Here’s another gem I found on the Cessna Pilots Association forum. I’ve seen the darndest things discussed, uploaded, admitted to, and debated over there. The CPA forums are a favorite haunt of mine because everyone who posts is a paid member of the association, which tends to keep out the rabble one finds in newsgroups and other ‘free’ message boards.
Anyway, this is an attempted takeoff by a Grumman Goose from what appears to be a lake. Things go slightly awry, though I’m sure everyone walked away and I understand that the aircraft was repaired.
This incident is reminder of the dangers of flying sea planes. Beyond the fact that the runway surface is always changing, tends to hide obstructions (logs, for example), may contain obstacles like boats, and isn’t necessarily straight, there’s also a point where the aircraft is “on the step” and especially vulnerable to the sea gods.
It’s akin to the moment before a tailwheel airplane leaves the ground. Not enough speed to fly, yet enough lift to leave the airframe light on the wheels and therefore more easily affected by the wind. Sea planes have the disadvantages of that tailwheel aircraft, plus the unpredictable effect of waves hitting the hull at the moment when it’s got just enough lift to pull the airframe partially out of the water, taking quite a bit of stability with it.
Good times, eh?
Speaking of the hazards of operating an aircraft on the water, I received my sea plane rating on Lake Havasu about five years ago. My largest worry were the boaters traversing the lake. For the most part, they were intoxicated, poorly trained, and totally unconcerned about the idea of a spinning metal propeller moving toward them.
When on the water, sea planes are less maneuverable than sail and power boats. Sea planes have no brakes and the water rudders are not terribly effective at the slower taxi speeds we use when in the vicinity of other watercraft. Sea plane therefore have the right of way over boats. Not that you’d know it from the way these boaters would cut in front of me.
One genius even had the idea to come over to us after a flight and ask if there was any way we could tow a water skier using the airplane. The best part is that he wanted to do it while the aircraft was in flight. Imagine a half-drunk, half-dressed hooligan with a beer in each hand who uses the word “dude” waaaay to much and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what we were dealing with.
I recall being unsure of the proper etiquette for this situation. Do I laugh at him? Slap him? Just shake my head and mutter, “That’s a shame”? In the end, I believe we just said no and left it at that.
On a slightly different note, I want to wish everyone a very happy new year! May 2006 be marked by fair skies and tailwinds for us all.
The new year is starting off right at work. My boss just had a front page article published about him in the Orange County Register. The Register is the largest newspaper in Orange County, with a daily circulation of about one million copies.
Unfortunately, the Register requires online users to register before reading the article, but you might be able to get a login from BugMeNot.com. As I recall, it’s a copyright violation to reprint an entire article without permission, but I can quote from it, so here’s an excerpt:
The 62-year-old, Yale-educated native of the Virgin Islands whose floppy white hair, somewhat patrician bearing, and desert-dry wit call to mind an aerial George Plimpton likes to teach by doing, not telling.
His midair engine stall is designed to do just that. Among other things, he is forcing Kim to think of alternative ways to maintain enough altitude to glide safely back to the airport.
Safety being the prime concern for Church and his John Wayne Airport-based Sunrise Aviation school.
His 26 flight instructors must have a minimum of 1,500 flight hours to be hired. His 35 planes are stripped and inspected every 100 hours of flight. He writes columns on safety for aviation magazines. And even beginning pilots are trained in aerobatic “spin training” - an extra safety precaution that few aviation schools provide.
“You are in a significantly less friendly environment in the air than on the ground,” Church explains. Flying “has to be approached with significantly more organization than when you get in your car.”
Church’s obsession with safety won him the Federal Aviation Administration’s 2005 Safety Counselor Award.
The award is one of four given each year to the nation’s top small-aircraft mechanic, avionics expert, flight instructor, and in Church’s case, safety guru.
In his more than three decades of flying, Church has logged 12,000 hours in the air with a few near-misses - but nary a crash.
The average small-aircraft pilot may have fewer than 1,000 hours’ experience. And few pilots earn their hours by doing aerial loops, twists, dives and other aerobatic stunts that are Michael Church hallmarks.
“The guy knows what he’s doing,” says Terry Vance, the Huntington Beach motorcycle drag-racing champ who credits Church with saving his life.
Vance’s small plane went into an unintentional spin over New Mexico. The aerobatic training that Sunrise requires helped him pull out of a potentially deadly spiral.
“If I had not had spin training I would have been in serious trouble,” Vance says.
Church himself is more phlegmatic about his success.
“If you manage the risk and grow to a ripe old age, somewhere along the line people are going to start asking how you do it.”
It’s a delight to read something positive about GA, even more so in this case because it’s about the company where I work. I hope that this article will help establish a relationship between the two and the Register will “go to Church” the next time they need information on general aviation.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
I was on my way to work a few days ago – cruising down Alton Boulevard at about 45 mph – when a small geriatric Asian woman suddenly jumped out in front of my car. Her left hand went up, palm out, making the universal symbol for “stop” as though she was a traffic cop managing a busy intersection during a power outage.
It was an interesting choice. My car is a 14 year old Mitsubishi Eclipse with nearly 200,000 miles on it. No disc brakes, just drums. No anti-lock system. No crumple zones, airbags, or sneeze guards.
Suffice it to say I left skid marks on the ground… and in less mentionable places. This crazy woman avoided an ambulance ride by mere inches.
Did she take a moment to reflect on this fact? Nope. Instead, she rushed around to the passenger side window and started pounding on it while yelling something incomprehensible. I could only pick out bits and pieces, but the words “high school” stuck out.
I’m not sure if it was idle curiosity or the urge to yell back at her, but whatever the reason, I reached over to roll down the passenger side window. This was clearly a mistake, because before I could even get it halfway down, she reached into my car and unlocked the door. In an instant, the door was open and she was sitting in the right seat, all the while jabbering on about highschoolhighschoolhighschool. Naturally, my laptop computer was under her ass. A meaningess factoid, apparently, because she continued screeching about “highschoohighschool!”.
There was a high school just down the road. Hmmm. Was there some sort of emergency going on over there? A crazed student with a gun, perhaps? A gas leak? Or perhaps it was something really important, like the football team getting a critical two point conversion in the fourth quarter?
I began driving toward the school, thinking it might be wise to dial 911. If nothing was happening on campus, there was always the hijacker in my car for the authorities to work on.
It was about this time that I hear the word “bus” interspersed with the gibberish and it all started to fall into place. Our intrepid nut case had missed her bus. Apparently wherever she’s from, if you miss the public transportation, you forcibly stop the next automobile and they give you a ride to the farthest reaches of town.
Still shocked at having an uninvited total stranger in my vehicle, it took a good 30 seconds before I threw her out. I spat, “Confucious say: get the hell out of my car before I go postal, you crazy loon!”
OK, not really. It was more like, “Um, I’m headed to the airport. This is as far as I can take you.”
A blank stare. Time passes. I gesture to the sidewalk. She opened the door, hopped out, and happily walked away without so much as a goodbye or thank you. After all we’d been through together!
The nerve.
Did you know there’s a name for those who fear Friday the 13th?
Try saying that three times fast.
Some sources say it may be the most widespread superstition in the United States. Some people won’t go to work on Friday the 13th; some won’t eat in restaurants; many wouldn’t think of setting a wedding on the date.
Just how many Americans at the turn of the millennium still suffer from this condition? According to Dr. Donald Dossey, a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of phobias (and coiner of the term “paraskevidekatriaphobia”), the figure may be as high as 21 million. If he’s right, eight percent of Americans are still in the grips of a very old superstition.
Statistically, only about 3.3% of the population has a birthday on the 13th of a month. I wonder what’s eating the other 4.7%.
I’m not sure why Friday the 13th is supposed to be such a bad day. Everyone ooohs and ahhs about it as though they’re performing a cold reading of some B-movie script that even Hollywood couldn’t bring itself to embrace. Society obviously takes this pretty seriously, because there are a lot of high-rise buildings out there with inaccurately numbered floors. Or do they build the 13th floor and just leave it vacant?
Hmmmm. Note to self: try the stairwell next time.
Here’s another tidbit about this ”unlucky” day:
With the aim of mapping “the relation between health, behaviour, and superstition surrounding Friday 13th in the United Kingdom,” the authors [of a British Medical Journal study] compared the ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years.
Incredibly, they found that in the region sampled, while consistently fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher than on “normal” Fridays. Their conclusion:
“Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended.”
It’s enough to make you wonder if we’re talking about Friday the 13th or April 1st!
Anyway, this particular Friday the 13th happens to be my birthday.
Perhaps I should be waiting for a disaster to befall me, but I’m not. 2005 wasn’t a perfect year, but it could have been a lot worse. One needn’t look far to see that. In the past year I lost friends to cancer, accidents, and saw still more of them lose their job, health, and/or home. I could easily be in their shoes. And who knows, I could be in that very place a year from now.
For today however, life is good. No — make that great. And no paraskevidekatriaphobic is gonna bring me down.
When William Congreve wrote that “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”, the woman he had in mind was probably Mother Nature.
Despite the fact that nearly a quarter of a million people are in the air at any given minute of the day, the rarified heights we pilots traverse are Her domain. And every now and then she reminds of that fact. With extreme prejudice. Take, for example, this PIREP (pilot report), courtesy of Sam:
MGM UUA /OV SCD 270004/TM 2200/FL090/TP SR22/IC SVR ICG 077-0900/RM ACFT WAS DESCENDING BY PARACHUTE DUE TO SEVRE ICG BUILDUP
If you don’t speak pilot, here’s the decoded version.
- UUA: “Urgent Pilot Report”
- /OV: Location (”4 miles west of Sylacauga, Alabama”)
- /TM: Time (”22:00 Zulu”)
- /FL: Flight Level, aka altitude (”9000 feet”)
- /TP: Aircraft type (”Cirrus SR22″)
- /IC: Icing (”Severe icing between 7700 and 9000 feet”)
- /RM: Remarks (”Aircraft was descending by parachute due to severe icing buildup”)
The airplane in question is a Cirrus SR22, a svelte, modern, composite design that’s taking the aviation world by storm. I fly these every day at work. They have tremendous performance for a general aviation aircraft, able to carry a significant load and climb at better than 1400 fpm while cruising at 180+ knots.
But even an SR22 is no match for Mother Nature when she tries to turn you into an ice cube.
One of the big attractions of the Cirrus is that they come with a safety device known as a Ballistic Recovery System. The BRS is essentially a parachute. The canopy is stored in the aft section of the fuselage, and when it’s activated, a rocket pulls the ‘chute out of the aircraft and frees straps built into the fuselage. The pilot shuts down the engine, and the entire aircraft descends to the ground at a slow enough speed to allow the occupants to walk away unharmed.
You can read about the parachute on the Cirrus site. Also, see a video clip of a BRS deployment here.
I assume the PIREP was submitted by a controller and not the pilot, as he was undoubtedly busy trying not to soil himself. Not to make light of the situation, but it would have been sort of funny if the pilot had deployed the ballistic recovery system and then casually asked ATC if he could change radio frequencies to submit a weather observation to Flight Watch.
“Cirrus calling Center, say again?”
“We’re declaring an emergency due to severe icing and have had to deploy the parachute… oh, and we’d like to get a frequency change to submit a PIREP.”
(20 seconds of confused silence)
“Um… hmmm. Okay, frequency change approved and, uh, good day?”
A post over at Cockpit Conversation got me thinking about the 787 Dreamliner, a new all-composite airliner from Boeing.
That post referenced a British newspaper article whose title was a bit sensationalistic. “Passenger aircraft rivals clash over safety of fuselage built from plastic”.
Airplanes are not built out of plastic, they’re made of carbon fiber. The two are both composite materials, yet interchanging them would be like saying a metal airplane was going to be made out of tin.
The article also states that the Dreamliner will be the first “passenger jet” made entirely of composites, which is untrue. Smaller passenger jets are already made of composites. The Raytheon Premier, for example. The Hawker 4000. The Eclipse 500. The Citation Mustang. The Adam A700. And GA aircraft have been made wholly out of composites from the 1970s (witness the Varieze). Many modern airframes are all-composite (Cirrus, DiamondStar, etc). The 787 may be the first large airliner to be built mostly of composites, but the material and methods have been tried and tested for a long time.
Composites are also insanely strong. I fly aerobatic airplanes that you can put 10 Gs on — an frankly they’ll take twice that without blinking. You stress them that way over and over again. A very hard life for a wing. What’s it made out of? Yeah. Composites. The parts that tend to break are the metal ones (formers, stringers, etc) that you cannot see. Which is Airbus’ whole arguement against composites.
No material is perfect. Everything is a compromise. But I’d have no problem flying (or flying on) a 787.
Ah, the poor old Irvine World News. This is the Rodney Dangerfield of newsprint, a hometown paper which is printed once a week.
It gets little respect, probably because they give it away for free. ”You get what you pay for” and all that. Plus, it really does confine itself to the world of Irvine. That fact alone makes the paper worthless to most of Orange County, I’d think. They don’t care about the happenings in Irvine any more than I care about the minutia of life in Brea.
More often than not, the World News is “delivered” to my house by a paperboy who throws it onto the ground behind — or more often, underneath — my car. The issue typically remains hidden there until it’s crushed by the tires of my Eclipse.
Like I said, little respect.
Even so, the paper published an article about me in today’s issue. Opera Pacific has been making an effort to better publicize our productions, and as part of this push they’re trying to highlight members of the company. I guess they found me interesting because of the aviation angle.
Anyway, I’ve got a PDF file available if you’re interested in reading it.
The latest AVweb contains a very disturbing article which, while aviation-related, has implications reaching far beyond our quirky corner of the world. Indeed, this thing comprises a serious erosion of basic constitutional rights that should concern every American whether they fly or not.
…the California Department of Health Services, Radiologic Health Branch, came to the warehouse expressing concern about radium-dial instruments on the premises. This set a process in motion that seems to have no end — even almost eight years later — and thus far has resulted in the destruction of over one million (yes, one million) irreplaceable historic aircraft instruments and related parts, only a tiny fraction of which had any radium. It has also resulted in the razing of one of two warehouses that housed the items since the 1950s. So far, the cost of the “cleanup” has exceeded $7 million and the bill is being presented to Jeff, personally, even though it was a lawfully incorporated company that owned the instruments. Under the law, he cannot even protect his house and family by declaring bankruptcy, so our government has inventoried his house and its contents for possible seizure and sale.
The article touched a nerve for three reasons. The first and most important of those is ennumerated above. The second reason is because this all took place at Chino Airport, a well-loved local haunt and home to numerous friends.
The third reason is a personal connection. One of my co-workers at Sunrise had their Stinson 108 restored recently, and much of the work was done at Chino. The project was held up for quite some time due to the fallout (no pun intended) from this radium instrument issue. As I recall, the 108 has instruments with the radium faceplates.
The ultimate irony here is that at Chino — and airports all over the country — pilots toss fuel samples on the ramp every day during preflight inspections. That fuel contains high concentrations of tetra-ethel lead, a carcinogen which is present in far greater quantities than any collection of aircraft parts, no matter how large.
I just put up some captioned photos from my birthday party. I was gonna write a big thing about it, but photos are far more interesting aren’t they?
I will say that when you have birthdays like this one, it almost makes getting older something to look forward to! A small group of close friends laughing the night away. Perfect.
The timing was ideal, because Italian Girl in Algiers was in a rather stressful stage at the time. We were quite short on rehearsal time and about to launch into tech week feeling unprepared. As it turns out, the production is great and the preview audience loved it. That eased the stress considerably for tonight’s opening.
Anyway, back to the party. Paul put together a great spread of food from the Austin Rib Co. I love that place. Not only is it a true mom-and-pop joint, but the grub is out-of-this-world good. Not good for you, of course. But then, what fun would that be? Austin Rib Co. is located in a non-descript shopping center in Orange, a hole in the wall eatery you’d never know about unless someone tipped you off.
Lesley has always made me a cake on my birthday, and somehow she manages to outdo herself every year. This year’s was no exception. I managed to pry out how long it took to make the cake, and it was measured in days. I’m not the only who thinks she ought to be working as a connoseur of fine desserts at some high end establishment. Girl’s got mad skills, I tell ya.
After everyone else had gone home, Paul and I decided to play a few hands of poker. Those of you who play Texas Hold’em are undoubtedly smirking, knowing that there is no such thing as “just a few hands” in this game. We finished around 3 a.m. and I drove home $20 richer. Woo hoo!
Little did I know that my aunt Norma was going to pass away that day from pancreatic cancer. In fact, I didn’t even know she was sick. Until a few days before, she didn’t know she was sick either. Apparently Norma contracted what the doctors diagnosed as pneumonia. Two days later, a different physician figured out that what first appeared to be fluid in her lungs was actually end stage cancer. She died on January 14th — the same day as my mother, 27 years earlier.
The speed with which her illness progressed is shocking, because she seemed to be in such good health right up to the end. Yet it’s also a blessing, as she was spared the long and painful denoumont so many cancer victims endure.
What can you take away from something like that, except the obvious? Life is short, my friends. Get out there and live each day like it’s your last.
The House of Rapp must show up at the top of some frequent Google search used by prospective Skylane owners, because I field a lot of inquiries about the airplane. In fact, I received one such query today.
As a C-182 driver and previous owner I was wondering if you could comment authoritatively regarding the following comment from a back issue of Aviation Consumer:
“To this day, the airplane [ 1998 Cessna 182 ] requires aggressive re-trimming during the flare to prevent wheelbarrowing, and many 182s have been pranged over the years because of it.”
The statement “aggressive re-trimming during flare” conjures up all sorts of scenarios in the minds eye that I can’t quite sort out. Does this mean in the last few seconds you have to reach down and bump the trim nose up or suffer an iffy score from the landing judges? How bad are we talking here? Would a stiff arm suffice for controlling pitch in the flare? Would keeping a little power in help minimize the nose-drop tendency or is that a bad idea?
It seems to me, that any pre-occupation with trim might, at such a critical phase of flight, result in an over-trimmed configuration and place you in a perfect situation for a departure-stall if a go-around is needed.
I don’t have much Cessna time (all PA-28 variants) and I don’t fiddle much with the trim on short-final and never in the flare. Which is why the comment surprised me.
I’ve been thinking about buying an airplane and the 182 is on the short list. Any other squawks a buyer should know about?
I understand what Aviation Consumer was getting at, but they either didn’t phrase it very well, or they just don’t have much Skylane time.
The C182 has a heavy nose, owing to 6-cylinder O-470 engine and sizeable constant speed prop hanging out there. The situation is made worse by the typical loading configuration (two people up front, nobody in back), which leads to a forward-ish C.G. location. Pilots who use poor technique can and do land them nose-first. Early 182s fell victim to bent firewalls because of these nosegear first landings. Later 182s have a beef-up kit installed. You can see a diagonal “I-beam” installed on the firewall to strengthen it. You’ll also find this on a lot of older 182s if they’ve experienced a wrinkled firewall in the past.
In my mind, the problem stems from poor pilot technique. Many people never really learn to land an airplane properly and don’t take care to ensure a solid mains-first landing. This may be okay in a Skyhawk or Cherokee, but when they transition to the Skylane, this manifests itself in nose first landings, as the pilot never really learned to give appropriate respect to the fragile nature of nosewheel assemblies. The nosegear is attached to the engine mount, which is in turn mounted to the firewall. Make a hard landing on that poor nosewheel, and the weakest part will give. The firewall is often that part.
Prop strikes, while possible, are rare because the nosegear assembly is designed to prevent a prop strike even when the nose strut is flat — a certain amount of clearance is built into the design. Anyway, because of this heaviness, many pilots learn to trim the airplane nose-up on final approach so they don’t have to pull so hard on the yoke in the flare. I subscribe to this method and used it for years with no problems. Could I just strong-arm it? Sure, but then I lose the subtle tactile feel I want when landing the airplane.
The reader is correct in noting that with the airplane trimmed nose-up (and I used FULL nose up trim, to the point where I had to use forward pressure on the yoke to keep the nose down until the flare), you have to be careful when executing a go-around. Adding full power with the trim set that way will lead the airplane to develop a very nose high attitude. However, as long as the pilot is aware of this tendency and is ready and able to use forward pressure on the yoke for a few seconds until he/she can feed in some nose-down trim, I don’t see it as a problem. I practiced go-arounds with full nose up trim – a useful exercise no matter what you’re flying — and never had a problem.
On the other hand, I know pilots who simply strong-arm the airplane, and that’s fine if that works for you. Just make sure you don’t land the airplane nosewheel-first. Each person should try the two techniques and select the one that works for them. And if you do bounce it for some reason, don’t try to salvage the landing, just go around. The first bounce rarely breaks the plane, it’s the subsequent ones — often greater in amplitude — that do the job.
As far as other squawks, check for corrosion from loose sound-deadening pads. The adhesive was known to retain moisture if it came loose from the airframe. I’d also check above the headliner, in the tailcone, and inside the wings for corrosion. None of these airplanes had any corrosion proofing unless they were ordered with the optional sea-plane provisions.
Check the fuel cells for age and condition– they only last about 20 years and are about $1500 each to replace. They last longest if you keep them full, as the fuel prevents the nitrile material from drying out.
In the powerplant department, I like to see an airplane that’s been run, not sitting. Inactivity is the #1 enemy of a piston engine. I’d also look for any looseness in the induction system tubing (often overlooked in inspections), any rubbing of the lower cowling assembly on the crossover tube under the prop, and check the cowl flap hinges for looseness. Especially the right cowl flap, which gets beat up by pulses from the exhaust system. As previously mentioned, check the logs for any firewall damage.
Check the prop for overhaul date. It should be overhauled every 6-8 years or so. A failure of the propeller can kill you. If a blade or portion thereof fails, the vibration will be severe. Severe enough that it can rip the engine off the mount. Once that happens, the CG shifts so far aft that the aircraft will be uncontrollable no matter what you do. Constant-speed props are frequently ignored as long as they maintain RPM. It’s not uncommon to see props in service that have not been overhauled in 15 or 20 years. Big mistake. Huge.
Do a thorough AD search. And have a 182-savvy mechanic do the compression tests. They have to be done with the engine HOT, using a compression tester with a master orifice for calibration, and using proper technique. TCM engines are different from Lycomings in that respect. That stuff about a 60 psi baseline is wrong. You establish your own baseline using the calibration tool, and it’s often down in the low 40s! You WILL have leaks, the only question is where are they coming from. If it’s past the rings, fine. If it’s coming through the exhaust valve, that’s a problem.
Overall, the 182 is probably the best plane out there. It represents the best combination of useful load, wide CG range, cabin size, aftermarket support, STC availability, and low acquisition (and insurance!) cost of any airplane in existance. It also has impressive short field capability, low speed performance, great climb rate, and outstanding visibility. The O-470 is a phenominal engine. Smooth, powerful, dependable, and easy to maintain.
You can’t go wrong with a Skylane, trust me.
A final note: if you’re in the Socal area, I highly recommend Dave Palacios of DP-Air for your prebuy. He knows Skylanes, and owns one himself. http://www.dpair.net/ Dave did the work on my Skylane for several years, including replacing the aforementioned fuel cells, a dirty and difficult job.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and maintained by the millions of people who use it. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, and its contents are free and open.
Open communities of this type have a sordid history on the internet. Without rigorous moderation, these things devolve into a repositories for conspiracy theorists, morons, flame wars, and really twisted stuff like spam. Usenet is the ultimate example. It’s 99% noise, 1% content.
Wikipedia has managed to sidestep these landmines. It’s not perfect, but it does represent the largest and most up-to-date encyclopedia on the planet. For a free, user-operated web site to be that useful is quite an achievement.
Alas, the grubby Mr. Smiths in Washington are spoiling the party. Surprise, surprise. They’re using Wikipedia to airbrush the truth, trash their political opponents, and generally run the joint like it was one of their advertising campaings. Normally they’d get away with it, but on the internet, IP addresses allow these things to be traced.
It’s reached the point where an RFC (request for comment) has gone out to the Wikipedia community proposing that the U.S. Congress have their IP addresses blocked permanently.
If only the voters could block these clowns that easily…
CNet summarized the situation nicely:
We already know, of course, that politicians live primarily for re-election and typically view the truth as an impediment to the higher purpose of unfettered self-aggrandizement.
Still, we can be excused for feeling mildly nauseated when fresh confirmation of this distasteful aspect of modern politicking surfaces.
The latest episode appeared last week in the form of a report that aides to Rep. Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat, deleted references to his broken term-limits pledge and massive campaign war chest on Wikipedia.
Then the trusty editors at Wikipedia got together and compiled a list of over 1,000 edits made by Internet addresses allocated to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The IP address subsequently was blocked and unblocked.
An extensive analysis reveals how juvenile official Washington secretly is, behind the mind-numbingly serious talk of public policy.
One edit listed White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for “douche.” Another said of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) that: “Coburn was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag.”
(Keep in mind these are the same holier-than-thou political climbers tasked with writing laws telling the rest of the country how to behave. Or else.)
This juvenalia is, of course, thoroughly bipartisan. Another change to the Iraq invasion entry shows that the anonymous congressional editor played up the dubious connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
It’s true, of course, that the cretins who are behind the Wikipedia alterations can (and probably will) do this from their home computers in the future. But the difficulty in policing the political class shouldn’t make us any less alarmed at the most recent evidence of its misdeeds.
Every pilot must, by law, complete a Flight Review (or equivalent) every 24 calendar months. The law specifies that this review must comprise at least one hour of flight and one hour of ground instruction, and it must include a review of the operating procedures of Title 14, Part 91 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
“Part 91″, as it’s affectionately known, covers things like airworthiness rules, pilot-in-command responsibilities, weather & equipment minimums, right of way rules, etc. It also contains some fun stuff, such as rules on formation flying, and the guidelines you have to follow before dropping objects from your aircraft.
I’m not making that up.
The Flight Review is a good thing. The average pilot only flies 30-50 hours per year, and doesn’t progress beyond the private level. Inevitably, skills and knowledge begin to rust away. Even I, a pilot who flies ~500 hour per year and teaches this stuff every day, find myself having to look things up. There’s just a lot of stuff to remember, and precious little of it is what could be classified as “unimportant”. This is flying. We’re hurtling through the air in three dimensions, sometimes in the clouds where we cannot see, and defying the law of gravity in a way only birds were meant to do.
Anyway, there are countless Flight Review guides, aides, and courses available. Some are extensive commercial products that have a hefty price tag attached to them. Others are available for free via the internet. I’d never found one that I really liked until today. And who made it?
Would you believe… the FAA? Yep. Anyone who’s read through the FARs (and even the AIM to some extent) know that brevity is not the Fed’s strong suit, but this course is different.
The FAASafety.gov web site — the online component of the FAA’s Aviation Safety Program — has put together a sort of online college catalog of courses you can take. I was not in need of a Flight Review, but just for kicks went through the course anyway. It took me about an hour, and covered all the pertinent information in a very concise, compact way. PDF files are available if you want to go into more depth on a particular topic, and there are plenty of links to the relevant pages in the Airman Information Manual.
I loved the format, because if you are not in need of much review in a particular area, you can get the basics and move on to the topics where you do need to go into more detail. It’s customized without being customized. Even the quiz questions at the end were a cut above the usual FAA stuff. It’s a mystery to me how the required TSA security training can be so poor while this FAA Flight Review guide can be so good.
Actually, I do have a thought on that. One of my students — a guy who came to me for a Cirrus checkout — is a video producer who worked with the FAA to produce a runway safety DVD. This DVD was was sent to every flight instructor in the country. I spoke at length with him about the quality of the FAA’s publications and he indicated that the Feds know some of their stuff falls short, but they’re slowly (it’s a government agency, after all) coming around to a new way of doing things, bringing in web, video, and marketing specialists to make use of the latest tools and techniques for pilot training.
To be fair, the FAA’s own web site does provide a tremendous level of data. Pilot searches, aircraft registrations, online regulations, etc. On the other hand, there are things like IACRA, the FAA’s attempt at making 8710 forms ‘paperless’. If it were possible to take out a contract on a web site’s life, I’d be sorely tempted to pool my money with other CFIs and hire Tony Soprano to rub that thing out. Ugh.
I went through the FAASafety.gov site in greater detail and found a lot of good stuff there. But the Flight Review course really caught my eye. I thought highly enough of it that I’m going to print out full color copies of the course and put in a binder for reference.
