-related businesses, and one exceptionally bad one. As a service to my fellow owners, I’m going to name them all here.

Cheer: Great Lakes Aero

This company makes windows for light, unpressurized aircraft that are roughly triple the quality of the original manufacturers’ at a third the price. As if that weren’t enough, I bought a new windshield in May but didn’t get around to having it installed until December, when I found out that I’d bought the wrong thickness. No problem: Great Lakes was happy to take it back and give me a refund (minus a trivial restocking fee) and ship me a new one.

Cheer: Sutton Aviation

This won’t be of much interest unless you keep your plane near Ottawa, but this year Sutton Aviation at Rockcliffe Airport showed me that an annual inspection (and associated upgrades, rectifications, and repairs) can be fast, thorough, and (relatively) inexpensive. Maybe I can afford to keep this plane after all.

Jeer: Aircraft Spruce

I was excited when I found out that Aircraft Spruce would be opening a Canadian operation, even if it’s just a transhipment point, because I’m tired of the cross-border mail order hassles. I called Aircraft Spruce first to confirm that their deal with UPS meant no brokerage fees (”just tax”, said the man on the phone), then discovered when my package arrived that Spruce had simply collected the infamous, non-refundable $60–70 brokerage fee on UPS’s behalf before shipping you the order — how is that a benefit to Canadian customers? They refused even to apologize afterwards, much less make good on their mistake (at first, they tried to claim that the fee was sales tax, until I pointed out the sales tax on a separate line). Until we have a real Canadian source, other mail order companies like Chief Aircraft will be happy for your business, and will treat you better in the bargain.

According to AOPA, the biggest issue facing general aviation in the U.S. is the risk of user fees. I agree with Phil Boyer that user fees could hurt GA, especially if they are per use (as in Australia) rather than flat fees (as in Canada, with one misguided exception); however, I think that there are even bigger issues facing North American general aviation. Here, on no scientific basis whatsoever, are my top five:

1. The end of AvGas: Almost nobody makes AvGas any more, it’s expensive to transport, and environmentalists rightly hate it because it’s leaded. Watch for it to get rarer and more expensive, with more and more shortages, over the next few years, at the same time as ethanol in MoGas renders it unsuitable for the few aircraft engines that could use it. The solution? Diesel engines, but they’re still expensive to install (nearly the whole cost of my plane), probably won’t ever be approved for all existing models, and do not yet have a significant North American maintenance network in place. Most old planes will have to be retired, and most pilots won’t be able to afford to replace ‘em, so they’ll retire with their planes.

2. (In)Security: It’s there, and it’s not going to go away. The general public has always been afraid of airplanes (I’ve posted in the past about how we exacerbate the problem by promoting air shows), and general aviation in particular scares them because it’s so lightly regulated. In the 2004 U.S. presidential election, one of the candidates was a GA pilot and went out of his way not to cause problems for his fellow pilots; in 2008, we probably won’t be that lucky. And the next time something bad happens, watch for GA to be the scapegoat even more than in 2001: we could be regulated right out of existence on either or both sides of the border.

3. Airport closures: New residential neighbourhoods, either on reclaimed industrial land in the city or former farmland in the country, almost always mean bad news for general aviation. Airports are useful only when they’re near somewhere you want to go, so the most useful airports are typically also the most threatened: Toronto City Centre Airport is constantly under seige from nearby condo dwellers, for example, and even little Rockcliffe Airport struggles with community noise complaints (note that both of these airports have been there since before World War II). Airports aren’t the only ones who suffer from the soccer-mom onslaught: in rural areas farmers have to deal with complaints from new subdivisions about noise and smell, hunters have to go further away to hunt, and so on.

4. Maintenance: Most of the GA fleet is, and will remain, old — very few of us can shell out $300K-$1M for a new light plane, so we have to settle for spending $20K-$150K on something older. It would take only a couple of expensive Airworthiness Directives from the FAA or Transport Canada to knock a huge part of the fleet out of the sky by requiring a repair worth more than the planes’ resale value. Furthermore, the shops that maintain these planes for us often operate on a shoestring, billing much less per hour than an auto shop, and in the U.S. a few of them are starting to refuse to work on older planes for liability reasons (U.S. law protects manufacturers from being sued once the planes are a certain age, so the shop would be the only one to go after in a crash).

5. User fees: We’ve been paying these in Canada for a while now, and since they’ve remained low and fixed (thanks to COPA), they don’t seem to have had any impact at all on GA. However, that could change easily. If either Canada or the U.S. introduced a pay-per-use system, flying could quickly become too expensive and/or too dangerous for most GA owners. For example, if you had to pay $100 each time you filed IFR, scud running might become a bit more tempting; if you had to pay $25 for a weather briefing, you’d be less likely to talk to a specialist about icing. Realistically, I don’t think this is as big a threat as the others, but I’m still grateful that COPA and AOPA (I’m a member of both) are looking out for our interests.

My plane’s back on the line today. After doing some high-speed taxi checks to make sure nothing was leaking or running too hot or cold, I had to try to push the plane back into its spot through snow and a small ditch, cover it up, and plug it in. Call me slow (seriously — go ahead), but it took me until my fourth winter owning a plane to figure out some very simple tricks for moving, covering, and plugging in a plane in a snowy, slippery, uneven parking spot.

[Update: see below.]

According to Snopes, this photo is legit — it’s a Cherokee 180 N6487J that crashed into a tree during a forced approach near Meadowlake Airport in Colorado last month after the engine lost power (the pilot, who was the sole occupant, had no serious injuries).

The picture is circulating around the Internet because of the funny juxtaposition of a flight school sign and a small plane crashed into a tree behind it. However, American Aviation uses Cessnas as its primary trainers (and a Piper Arrow for complex training), and the PA-28-180 in the picture is registered to a real-estate company, so unless it was on a lease-back, it really has nothing to do with the flying school or flying lessons. Still, it is hard not to come up with funny captions …

I was reading through an article on pilotage [Wikipedia] in the December AOPA Pilot. In general, I found the article enjoyable, but one thing stuck out like a wart — the author’s assumption that people should always read a chart track up (with the chart rotated for the direction they’re heading) rather than north up.

I have no objection to the suggestion that people try using a chart track up, but frequent claim that it’s easier — and some pundits’ and instructors’ insistence that it’s the only proper way — grates a bit. In informal surveys on aviation mailing lists, I’ve found people split about 50:50 between north up and track up, and I suspect that it has to do with how different people’s brains work, something along the lines of left-handedness and right-handedness.

Personally, if I’m flying west, my mind already pictures me flying right to left, so it’s by far easier to hold the chart north up so that it lines up with what I’m seeing in my head. Track up would be a double annoyance, since (1) I’d have to rotate everything in my head, and (2) all the text on the chart might be sideways or upside down. Likewise, when I’m walking, cycling, or driving around a city, I think of myself as heading northwest, south, etc. — I never memorize a trip as a series of left or right turns. I imagine that people who do navigate that way probably also find track up easier.

So if you fly, hike, boat, or whatever, do you prefer to hold your charts (or set your GPS display) north up or track up? Why? If you’re an instructor (aviation, seach-and-rescue, orienteering, etc.), have your students generally found one or the other easier? Has anyone every done a proper scientific study?

A friend sent me a link to this 20 minute U.S. government training film for the F4U Corsair (Google Video). Make sure your wings are locked in the down position before takeoff, and remember that you’re burning well in excess of 200 gallons/hour at military power. Stall is a bit exciting, and make sure you don’t pull more than 7Gs in a dive.

A lot of the stuff here, though — like the checklists and mixture management, and the caution not to ride the brakes while taxiing — will still be familiar to a student pilot in 2007.

Some workers at Chicago/O’Hare Airport claim to have seen a UFO on the night of November 7, 2006 (CNN story): it hovered over the field and then climbed rapidly out of sight. The FAA talked a lot about low ceilings and airport lights creating optical illusions, but I found the explanation from controller and union rep Craig Burzych much more convincing:

“To fly 7 million light years to O’Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable.”

Next time you’re in an airliner landing at a major hub, don’t grumble if you’re stuck for 15 or 20 minutes because another plane is in your gate — it might just be saving the world from eternal servitude to a race of hyperintelligent (but impatient) cyborgs.