Does wishing for the demise of a show set in my home town make me a bad person?  I hope not, because I was glad to read this:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — “The O.C.,” the once-hot teenage soap opera that saw its ratings plummet like a delinquent student’s grades, has been canceled.

Based in the affluent Orange County, California, city of Newport Beach, “The O.C.” caught fire in its first season, 2003-04, as the top-rated drama among advertiser-favored young adults and with a total audience of nearly 10 million.

“The O.C.” didn’t sustain its momentum, dropping to about 7 million weekly viewers during 2004-05 and then to fewer than 6 million last season. This year, returning in November after Fox wrapped its postseason baseball coverage, “The O.C.” has only drawn about 4 million viewers.

Somehow, the real Orange County became a magnet for producers of bad television over the past few years.  “The O.C.” scraped the bottom of the 90210-esque barrel from day one, yet somehow found enough of an audience that it spawned two Orange County-based reality shows:  The Real Housewives of Orange County and Laguna Beach.

I’ve seen all three shows, just out of curiosity.  There are definitely people who live that way, but they’re a relatively small number.  TV show fans do weird things sometimes; I wonder how many folks have moved here because of those shows, and what they think of the place after living here for a while.

The true reality of Orange County life goes down two seperate paths.  The high-life that everyone associates with O.C. is frequently a person with a $100,000 income living in an overpriced, rented apartment and driving a $150,000 car, leveraged to the hilt in order to finance an lifestyle they cannot afford.  That’s not going to last.

The other reality is comprised of ordinary people living normal, sensible lives.  I’d say that accounts for 95% of the county’s residents.

What you don’t see on TV is the sense of entrapment the real estate values place on homeowners here.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who say that they couldn’t move even if they wanted to because the high cost of real estate and the step up in tax basis on their home would make even a downward move unaffordable.  They’re wealthy on paper, but that’s it.  There are homeowners with multi-million dollar homes on Balboa Island who couldn’t even afford to pay the property tax on their place if it wasn’t for Proposition 13.  They’ve simply owned the place for 30 years and bought when it was affordable down there.

I suppose these nuances don’t make for good television, but I dislike the reality shows because there’s a segment of the population that expects and wants Orange County to be as vapid and shallow as what ends up on screen.  It’s perplexing.  When shows like “Dallas” were on the air, nobody thought it represented the real city of Dallas.  Of course, that was twenty years ago; the definition of “reality” has undergone some plastic surgery since then.  I hardly recognize it.

I like Orange County.  I just don’t like the way it’s portrayed to the world on these B-roll TV series.  The sooner they go, the better.  Let the glare of Hollywood’s reality craze warp someone else’s community for a change.

Aviation legend Bill Kershner, renown throughout the GA community as an instructor and author, has died.

Dog-eared copies of Kershner’s Advanced Pilot’s Flight Manual are on the bookshelves of countless pilots.  He’d been flying since 1945, and by my count, he must have been in his late 70s.

Kersher was cool.  He lectured at the UT Space Institute.  Kershner was old, but not crotchety.  He was modest, yet confident.  AOPA has a page of video clips and article reprints on the man.

We’re in an era when aviation is more synonymous with “money” than ever before.  The flying world tends to pay you little notice unless you’re in a half-million dollar composite SR-22 or Columbia.  Or the aerobatic equivalent, an Edge 540.  Bill Kershner did his thing with an old C152 Aerobat, training “over 600 students, including 45 Army aviators, FAA test pilots, lectured and flew spins at the Navy Flight Test School at Patuxent River, MD three separate summers, and taught aspiring Navy and Air Force pilots”.

That’s what I call “the right stuff”.  RIP, professor.

Mike Busch’s AVweb article “Checking the Dipstick” got me wondering how much oil is truly required for safe operation.  He writes:

The engines on my Cessna 310 have 12-quart sumps — 13 quarts if you include the quart in the spin-on oil filter. When I first acquired the airplane, my mechanic would fill the sump to its maximum capacity at each oil change. It didn’t take me long to discover that the engines didn’t like that, and promptly tossed several quarts out the engine breathers.

My POH states that the “minimum for flight” oil level is 9 quarts. So I asked my mechanic to service the sump to 10 quarts (instead of 12), and I’d add a quart of make-up oil when the level got down to 9 quarts. That worked better, but I was still seeing a fair amount of oil on the underside of the engine nacelles and the outer gear doors.

He goes on to say that after experimenting, he found that running at 9 quarts and not adding oil until reaching 7.5 worked best.

By comparison, an SR22 has a 310 horsepower TCM IO-550-N.  That’s a big engine — bigger than in Mike’s C310.  Yet the sump has an eight quart capacity.  And I’ve found that if you fill it much above 5-6 quarts, it throws the excess overboard.

Yes, operating a 310 hp, 550 cubic inch engine at 80% power for hours on end with  only 5 quarts of oil.  It sounds wrong, doesn’t it?

In lieu of 14 CFR 33.39, Continental must have demonstrated proper operation of that engine with only 4 quarts of oil.  It’s interesting that the FAR is entitled “Lubrication System”.  My understanding of oil’s function in the engine is that as little as one quart is needed for lubrication.  The balance of the sump capacity is primarily for engine cooling.

I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and run a $60,000 aircraft powerplant with one quart of oil in it, but this might explain the lower capacity on the IO-550-N.  If air flow and oil cooling are improved, perhaps a lower quantity might be acceptable.  They’re referred to as “air cooled” powerplants, but that’s a huge misnomer.  If you took away all the oil that wasn’t required for lubrication, you’d end up flying a glider, especially on a hot day.

The IO-550-N is also standard on the Columbia, Legacy, and other fast airplanes, and they all seem to have an eight quart capacity.

I want to suggest that the cowling is efficient enough and the aircraft’s cruise speeds high enough that air takes on a greater role in keeping the engine cool, but the Columbia 400 sort of blows that theory out of the water.  The CL400 is twin-turbocharged and it operates as high as FL250, where there’s little air to cool the engine, yet power output remains very high.  All on an eight quart capacity.

I’m not a powerplant engineer, so I could be way off base with the rationale.  But there’s no denying that the SR22 operates with 50% less oil capacity than other airplanes equipped with basically the same engine.

For a long time, I used to get very uneasy operating an engine of that size with so little oil.  The O-470-S in my previous aircraft had a 9 quart capacity.  That’s a 13% greater oil capacity for an engine with 15% lower displacement and 25% lower horsepower.

Another data point:  I fly an Extra 300 with an AEIO-540 and it has a 14 quart capacity.  And let me tell you, you’d better not take off with less than 12 quarts in that sucker or you’ll be looking at higher engine temps.  Sure, I’m doing inverted flat spins and other things that frequently toss as much as 2-3 quarts of oil out the breather and onto the tail.  In fact, it’s quite common to come back with the empennage completely coated in oil.  But Decathlons have a similar setup — an inverted oil system — and their oil capacity is no higher than what you’d find in a non-aerobatic airplane with the same engine.

Consider also that the limited fuel capacity of aerobatic airplanes means they won’t be in the air for more than an hour or so.  A normal airplane with an IO-550-N will typically have a 4-5 hour range.  Longer flight times, lower oil capacity?

Anyway, back to the Cirrus.  My unease was abated somewhat by talking (repeatedly) to the factory.  When I was in Duluth, the demo pilots and instructors said they never ran more than 5 quarts in any of the SR22s or it’d be expelled by the engine.  This isn’t just what they do, it’s what they teach in the standardized training program.  The SR22 fleet has already surpassed one million hours of operation, and with the advanced engine monitoring capabilities in these airplanes, it’s a sure bet that operating at this “low” oil level is not harmful.

It does take some getting used to, though.

My final thought on oil levels is that most pilots probably never know what the engine is actually using versus what it’s venting, because most aircraft have a dirty underside, and unless it’s dripping with oil, you’d be unlikely to notice it.

In fact, depending on the location of the breather in relation to the exhaust pipe and the rest of the airframe, vented oil might never show up at all.  This is especially true if they’re flying something like a Pitts, Extra, Decathlon, or other such plane because the breather doesn’t exit under the cowling.  To keep oil off the belly, the tube runs down the longitudinal axis of the airframe and ends next to the tailwheel.  It could vent oil all day long and you might not see any sign of it on the airframe.

Mike mentions another skewing phenomenon.  When it comes to checked the oil level, is what you read on the dipstick an accurate representation of what’s in the engine?

If you check the oil level shortly after the engine has been run for awhile, the dipstick reading will be noticeably lower because a significant quantity of oil remains adhered to various engine components. Another reading taken 24 hours later will often show an oil level that is 0.5- to 1-quart higher.

Tailwheel aircraft, especially those that have seen significant maneuvering during the last flight, can have a fair amount of oil sitting in the long breather vent tube I mentioned earlier.  Put an oil bottle on the breather, and within 24 hours you can have a quarter of a quart in there.

With all these factors, how does one really know what’s causing oil consumption?  Simple:  get to know your airplane.  Listen to what it’s telling you.  Look at usage patterns and note when oil is added.  Check the underside of the airplane during the pre- and post-flight inspections (you do perform a post-flight inspection, right?).  These hand-built contraptions have individual personalities.  Pay attention to them and they’ll tell you exactly what’s going on.

Most corporate aircraft have no identifying marks on them at all because the company doesn’t want competitors knowing where their executives are going.  They even go so far as to have their N-number blocked from sites like FlightAware.

But not all companies are like that.  KFC, for example, used to have a corporate airplane at SNA.  I’m not sure if it was based here or just came into Orange County frequently, but it always seemed to be on the field.  This thing was a beauty, a Challenger 604 painted in red and white striping.

Unfortunately, the clean lines were marred by a giant Colonel Sanders logo on the tail.  Also, the 604 fuselage has a wide diameter, but it’s not very long.  So between the paint scheme and the logo on the tail, the airplane was essentially a giant KFC chicken bucket turned on its side.

One day, just for kicks, I walked up the airstair door, knocked on the side of the plane, and with the straightest possible face asked the pilot if I could get an bucket of Cajun chicken “to go”.

He got a kick out of that, laughing heartily for about 5 seconds before pointing at the airstair and telling me to get the hell off his airplane.  I descended toward the tarmac while uttering my parting shot:  “They warned me that the Colonel made a mean bird…”