My last missive may have come off as a bit dismissive about air traffic controllers.  So in a contrapuntal vein, I offer the story of Phil Aune, the nation’s (and probably the world’s) oldest air traffic controller.

VAN NUYS - The nation’s oldest air traffic controller made his final approach Thursday from the world’s busiest general-aviation airport.

Phil Aune, 70, the “Voice of Van Nuys Airport,” stepped down from the control tower after tracking his last plane, a single-engine Cherokee.

Throughout his 47-year career, the soothing voice of “Papa Alpha” had guided millions of planes in and out of Van Nuys Airport.

“I’ve been crying; it’s very emotional,” said the gray-haired grandfather and FAA veteran just after his last shift ended at 1:40 p.m. “My last airplane.”

Before dawn, Aune (pronounced awe-nee) hoisted Old Glory for the last time outside the six-story box of glass west of runway One Six Right.

At the top of rush hour, three Los Angeles television and radio traffic aircraft and four traffic choppers flew in tribute past his capacious glass window.

Midmorning, two engines from the Los Angeles Fire Department “crash crew” at VNY - the FAA designator for the airport - stopped before the tower to let fly honorary streams of firefighting foam.

After noon, actor and pilot Patrick Swayze called Aune from London to wish him a fine farewell.

“Phil is sort of the Vin Scully of Van Nuys,” Dan Katz, president of Hollywood Aviators, a flight school in Van Nuys, said while dropping off a basket of farewell cookies. “He really is the voice of VNY.

“He’s just amazing. He’s such a fixture here. It’ll be sort of funny not to be able to hear him on the radio.”

Aune signed on at Van Nuys Airport in 1959 when it was surrounded by fields of corn and wheat. He was among the first hired by what was then the newly founded Federal Aviation Administration.

Over the years, Aune would track Hollywood celebrities from Bob Hope - who used VNY for his ’round-the-world USO tours - to pilot-actors Danny Kaye, Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

I had known about Phil before he was featured in the documentary One Six Right, but wasn’t aware of the amazing record of longevity he’d set at Van Nuys Airport.  He’s been working at the VNY tower for as long as they’ve had one.  Or to put it another way, he’s been a controller for as long as the FAA’s been in existence.

It’s a testament to his skill and patience that he served so long at what is renown as the world’s busiest general aviation airport.

Since we’re on the topic of air traffic controllers, I must admit I’m fascinated by the individual personalities they foster at GA airports.  For example, at John Wayne Airport, the controllers are as good as they come.  Helicopters, airliners, student pilots, hot shot aerobatic gurus, experimentals, spam cans, and more mix it up over SNA, but the controllers rarely get flustered.  I know their voices and when coming home it generates a sense of comfort to know they’re there.

They are on top of the situation and it shows.  If a student’s soloing, they get a watchful eye over them, something I appreciate when it’s my guy up there flying by himself for the first time.  The controllers know the airplanes I fly, and they know my voice.  After a while, you can almost anticipate each others thoughts.  It’s an amazing partnership.

On the other hand, I avoid Camarillo on the weekend if I can help it.  Especially in the morning.  The tower operators there often seem to be right on the edge of overload whenever the airspace gets full.  Several controllers have strong accents, and I get the feeling the place might be a training location for controllers.  I don’t begrudge the CMA controllers their classroom — after all, pilots have theirs, right?  But there seems to be a higher level of stress with a lower level of traffic at Camarillo.

Chino is another place where you can find some interesting personalities in the tower cab.  Some are sharp as a tack, others seem to miss a lot of things.  I’ve been extended downwind and forgotten about on multiple occasions at Chino.  Try as I might, I’ve been unable to get a handle on individual controllers there.  They all sound the same to me.

Brackett Field in Pomona is one of my favorite places to observe ATC behavior, especially during the holidays.  The tower folks there seem to be quite talkative, almost festive in mood.  In fact, they even string up a huge strand of green and red lights on the side of the tower, creating a massive Christmas tree.  You can almost smell the Douglas fir branches.  At least a couple of the tower controllers are pilots.  You can always tell the ones who are pilots — when something new or different shows up, they take an interest.  The other guys are only asking questions so they know how to address the airplane.  Is it “Experimental” or “Vultee”?

The really huge airports don’t seem to have much personality.  I’ve been into LAX, SFO, LAS, and PHX, and I can only assume that the plethora of airliners sucks some of the personality out of the airwaves.  No classic biplanes, no mix of aviators.  Just an endless stream of seven-something-sevens coming down the ILS.

Airports are nothing in and of themselves.  Just patches of high-strength concrete.  It’s the people that give airports their personality, and a controlled fields, the guys in the tower cab go a long way toward dictating what sort of feel the airport will have.  They do great work, and those of us on the other side of the radio appreciate it.

The hits just keep on coming for Airbus.

As if lost sales and slipping delivery dates weren’t enough to worry about, the EADS subsidiary lost two top executives today:  the CEO of the company, and the guy who ran the Airbus division.

Humbert said the delays to the A380 had been a “major disappointment for our customers, our shareholders and our employees,” adding that he felt it was the right course of action to offer his resignation to shareholders.

Relations between Forgeard and Humbert, his soft-spoken former No. 2 at Airbus, have appeared prickly and Airbus was reported to be furious when Forgeard diverted blame onto his former teams in Toulouse, southwest France, for the A380 crisis.

But some analysts had said the future of both men had become intertwined simply because of the scale of the A380 problems.

The A380 delays are expected to cost EADS some 2 billion euros in lost operating profits between 2007 and 2010. Its shares fell 26 percent, wiping out 5 billion euros of value in one day when the A380 delays were announced in mid-June, sparking a hunt by French regulators to know exactly who knew what and when.

The sell-off and disclosure of what was going wrong inside the A380 assembly plants also angered Britain’s BAE Systems.

Shades of the Concorde?  Perhaps.

Forty years ago, Concorde was touted as the future of commercial aviation.  Now they may have been right from a technical standpoint, but Concorde was an economic disaster for those who built it.  Predictions of thousands of supersonic birds traversing the planet gave way to just a dozen aircraft, each sold to their respective airline for the princely sum of one dollar.

If Airbus isn’t careful, people far more influential than me will start making that connection.

On the other hand, billions of dollars worth of infrastructure improvements necessary to accomodate the mammoth A380 appear to be moving ahead without regard for the machinations taking place at Airbus.

Here in Southern California, LAX is about to close one of its four runways for as long as two years.

Around midnight July 29, airport workers will paint large yellow Xs on the southernmost runway, a signal to pilots that it is closed. Then, multitudes of dump trucks, graders and excavators will roll onto the airfield, not far from where hundreds of airliners will continue to take off and land each day.

The first major project at Los Angeles International Airport in two decades aims to improve safety and prepare the airport for a new generation of jumbo jets. Work will begin just as the airport enters its most hectic month of the year, putting pilots, airlines, air traffic controllers — and members of nearby communities — on edge.

“I think delays will be more significant than the original forecasts,” Jon Russell, a safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Assn., said of the $333-million project to move the runway 55 feet south — closer to the airport’s boundary with El Segundo — and build new taxiways.

The impending mix of heavy construction equipment and commercial air traffic at a crowded airport about to lose one-fourth of its runways has officials looking for ways to head off long delays, which could trigger problems at other airports as well.

LAX can probably operate with three runways and maintain partial on-time performance.  The problem is that it doesn’t leave them with an ounce of additional capacity.  No wiggle room to deal with contingencies.  It’s a point the FAA makes in the last paragraph of the article:

With construction in full swing in a matter of days, air traffic controllers caution that mechanical problems or bad weather could throw off their best-laid plans.

“If there’s an aircraft mishap, like someone’s gear collapses on the runway, and now we’re down to two runways,” the FAA’s Shappi said, “all bets are off.”

It’s hard to imagine that LAX wouldn’t have events like that from time to time.  A blown tire, brake fire, rejected takeoff, overweight landing, runway incursion, bird strike, or a dozen other problems might close another runway.  That’s when things will really get interesting.

The longer I work as an instructor, the more amazing I am that we’re able to do anything productive at John Wayne.  I want to say the airport is kind of busy, but that’s akin to saying the Pope is kind of Catholic.  Understatement of the year.

Yet we somehow manage to take a person who has never been in an aircraft before and turn them into a pilot, someone qualified to mix it up with the big jets, deal with wake turbulence, handle the highly challenging radio communication, and fit into the pattern with a dozen other airplanes of all shapes and sizes.

When you stop to think about it, that’s pretty amazing.  You can’t help but turn out some capable pilots in that atmosphere.

It gets even more impressive when you run some numbers.  The “big bad” airport that everyone speaks of on the east coast seems to be Teterboro.  Its proximity to Manhattan and the lack of reliever airports for that region make it a very popular destination for the jet set when they’re “in a New York state of mind”.

An east coast-based pilot recently indicated that he felt TEB was the greater challenge because the airspace around New York was so crowded.  He went on to say that those of us here in the Los Angeles area “only have LAX to deal with”, whereas “in a small area JFK, EWR and LGA all share airspace.”

I think this is a guy who’s never been to Los Angeles.  It’s not only LAX… not by a long shot.  It’s Burbank, Van Nuys, Long Beach, Hawthorne, Santa Monica, Fullerton, Torrance, El Monte, Compton, Whiteman, and so on.

But when you get to John Wayne, you really start to see some fireworks.  SNA may be Class C airspace, but it qualifies for Class B airspace rulemaking.

Class B airspace requires 5 million passengers enplaned per year and more than 300,000 total operations (an operation is definied as a takeoff or landing). I expect this year we’ll enplane over 5 million and serve a total of 10 million passengers, and that’s just on the airlines.

Of the 355,000 operations that take place at SNA each year (which is 57% more than TEB), 250,000 are general aviation.

I estimate that between 50,000 and 75,000 of those are just from Sunrise, the FBO where I work.

Then there’s the physical plant.  John Wayne Airport is only 500 acres in size.  Teterboro has 827 acres.

The one area where TEB does take the cake is, unfortuantely, fuel prices.  Fuel at TEB now costs as much as $7.05 a gallon.  That’s at Atlantic Aviation.  We have one of these bloodsuckers at SNA, they make Signature Flight Support look really good — not an easy thing to do.  And I’m not just saying that because I waited 90 minutes for a fuel truck this afternoon.

It really is a jungle out there.  I first realized this shortly after I earned my pilot certificate.  When you find Class B airports like LAS, PHX, and SAN far more laid back than your home base, you know it’s someplace special.

Teterboro may be famous for long IFR delays and rigid adherence to narrow departure corridors, but if you look at numbers, it’s hard to compare anything to John Wayne.

Conventional wisdom – and statistics — tell us that a mechanical engine failure in a properly maintained aircraft is quite rare.

Engine stoppage is usually caused by the dummy in the pilot seat.  Fuel exhaustion is by far the leading cause.  Engine and fuel system mismanagement are also possibilities.  There’s no shortage of creativity in this department. 

Until recently, I didn’t know very many people who’d ever experienced a mechanical failure of a certified aircraft powerplant.  But at the last aerobatic contest I encountered no less than three people who’ve recently had one (there were also two prop strikes, but that’s a story for another time).  The reasons were varied:  cylinder failure, fuel contamination, and oil pump failure.

The last of these was in a Pitts S-2B — the same kind of airplane I fly.  It piqued my interest because an engine failure in a Pitts is a big deal.  The airplane is not terribly crashworthy, and it comes down like a rock when the engine stops turning.  It’s one of the few airplanes where my first inclination would be to leave the airplane rather than stay with it.

The pilot in question is a great guy named Yuichi.  He’s not only a talented aerobatic competitor but also an active Airframe & Powerplant mechanic.

Yuichi is has saved my bacon on more than one occasion through his willingness to work on my airplane in 100 degree heat after a long day of flying.  Sometimes I’ve even seen him skip his own practice time in the box in order to help someone else solve a mechanical issue so they could compete.

When the phrase “couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy” was coined, it must have been Yuichi they were talking about.

Here’s his story:

As most of you know I had to make a forced landing last Saturday afternoon in Pitts N117PS. I am very happy to be at my desk again and to share my experience.

June 03, 2006. I took off about 1410 local from LVK for routine practice at Mt. Diablo practice area. At about 1435, around 2500ft MSL, I noticed power loss (probably just propeller speed reduction due to loss of oil pressure) after finishing a snap roll. As all you guys do, I have a habit to look oil temp/press gauges as well as performance gauges, especially when changing positive and negative Gs. I saw oil pressure gauge was pointing 0 psi that time.

Reduction in oil pressure is not unusual on N117PS. Whenever there is prolonged 0 G load, like a top of push over humpty, or outside loop, etc. This mostly reduces oil pressure drop to about 20 psi and come back right away. But holding 0 psi for couple of seconds is not normal. I pulled throttle to protect the engine and glided at 95 MPH, and continued to push / pull, and move throttle to recover oil pressure.

A couple of things came into my head as the cause of losing oil pressure.

1) Lost engine oil because of practice maneuver, crack at engine parts, or loosen drain plug.
  (But the wind screen is clean … No oil drops at all)
2) Oil pressure gauge mulfunction. 
  (Ok but it does not explain the RPM drop.) 
3) Oil pump failed. 
  (I think it is the problem.) 
4) Gravity valve stays at inverted position. 
  (Maybe. If it is, I can do someting before I hit ground.)

Unfortunately the pull and push maneuver did not work in this case.  Occasionally the oil pressure came back to 2-3 psi, but dropped back to 0 psi very soon. There was not enough altitude to make it to the nearest airport (Byron). I have no choice, so I decided to do a off field landing down there.

I picked up a straight road (Empire Mine Road) running east to west through the box. There was no traffic. There was also a grass field right next of the road would be perfect alternative. I made a mayday call to LVK tower and 121.5, before I got too low.

Now it was easy, just do routine landing I used to. On final approach, I saw white SUV turn onto the road which would have been on a collision course with me. I could not blame the driver, because the road was not blocked at entrance, they even don’t know what happened in the air. I switched my landing site to grass field just south of the road and landed. At first landing roll was perfect, I thought “wow, this is my one of best landings I ever made!!”. But 5 second later, the landing gear caught the muddy surface and the plane then flipped over inverted.

I was so lucky, the airplane stoped after just half flip and did not tumbled. The bad thing was now the airplane was upside down and the canopy was held by the ground. I realized that I was trapped inside the airplane. I picked up my cellphone and dialed Attitude Aviation front desk. A cell phone is great tool in this situation.

I was sitting there upside down for a while, when suddenly a gentleman called me. “Are you OK?” I told him to lift the tail up and now the airplane was standing on its top wing. I got about 2 ft clearance opened the canopy and then I dropped on the ground.

The gentleman said, “I am so glad you are OK.” I looked at his car .. It was the the white SUV that I saw on short final. Soon, we saw emergency crews turned on the road, then he said “I guess you are OK. Take care!”. He was exactly like a hero. I hope I said “Thank you” to him. I wish I will find him again.

Post emergency landing review: 
(1) I asked myself why I did not try complete inverted flight, not just shaking the airplane. If the cause of problem is gravity valve, I might have some oil pressure while I was at inverted.

(2) Some people suggested to me that I jettison the canopy before touch  down. That way I do not have the risk of being trapped in the airplane. The load meter in the cockpit said I had negative 6Gs at least when the airplane flipped over. I checked my seat belt before touch down, and I had 1 inch clearance between the canopy, but I still hit canopy because my body stretched a little at the time. This means that if I had jettisoned the canopy before impact, I might hit my head somewhere. The canopy protected me from rocks and mud. I do not say to keep canopy is best idea, but the pilot has to be able to break the canopy at least. I will carry a knfe (not a small folding knife, heavy duty survival knife prefered), or axe in the future. I also have a idea how to open biplane canopy even upside down without outside help. However, I have no chance to test this technique until next time…

(3) Preview your practice area if low altitude practice is needed. 1500ft AGL is not enough to make airport in most situation. I was so surprised that practice area has many hills and power lines.

I think Yuichi’s a little hard on himself.  Even if the gravity valve was at fault, priority #1 is fly the plane, #2 is find a place to land, and then you can troubleshoot.  From 2500 AGL, I’m not sure he’d have had much of a chance to get to it. 

In this case, “any landing you can walk away from” really is a good landing.  I believe the airplane is a total loss.  The damage doesn’t sound that bad, and I’m sure it’s fully repairable, but once the airplane goes over on its back, the steel tube airframe gets bent.  At that point, the ship is probaby worth more as a collection of parts than it would be after the restoration, so the insurance company writes a check.

It’s worth noting that all three engine failures I heard about at Paso Robles were in high performance aerobatic airplanes.  When these engines are installed in normal airplanes, pilots take great care to make gentle throttle movements and generally be as nice to the engine as possible, cooling it down slowly at the end of a flight and helping it live a low stress life.

Install the same engine in an aerobatic airplane and we rapidly move from full throttle to idle and back again, over and over.  Short flights, high climb rates with little cooling air.  Lots of cycles.  We torque the prop and put tremendous stresses on the crankshaft, pulling enough Gs to move the entire engine several inches on the mounts.

When you think about all that, perhaps the real surprise is that these failures are not more common.

Anyway, I hope this is as close as I’ll ever get to re-living Yuichi’s experience.  I love how he casually states that he won’t have a chance to test his new technique “until next time”, as though it’s a foregone conclusion that this won’t be his last engine failure.

You’re probably thinking, “How about hoping there won’t be a next time?”.  The thing is, as pilots we have to plan for it anyway.

From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab.  I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate.

We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the Wordpress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on.  The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising.  The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar.

Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site.  I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we go to bed at night.  It’s in our postal mail, email, radio, television, it’s on buses, cars, billboards, pens, packaging, and everything else we touch, see, or do.

But even that doesn’t spur my intense dislike of online advertising.  The crux of the problem is that advertisers are resorting to more dishonest methods for pimping their wares.  Adware, spyware, and outright deceptive advertising — anything to get you to click on that ad.  I’ve no doubt that American enterprise loses millions of hours of productivity to it.

I know I’m not alone in believing that there should be some place that’s free of overbearing communiques on Leptoprin, day trading secrets, and free iPods.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to some web-based advertising.  For one thing, AdSense doesn’t stoop to the malware level.  Also, their stuff is highly targeted, so presumably any ads that appeared here would be aviation related.  Flight training, charter, aircraft manufacturing, part suppliers, and so on.

Of course, I’d be remiss in not adding that there’s another reason I’m rethinking things:  money.  Does that make me a bad person?

My site gets thousands of visitors per day, and every time I turn around there are guys getting four, five, and even six figure checks from Google for doing nothing but running their web site.

To be honest, I’m curious about what sort of money a site like this would bring in.  Will I join the AdSense tidal wave?  I’m undecided.  But if you’d have told me five years ago that any small-time web site would be able to generate that kind of revenue without dealing in something a) illegal or b) pornographic I’d have said you were crazy.

I’m starting to think I’d be crazy to not at least look into it.

“Time to spare, go by air.”

That’s the old saying. For those of you who aviate on airliners, you may feel this aphorism is directed your way. The delays, breakdowns, and other vagueries of the industry can leave you feeling like it would be faster to just walk to your destination.

In some cases, you’d actually be right. Here’s something I wrote last summer after returning from Mexico via America West:

The coming and going from Mexico was interesting. First of all, one of our divers has been in Mexico City for the past few months and decided to travel to San Carlos the cheap way, via bus. It took Seth more than 36 hours.

I thought he was crazy to be traveling by bus, especially since I made the savvy decision to go by air. Yeah right. It took me 36 hours to get home! Which is especially maddening when you consider that my conveyance was travelling at 500 mph, more than 10 times the speed of Seth’s taco bus.

Here’s what happened. First of all, the America West Dash-8 was about four hours late getting to Guaymas to pick us up. There was some sort of mechanical delay in Phoenix. Then, we dodged thunderstorms all the way to Phoenix only to find the airport closed by the weather. We held for more than an hour before diverting to Tuscon, which was totally unprepared for us. We got AW to comp us some lodging, but not before Arnie let off a little steam at a supervisor. The next morning, our flight from Tuscon to Phoenix was late departing, and I barely made my connecting flight to Orange County. Most of the guys on this trip drove, and they made it home in 1/3 the time it took me via America West.

Sadly, it was a typical airline experience.

Nevertheless, the “time to spare?” saying is actually directed at those of us who fly our own airplanes. Oh, the glossy ads and rosy prognostications about private air travel make it sound like you can just jump in an airplane and fly away.

I wish.

That sort of thing might be possible in the middle of nowhere, but when you’re in the Los Angeles area, it’s a very poor idea. No, the reality of flying oneself around is quite different, especially in a post-9/11 world. Consider:

• check weather, TFRs, NOTAMS, etc.
• ensure the aircraft is legally airworthy, meaning all required inspections and maintenance are up to date
• open the aircraft, stow covers, heat shields, etc. and get the cockpit setup
• perform a preflight inspection
• get ATIS and a clearance
• perform engine runup, system checks, brief passengers

You’d think that those of us who own aircraft would get there faster, but the truth is that we’re sometimes stopped short of the runway by mechanical discrepancies and/or weather. Hell, I recently scrubbed a flight because it took an hour and a half for Atlantic Jet Center to send a fuel truck over to my airplane! By the time the aircraft was refueled, there was no time to make the flight.

On the other hand, there are plenty of times when the system works the way it’s supposed to. I had just that sort of experience last Friday, zooming up to Van Nuys in an SR22 in 19 minutes. My family was impressed by the short flight time. Frankly, so was I.

The trip home was even more fun, departing around 11:30 pm. I did have to wait a few minutes for a Baron to land downwind on 34L before I could take off. He made his initial call to the Van Nuys CTAF while passing over Santa Monica. I thought about taking off before he arrived, but those airplanes are capable of moving at better than 200 knots. I wasn’t sure the light I saw off in the distance was him, so for safety’s sake I just held short of the runway until he landed. The guy was nice enough, offering to expedite for me, but I insisted he take his time. Visions of a gear up landing danced through my head, and I didn’t want that on my conscience.

After departure, I turned the autopilot loose with the GPS flight plan I’d entered, and sat back to monitor the aircraft, look for traffic, and enjoy the view. Those late night flights are just about the only time you can fly from Van Nuys to John Wayne without talking to anyone. The towers at both airports are closed and the Special Flight Rules corridor is usually vacant at that hour.

I wish I could get a night-time photo of what it’s like up there. Unfortunately, my camera never takes decent photos of the cityscape after dark. The pictures either end up blurry or, if I leave the flash on, the glare reflects off the windows and ruins the shot. But imagine: it’s quiet, it’s cool, the air is perfectly smooth, and an endless carpet of twinkling lights projects out all around you. What’s not to like?

I challenged myself to make the perfect descent, arriving on the downwind at 100 knots and 1000′ AGL. The Avidyne makes it so easy. Just figure out how much altitude you have to lose (in thousands of feet) and multiply by two. Start down when you’re that many minutes away.

Example: You’re cruising at 4500′ and the airport pattern altitude is 1000′, so you have 3500′ to lose. Start a 500 fpm descent when the GPS reports your remaining time to destination is seven minutes.

If you are able to maintain a consistent airspeed during the descent and the winds don’t shift too drastically on the way down, it’ll work out every time.

The one issue I wrangled with during the trip was that of the noise curfew at Van Nuys. It says “NOISE ORDINANCE CURFEW: NO TKOFS FOR ACFT EXCEEDING 74 DBA (PER AC36-3) BTN 2200-0700; EXCP MILITARY; MERCY FLIGHTS & LAW ENFORCEMENT ACFT.”

I sat there for quite a while trying to figure out how much noise an SR22 generates on departure, and how the noise signature is computed. Do they mean 74 db right next to the prop? Or at the monitoring equipment on the ground? I tried to find a copy of Advisory Circular 36-3, but a Google search turned up nothing substantive.

In the end, I did a maximum performance takeoff, lifting off before the numbers, and climbed to 1000′ as quickly as possible before reducing the prop speed to 2500 RPM.

Later, I thought of searching for “FAA Advisory Circular” rather than “AC 36-3″ and found a comprehensive listing of Advisory Circulars on the FAA web site. 36-3 shows the SR-22 comes in at 73.6 db, just under the 74 db limit.

Imagine you’re flying in the clouds.  You can’t see anything out the window.  You’re flying toward the airport on an instrument approach, only a few hundred feet above the ground while traveling at 120 mph, guidance courtesy of a multi-billion dollar miracle we call “GPS”.

You know that GPS is the latest thing.  It’s never failed you.  Everyone uses it.  It’s the future.  It’s smart.  It’s sophisticated.

And it may be sending you off in the wrong direction.

RAIM is the method an IFR-approved GPS receiver uses to ensure that the data it’s getting from the satellite constellation is valid.  I won’t get into the specifics of how RAIM works, but with the world moving ever more toward satellite navigation, this is pretty important stuff. 

It always stinks to realize you’ve been remiss in teaching students something they ought to know, and unfortunately, Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring — better known as RAIM — falls into that category.

I’ve got a couple of instrument students right now who are working toward their ratings in glass panel airplanes.  One’s in a G1000 equipped DiamondStar and another flies an Avidyne equipped Cirrus SR22.  I’ve taught them a lot about Global Positioning System usage, but for whatever reason I have not been insisting that they perform RAIM checks before IFR departures and approaches.

Oops.

I was reminded of my omission by John at Aviation Mentor.  He’s penned an excellent post about RAIM with plenty of nitty gritty details.

OK, the 80’s style Jazzercise headbands don’t exactly fit the Top Gun image of a hot shot aerobatic pilot.  This video is impressive nonetheless.

Maybe there’s something to be said for having the prop turning the wrong way.

“If we raise the roof, then phat beats will come.”  At least, that’s what Jon says.

And perhaps that’s what the FAA had in mind when they shut down the Seal Beach VOR last week to rebuild the roof.

I keep thinking that this must be some serious repair job.  I imagine a fraternity from Cal State Long Beach trashing the place during a knock-down-drag-out keg party.  A VOR transmitter is pretty small.  If the roof on a house can be replaced in a week, I wonder why it’s going to take so long to fix one that’s significantly smaller?  Could it be because the government is doing it?

Nah.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the widespread use of GPS that one of the nation’s most frequently used VOR stations can be out of service for more than a month without causing a meltdown of traffic in the Los Angeles area.

Every northbound IFR flight out of John Wayne Airport gets radar vectors to Seal Beach as the start of their clearance.  Departures and arrivals into many (perhaps most) airports around here use Seal Beach in some way.  If you look at an IFR chart, you’ll see that Seal Beach sits in the heart of Southern California.  Pretty much everything rotates around it.

I’m surprised they aren’t using a temporary or portable VOR.  I believe they used one of those when the Filmore VOR burned down during the fires a couple of years ago.

I count 44 instrument approach, arrival, or departure procedures listed in the NOTAM.  Many of these are listed as N/A (not available) until SLI is back online, the rest are changed in some way from what’s printed on the plates.

I forsee some confusion, especially if we get actual IMC around here, because it seems that the FAA’s left hand doesn’t know what the right one is doing.  For example, I flew the ILS into Torrance a few days ago, and when we executed the missed approach procedure, the controller told us to hold “as published”.  This raised a question in my mind.  I said, “Published where?”, thinking he might be referring to the NOTAM.

Nope.  He wasn’t aware of any change on the ILS 29R missed approach procedure.  He was aware the the VOR was offline, though.  And it gets better: on a tower enroute flight from Santa Monica to John Wayne, another controller cleared us “direct Seal Beach”.

Ah well.  At least they waited until after the June gloom to perform this maintenance.

I’m off to Mexico with the Club Zeta crew for a much needed vacation.

But I will leave you with this not-safe-for-work video clip.  Let it never be said that Pitts pilots aren’t proud of their equipment.  “Nice helmet”.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

The title of this Chinua Achebe novel came to mind this afternoon as I considered the status of the local airspace system.

I’m listening to SoCal Approach while I pack, and things are a little hectic up there due to a ground stop on all flight into Los Angeles: 

NOTAM:  Due to ZLA ATC ZERO. ALL FLIGHTS TO AND THRU ZLA STOPPED., departure traffic destined to ZLA airports will not be allowed to depart until at or after 03:00 UTC.

Apparently a widespread radar outage has occured at L.A. Center’s facility in Palmdale.

LOS ANGELES, JULY 18 (Reuters) - A power outage late on Tuesday at a regional radar center halted most air traffic in the Los Angelesa area, an airport spokeswoman said.

“All departing flights at LAX of at least 13,000 feet — essentially all our flights — have been grounded,” said Nancy Castles, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).

A regional radar facility in Palmdale, about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of downtown Los Angeles, lost power, cutting radar for Los Angeles area airports at around 5:30 p.m. local time (8:30 p.m. EDT, 0030 GMT Wednesday).

There was no estimate of when the radar facility would resume operations.  

I guess it’s a good thing I’m driving down to Mexico this year.

When radar outages occur, airplanes flying under Instrument Flight Rules (read:  airliners) must be spaced much further apart to ensure safe seperation.  When radar is operating, controllers can “see” the plane on the scope and safely vector them closer together.

With the radar out, aircraft are stacking up and it sounds like some are bumping up against fuel reserves.

I’m curious about why the power outage would disrupt ATC services.  Surely L.A. Center has generators, backups, and contingencies for loss of power.

The last time I can recall an outage of this size was during the October, 2003 fires.  Socal Approach went offline when forest fires mandated a full evacuation of the facility.  As I recall, L.A. Center did their best to fill in the gaps.

This isn’t quite that bad.  Center is still “on the air”, they just don’t have any radar.  There are procedures for dealing with radar failures.  They don’t typically happen on this large a scale, but the procedures are there for dealing with it.  In the 2003 evacuation, there weren’t any procedures for dealing with the complete loss of a major metropolitan approach facility.

Of course, today we also have the Seal Beach VOR outage, which affects several L.A. approach procedures.  Not to mention the impending long term runway closure which will shut down a quarter of LAX’s runway capacity until 2008.

Fires aside, it seems things will continue to be hot under the collar around here for quite some time.

Things fall apart, indeed.

I returned from Mexico a couple of days ago.  It was unfortunate that I wasn’t able to fly down to San Carlos.  When you’ve got a pilot certificate, making a 15 hour drive leaves you wondering why you went through all that training, even though you’re well aware that there are plenty of times it just wouldn’t be safe to fly.

As it turns out, this was one of those times.  The intense heat and humidity the southwest has been experiencing lately created a 300 mile long squall line along Interstate 8.  Spectacular thunderstorms are a common occurance in the region during summer months, but this one was impressive even by those standards.  Surface winds of 50 mph and lightning strikes at the rate of 2-3 per second.

While on vacation, I watched with interest the unveiling of Cessna’s long-awaited “Cirrus killer” at AirVenture.  The Textron subsidiary has been losing market share to Cirrus Design for a number of years and certainly saw the handwriting on the wall.  To be competitive, they’d have to ante up with a modern design containing all the features you’d find on an SR22.  This is what they came up with:

More photos availble here. 

Cessna CEO Jack Pelton was careful to describe this as a “proof of concept” airplane.  It’s hard to know how close this will be to the final product and where they are in terms of certification.  It could be a year down the road.  It could also be five years down the road.

From what I can see, this thing is basically a high wing Cirrus.  The wing is similar, the structure looks similar, it even has the free-castoring nosewheel.  The shape and size of the vertical stabilizer, main landing gear, and fuselage are reminiscent of the Cirrus as well.

I can’t decide if Cessna is trying to catch up, or if waiting to build this airplane was a sign of genius.  On the one hand, it’s a huge corporation that probably moves slowly.  On the other hand, it’s possible that Cessna waited on purpose, allowing Cirrus to spend millions on R&D, tooling, improvements, etc.  Then, once they had a final product which was selling well, just copy it and put the wing on top.  The Soviets did that for years, copying everything from military jets to our space shuttle.

One can assume that Cessna will have to match Cirrus in price.  Cirrus is selling a thousand airplanes per year, that’s what’s taking the lion’s share of the high-performance piston market.  A fully loaded SR22/GTS runs about $450-480k, so to be competitive, that’s where Cessna will have to price this airplane.

It had also better come with airbags, a parachute, a glass panel, air conditioning, deicing, and all the other stuff you find on a Cirrus in that price range.  It will be interesting to see what the useful load is with all that equipment on board.

A fully loaded GTS has a full fuel (80 gallons) payload of 500 lbs.  Not much, I guess, but that’s what people want these days.  They rarely travel with four on board, so why not have the equipment and fuel capacity that will allow the airplane to really travel — in style.

I fly Cirrus SR22s every day at work.  It’ll be tough to beat them at that game.  The folks in Duluth spent a lot of time and money to come up with a modern airplane, and they’ve had thousands of chances upon which to improve the product.  The doors, brakes, fairings, electronics, and other components are far better than on the models they made just a few years ago.  And Cirrus recently announced the addition of a turbocharger to the SR22.  It’s their way of trying to stay competitive with the Columbia 450’s 230 knot cruise speed.  To really keep up with the Jonses, Cessna’s new airplane should at least have a turbocharger option.

One place where Cessna can improve on the SR22 is in control feel and harmony.  In my opinion, this is the SR22s main drawback.  The Cirrus is not designed for “fun” flying, it’s designed to go places.  With that in mind, it uses a series of spring cartridges for trimming the plane.  It leaves the controls with a foreign, artificial feel.  They feel the same on the ground as they do in the air.  There’s no aerodynamic feedback through the stick.  When you’re low and slow, the controls don’t feel mushy.  They’re as firm as when you’re at cruise speed, because what you’re feeling when you move the stick is the resistance of the spring cartridges more than the resistance of the air passing over the control surface.

Another major omission in the SR22 is the lack of a pitch trim wheel.  It’s extremely difficult to manually trim the plane for level flight.  A manual trim wheel would be perfect for this job, but Cirrus chose to omit it from the plane.  Again, it’s because the aircraft was designed for serious travel.  The thought was that the airplane would be on autopilot most of the time.  And it is.  But still, the lack of an analog pitch trim device is a major drawback in my opinion.  If nothing else, it would make the plane safer.  As it stands now, a trim failure means you have to fight the plane until landing.  In a Cirrus, it’s hard work to do this.  You’re not only fighting the out-of-trim condition, but also the normal spring cartridge pressure AND the rudder-aileron interconnect, which is quite strong.

If Cessna fixes this, gives it an A36-like control harmony, and is competitive on price, I can see them making headway against Duluth.

One major advantage Cessna brings to the battle is money.  As a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, they have financial resources far beyond those of Cirrus or Columbia.  That means they can design, certify, and start producing these planes far more quickly than anyone else.  Witness the Cessna’s Mustang jet.  They got a very late start into the VLJ market, yet they’ve basically caught up to Eclipse.  Why?  More resources.  That means less time spent scrounging for money.

Whoever wins this battle, it’s nice to see that one is at least taking place.  The ultimate winner in this contest will be the general aviation community, because competition means innovation and that’s something the industry has been in sore need of for a long, long time.