Busy, busy, busy

Folks, I must apologize for my silence these last few weeks.  There are a lot of things I could write about right now, but I'm just tired so all I'll do is fill you in a bit on what has been going on.  A week or two before my last entry, Matt had the hood of his car pop open while he was traveling at 75mph on the freeway headed home from his reserve unit.  The wind caught the hood and slammed it into the windshield.  He wasn't hurt, but the insurance company called the car a complete loss.  Then a few days after the last entry, he was staying at a friend's house on his drill weekend.  He went to open the window and discovered that this one didn't have counterweights and it slammed back down on his finger.  See the x-ray below.  He has since had a pin inserted to hold the bones together while they heal.

Then, the remnants of Hurricane Ike moved into the area and through a wierd encounter with the jet stream resulted in tropical storm force winds (with hurricane strength gusts) hitting our area.  It took the carport off the house and dropped it on the wife's car, so we've been dealing with insurance companies, too.

 

 

Will VORs and ILS Really Go Away?

Flying Magazine has a weekly e-mail newsletter you can subscribe to and I do. Normally, what I read there is mostly a recap of news stories that I probably heard of through one of the many aviation-related RSS feeds I follow, but this morning's had a brief article by J. Mac McClellan under the "Left Seat" banner (which I haven't yet seen posted to their website, I'll update this post with a link back to it if I see it show up there) that I thought was pretty interesting. I don't like posting someone else's content in its entirety but I think this is worth it.

Will VORs and ILS Really Go Away?

It was more than 15 years ago when Richard Collins and I met with the then head of FAA airway and navigation and planning, and he laid out a detailed plan that would have decommissioned virtually all VOR stations and ILS equipment in less than 10 years. GPS, with the added accuracy and dependability of wide area augmentation system (WAAS), was going to make navigation stations bolted to the ground unnecessary and irrelevant. Obviously, it didn't happen.

Now the FAA is talking about starting to scale back the national network of VOR stations by 2010 because GPS and WAAS are a reality and we really don't need those costly to maintain navigation radio stations. Will it happen this time? I doubt it.

It would be easy to blame the many thousands of general aviation airplane owners who have not yet installed a GPS with certified IFR capability, and the much larger group yet to embrace WAAS. And that group, through AOPA and other associations, will complain, but they are not the real drag on transition to GPS, WAAS and the next generation (NextGen) air traffic control system. The real foot dragging comes from the airlines.

Though Garmin in particular has delivered many thousands of WAAS-equipped GPS systems for personal and business airplanes, the jets, especially the airlines, lag behind. Even the best-equipped business jets have been slower to get WAAS equipment approved and installed than piston singles.

Part of the reason is that certifying anything -- particularly primary navigation systems -- is just more complicated, costly and time consuming for a transport category airplane than for a light airplane. Another issue is that the flight management systems (FMS) found in nearly every jet guide the airplane anywhere by already using a combination of inputs from GPS, inertial navigation sensors, VOR and DME to navigate. A WAAS GPS adds very little tangible capability to a jet. And because the giant majority of runways used by jets -- particularly the airlines -- have ILS approaches, WAAS adds nothing to lower approach minimums as it can at small airports served only by non-precision approaches.

When you consider the dire financial straits of the airlines, and the huge cost of putting an airplane out of service to install an expensive and redundant GPS WAAS system, the airlines' enthusiasm for WAAS is really diminished. They already have the equipment to fly direct en route to an ILS approach with minimums down to a half-mile visibility or less. No way they want to spend money for benefits that are in the future, not today.

A notable exception among the airlines is Southwest, which is spending millions to bring its fleet up to required minimum performance (RNP) capability, including WAAS, in the hope it can fly precise departure and arrival procedures and save a few miles per trip. But as far as I know Southwest is alone among the major airlines in spending millions now in the hope of getting it back in fuel savings over future years.

So, sadly, I think a combination of factors will keep the FAA paralyzed. It will announce again, and again, that it is moving on, but the primary user of the ATC system, the airlines, won't follow. Even if the FAA sets a hard deadline and warns that it will shut off VORs, and then ILS approaches, on a firm schedule, it has no credibility. It has made such announcements before and they were ignored, and the schedule was not followed.

Some wag once said that changing the ATC system is like overhauling an engine while it's running. And that's very true. So far the inertia to preserve the status quo is more powerful than any benefits of change that can't be immediately converted into cost savings. When will all of this change? I don't know, and neither does the FAA.

What it takes (costs?) to become a pilot

Wow, two posts on flying in one day. That hasn't happened in a while, but I wanted to put something up about this before I forgot about it. There was a great post over on the Southwest Airlines blog about GA flying. Also, be sure to read the comments.

---Jim

How do I remain sharp when I can't fly that much

A problem I've had ever since I got my license, is that I can't really fly as often as I'd like. With the price of oil going up, avgas prices can't be far behind which only makes it worse. So the question is, what can I do to remain sharp when I can't fly and to make the best use of my time when I do get to fly? I welcome the thoughts of anyone out there who may be reading my blog (does anyone really read my blog?), but I'll list a few of the things that I try to do when I can't fly.

1. I read as much as I can about flying. I don't subscribe to as many magazines as I used to, but the ones that I still read cover to cover are: Aviation Safety, IFR, and IFR Refresher. I also read quite a bit from AOPA Pilot and AOPA Flight Training, and occasionally Flying.
2. I use the technique that my first instructor taught me, of armchair flying. That is, I'll plan a flight or pick a flight out of my log book and sit in my favorite chair and go through all the motions flying the flight in my head.
3. Go to the airport and watch/listen to the other planes/pilots.
4. Listen to ATC on my laptop.
5. Lately, I read blogs about flying, too. I happened across http://www.bloggingpilots/radar the other day which will provide me with more flying stuff to read and they are on Twitter, too.
   
6. Hope I hit the lottery so I can afford to fly as much as I want to (yeah, okay, not really, but it is nice to dream).
   

You'll notice, I didn't include 'use Flight Simulator' in that list. Frankly, I don't own a copy of MS Flight Simulator or the like anymore (I owned a Mac copy 20 years ago). One of these days, I may invest in a copy of On Top, but I haven't yet. The big problem with all of those options is that I don't use Windows as my primary OS except on the work-supplied laptop (where I can't install software that doesn't have a work purpose). Plus, it would help to have a bigger screen and yoke/pedals to make the most of those software packages. I'd like to think these help keep me a little sharper, but the fact is, I still could afford to spend a few hours with an instructor to knock some of the rust off. In fact, I need to get an IPC in to be IFR-current again. Oh, well. Last night, would have been a fantastic night to fly, tonight wouldn't be bad either. Well, off to dream about flying.