On January 5, a door plug separated from the frame of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 as it climbed through 16,000 feet. The flight crew was able to report the emergency to ATC and land the aircraft—and only minor injuries were reported. 

Aviation has grown increasingly safe over the past few decades, with safety records ticking up steadily to the point that it’s statistically less dangerous to take a commercial flight across the planet than to get in your car and drive to the next city. General aviation isn’t quite at that level, although safety numbers on that front have been climbing as well—an aging GA fleet accessible to the majority of pilots notwithstanding. This incident would seem to be a warning call to remind us that aviation is safe because we work so hard to make it so. 

But apparently there were warnings before this for this particular aircraft. According to the NTSB’s preliminary report, the aircraft had experienced pressurization problems on December 30, just a few days before the door plug blew out. 

Without knowing all of the details, I can’t comment on this particular case. 

But the whole scenario has me thinking a lot in general about the human factors of aviation and the checks we use to protect ourselves and others in the air. We have developed these checks with the full understanding that human beings are fallible and subject to pressures that can lead, at times, to bad decision-making. 

In fact, the recognition of human factors in aviation dates to its early days when accidents were often attributed solely to technical failures. Over time, it became evident that human error caused a significant number of accidents. This realization led to the establishment of human-related factors as a distinct field within aviation, with a focus on studying and mitigating the impact of those issues. 

To help mitigate this fallibility, professionals in aviation go through rigorous training and testing. They must use checklists. And they are required to make decisions that occasionally put personal interest (or at scale, economic interest) behind scrapping a flight because the risk is just too high, whether because of a potential maintenance issue, weather, or a crewmember just can’t hack it that day. 

Economic considerations in aviation are not small. Sometimes the safety of a flight is weighed against the commercial ramifications of failing to complete it. And that is powerful medicine, especially when risk looks somewhat abstract from the ground. However, pressure to complete a flight or project on schedule or within a particular budget should never eclipse safety considerations. 

It’s always worthwhile to slow down, investigate, and triple-check that our T’s are crossed and I’s dotted. We can’t allow all of the safe flights we’ve had before lead to complacency. 

Aviation is made safe by people committing to following established procedures, double-checking everything, and putting the safety of a given flight above commercial concerns or other social or psychological pressures. It takes strength to do this, but it’s so vital. In commercial aviation or general aviation, we should trust—but always verify. 

The post Boeing Max and the Case of the Missing Bolts appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

In recent years, the problem has been exacerbated. It used to be that pilots and controllers communicated in a fairly simple fashion, resorting to plain language when it suited. I recall attempting to affect an airline captain’s “Ah’, roger” drawl after obtaining my commercial certificate 60-odd years ago. Maybe I threw in a “Wilco” once in a while, signifying “will comply.” Instructions and requests were traded in a relatively clear manner.

We called ground control with an “On the ramp, ready to taxi” and got a terse “Taxi to one-eight.” If we wanted help finding our way, we could ask, otherwise, it was expected that we knew where the runway was and would call the tower for takeoff in due course. The frequency remained relatively uncongested. 

But pilots botched up from time to time, blundering into blind-alley taxiways or heading across an active runway. So taxi instructions gradually got more complex and wordy, first with a mandate to read back all “hold short” instructions and then with specific designations for a full-route clearance, all to be repeated verbatim. 

“Taxi to one-eight” became “Taxi to Runway 18 via Juliet, Alpha, and Romeo, hold short of Runway 31, confirm you have information Delta.” We soon learned we could get away with parroting “Taxi 18, Juliet/Alpha/Romeo, hold short 31, we have Delta.” 

Back in the beginning, we simply acknowledged receipt of a clearance by replying with our N-number, clipped to the last three ciphers if the tower had so stated it, just enough to assure that the right airplane heard the word from above. In all cases, the conversation was being recorded, and confirmation was important in the event of an investigation.

At this point, the controller’s manual requires controllers to state so many more advisory reminders, much of which we dutifully repeat back, that the frequency is filled with rapid-fire, nearly unintelligible verbiage, filed away in our mental cavities but not truly listened to. But, duty must be done.

The danger is that habitual repetition leads to hearing what we expect to hear, not what was truly said. 

“Cleared for the visual, report three mile left base for Runway 31,” becomes “Cleared to land, 31” in our mind, even though we read back the visual and report instructions. Or, as in the case of the Hawker crew at Houston recently, “Line up and wait” was interpreted as “Cleared for takeoff,” leading them to clip the tail of a cross-landing Citation. The old pre-ICAO “Position and hold” instruction was much more declarative, in my humble opinion.

My associates and I are now given to speaking slower, at the risk of overstaying our welcome on frequency, in hopes that ATC will reciprocate in intelligible delivery. Even so, well-meaning imposition of advisories and southern-exposure protections burden controllers with so much “New Speak” that we long for the days of shorter communication.

The post Hearing and Doing appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Equipped with a sliding canopy over two seats and control sticks, the M20T was unmistakably geared for military service. Under the wings, four hardpoints gave the Predator teeth in the form of missiles, light rockets, or gun pods.
Much like the 1951 effort, the Predator showed well—but not well enough. The official reason for its rejection was that the M20T did not recover well from spins with a full load of fuel. Mooney wings are lauded for their strength and stability. The former was an asset, the latter a liability in this design. Roll rates were lackluster, failing to meet design criteria despite numerous revisions to the ailerons. Spin recovery has never been great with the Mooney design, and that was really the nail in the coffin. A one-turn spin was easily recoverable with quick recovery inputs. A two-turn spin took another four turns to recover; a four-turn spin wasn’t recoverable. Mooney withdrew from the competition before it ended.
The winner was the Slingsby T-3 Firefly, which raised some eyebrows: “Made in America” was a stipulation of the contract, but Slingsby built most of the airplane in the U.K. and assembled it in the U.S. After a brief few years in service, the U.S. Air Force grounded the T-3 fleet in 1997 after a pair of spin-related accidents and an engine failure. They were destroyed in 2006.
Meanwhile, the M20T prototype had gathered dust at the Kerrville, Texas, factory. Jacques Esculier, the company’s president, ordered the prototype destroyed. The engine went back to Continental (it had been loaned for the venture), but the employees in Mooney’s R&D complex were more than a little attached to the machine they’d poured so much work into. In a clandestine effort, they disassembled the airframe and pigeonholed it in various spaces across the facility. And there it stayed hidden until it found a champion.
Former Mooney chief operating officer Tom Bowen recalled his first encounter with the design. “In 1995, the research and development team staff gained enough confidence in me, and they said, ‘We have something to show you—this project we’d really like to work on.’” The workers took him through the
hangars where the pieces of the M20T were scattered. “I knew a little about the program, but it hadn’t been my focus.”
Bowen received permission from the company’s president for the workers to resurrect the project, but Mooney was being prepped for sale so they had to do so without any meaningful budget. “So we begged, borrowed, and might have stolen a few pieces from the production line,” Bowen said of beginning to reassemble the airplane. Working evenings and weekends, the airplane began to come back together, this time with a Lycoming AEIO-540 under the cowl. The bird had never been underpowered, but this engine promised even more performance.
Now registered as N20XT, the unique Mooney took flight again, and Dirk Vander Zee, then Mooney’s vice president of sales and marketing, dubbed it the “Predator.” The name stuck, and the Predator gained its memorable paint scheme after Bowen’s daughters, armed with a three-view drawing and a box of crayons, colored in tiger stripes. In the hands of longtime Mooney experimental test pilot Mike “Mikey” Miles, the Predator took flight, and Miles started checking out the other Mooney test pilots in the bird.

The whole rehabilitation project had stayed beneath leadership’s radar, and on June 30, 1997, Bowen taxied the mostly complete Predator, its test time already flown off, to the main headquarters and parked it in front of the office of Mooney president Bing Lantis. “The offices all have windows out to the ramp, and as I walked in, he was speechless,” Bowen said. Lantis went for a ride, and magically, the team had a modest operating budget for the program. With a few bucks to use, the crayon on paper became paint on metal, and soon the bird was ready to display.
The Predator parked at the Mooney Aircraft Pilots Association tent that year at EAA AirVenture, and the next it was front and center for Oshkosh and the Sun ’n
Fun Fly-In.
The R&D team continued to tweak the design, modifying the flight control sizes, then adding and adjusting servo tabs to eke out every bit of maneuverability it could. The work was well outside the norm for Mooney’s engineers, who had built generations of stable, efficient aircraft but sometimes overshot their goals and had to rein back the project when it became too unstable. What they wound up with, Bowen recalled, was not the fingertip-flying mindbender that some would imagine.
“It’s not a two-finger machine,” Bowen said. “But it is a pleasant airplane to fly with one hand on the stick.” The 90-degree-per-second roll rate hoped for initially never really came to be—50 degrees per second is where it settled in, and inverted flight was never all that great, taking an aggressive nose-up pitch of 10-12 degrees to hold level inverted. “But it looped great, pulling only about 1.8 to 2 Gs.” It was speedy—160 knots or so in cruise, but the straight exhaust pipes with no mufflers made for a very noisy experience until ANR headsets came along.
Dreamers drooled over the design, but nobody was ready to pony up the bucks for orders, and when Bowen left Mooney, the Predator hardly flew. After a period of dormancy, the Florida Air Museum asked to display it, and it was ferried to Lakeland, where it sat for several years. It eventually wound up back in Kerrville at the Mooney factory, once again forlorn.
Don and Paul Maxwell, the father-son team at Maxwell Aviation, made an offer to the newest owners of Mooney: They’d restore the Predator to flight status if they could get permission. One might argue that short of the factory itself, Maxwell Aviation—one of the nation’s most popular Mooney Service Centers—would be the perfect place for such a project.
In 2020, the Maxwells showed up at Mooney’s Texas factory to bring the Predator back to their shop, but it didn’t fly home. The solid wing, a design trait Mooney owners brag about when it comes to comparison with other GA aircraft, becomes a liability if you want to haul a Mooney home. The crew from Maxwell Aviation set to drilling out the bulkhead’s rivets just aft of the cabin’s steel-tube cage and separated the tail, setting the pieces onto a flatbed trailer for transport.
The restoration took two years of part-time work as Paul led the effort, overhauling the engine and rebuilding the airframe. The M20T wing had featured larger-than-stock ailerons. Paul and his crew replaced that wing with a M20K wing, which brought them back to stock ailerons and flaps. The elevators had featured servo tabs to lighten stick forces, but after a few flights the team replaced them with stock equipment.
“Unless you’re going to be flying aerobatics every single flight, the older elevators were overkill,” Paul Maxwell said.
The Predator’s entire existence had ridden out numerous ownership changes at Mooney and a shoestring budget all along, but now the Maxwells have heaped the goodies onto it. Its instrument panel now features Garmin G3X Touch displays with engine instrumentation, CIES electronic fuel senders, and a Garmin GFC 500 autopilot.
The fuselage’s tiger stripes were replicated and extended to the wings. Carbon monoxide in the cabin was an issue all along, but the Maxwells have sorted that out, and it now has a Guardian CO detector. Sporting a 300 hp Lycoming AEIO-540 on the nose, the Predator certainly has the power to push you back into the seat and plaster a smile on your face.
“It’s a 170-knot airplane,” said Paul Maxwell. “It’s not as fast as a Bravo, but it will outclimb all the other Mooneys.”
The Predator returned to flight March 18 and recently attended a Mooney Caravan formation clinic in San Angelo, Texas. The Caravan clinic provides training through the year at regional venues before a giant formation arrival—with tentative plans for the Predator to lead it—at AirVenture in Oshkosh. The Predator will also be on display at MooneyMax, a Mooney-specific symposium in Longview, Texas, on June 22 through 25.
As for its future, what the Predator can do is limited mainly by regulation—it’s registered as experimental-exhibition. “Despite being factory built, it has more restrictions on its use than something built in a garage,” Paul said.
But he intends to fly it to Oshkosh for every AirVenture as long as he lives, and it will actively participate in Mooney caravan clinics as well as attending other, smaller events. 

Editor’s note: This story appeared in the July 2023 issue of Plane & Pilot magazine.

The post Mooney’s Almost-Warbird Returns to the Texas Skies appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

In 2023, many of the aircraft on display are known to Americans. However, Europe tends to produce more proof-of-concept projects than we see in America. This is partly as European governments subsidize certain developments, such as when a designer engages a national university. The builder gets technical assistance. The students get real-life experience.

Help with these costs yields many interesting designs but few make it to market. However, novel ideas can find their way into other marketed designs.

Other projects are carried, just like in America, by entrepreneurs that simply will not stop until they reach their goal. Jörg Hollmann of JH Aircraft is a driven engineer who has steadily developed and improved his super-light Corsair lookalike. For Aero 2023, he has something new… again!

Part 103-Eligible Corsair

When Jörg first introduced his carbon-fiber-tube-primary-structure Corsair, lot of us had to pick up our jaws from the floor. Corsair was so distinctive in its shape and so unique in its construction that most initially refused to believe it could fit Germany 120-Kilogram Class (empty weight allowed is within a couple pounds of Part 103).

Then he finished the aircraft, flew it, and proved it could make weight. Later Jörg worked with a three-cylinder internal combustion engine that seemed to fit the era well. He wasn’t done as you’ll see below.

Corsair is “a microlight single seater fulfilling different national regulations such as England’s SSDR or the U.S. Part 103, yet it is capable of +6 and -4 g without compromises on safety,” explained Jörg.

Designed and built in Germany, Corsair has an extremely strong carbon primary structure composed of laboriously-assembled carbon tube. “Furthermore,” Jörg added, “the complete cockpit area is constructed as a Kevlar reinforced safety cell.” Of course, this being a German design, an aircraft rescue system with a ballistic parachute is available as well. Germany requires such equipment.

“If you want to start your own project and build an aircraft on your own,” Jörg observed, “Corsair is not only available ready-to-fly but also as a kit.”

Get e-Motional!

If an aircraft is good, is an electric-powered one even better? Maybe, and those keen on this propulsion now have that choice on Corsair.

“With electric propulsion, Corsair e-Motion is nearly maintenance-free, thus it is less complicated and leaves more time for the pure pleasure of flying,” believes Jörg. “Especially with open canopy in nice weather you can directly feel the freedom of flying.”

Different types of batteries are available with up to 14 kWh, allowing up to two hours of flight time. Batteries can be recharged in approximately 4.5 hours at a standard wall outlet or in just 1.5 hours using a quick charger, reported JH Aircraft.

Those attending Aero Friedrichshafen 2023 are warmly invited to examine Corsair at Aero (April 19th – 22nd) in Hall 5, stand 305.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
JH Aircraft Corsair eMotion
all specification provided by the manufacturer

• Wing span (folded wings) — 24.6 feet (9.0 feet)
• Length — 20.7 feet
• Wing area — 108 square feet
• Empty Weight (without batteries) — 187 pounds
• Payload — 364 pounds
• Load Factors — +6g / -4g
• Engine — Electric motor HPD16 or HPD20
• Power — 16 kWc / 20 kWpeak or 20 kWc / 30 kWpeak
• Batteries — 7. 1 or 14 kWh / max 136 pounds
• Flight time — Up to 2 hours (14 kWh)
• Take off roll distanc — < 130 feet
• Take off over 50 ft obstacle — < 400 feet
• Stall speed — 30 knots
• Cruise speed — 86 knots
• Maximum speed — 108 knots
• Best climb — 1200 fpm

Story originally published on bydanjohnson.com

The post Aero Friedrichshafen 2023 — JH Aircraft’s Popular Corsair Debuts e-Motion at Europe’s Best Show appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

This isn’t just stunt flying gone bad—it can be a pilot who bows to external pressures such as get-there-itis or makes decisions when compromised by fatigue. Saying no to a flight, especially when you have passengers on board, can be very difficult—but sometimes it is necessary. When you read accident reports, you see the red flags—the mistakes or questionable decisions made by the pilots. This makes accident reports a valuable teaching tool.

Deconstructing the Dubroff Crash

April 11 is the anniversary of a Cessna 177B crash in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1996. The flight had captured national attention as its purpose was for 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff to set a record as the youngest pilot (I’m compelled to use finger quotes here) to fly across the United States. She was accompanied by 52-year-old Joe Reid, a full-time stock broker and part-time flight instructor, and her father, 57-year-old Lloyd Dubroff. 

The flight, which began on the west coast and was supposed to terminate on the east coast was billed as the “Sea to Shining Sea” flight. Lloyd Dubroff was acting as the publicist, and created an ambitious itinerary for the 6,900-mile trip, which was supposed to take eight days.

I remember this story vividly. I was both a pilot and a television news producer at the time, and the whole concept of a 7-year-old pilot smacked of a publicity stunt. I was then and still am doubtful that most 7-year-olds have the strength, size, focus, and maturity to take flying lessons; however, the media accounts of her skills in the cockpit indicate that the little girl, who learned by doing, could fly the airplane. The videos of her flight lessons—a few were shown on television—show a little girl on a booster seat using rudder extensions. She has both hands on the yoke as Reid cautions her to use more right rudder.

I was still years away from being an instructor, but it didn’t look like she was really doing the flying. From the angle you couldn’t see the rudder pedals, so I couldn’t be sure. When I became an instructor I sometimes flew with children and gave them instruction with their parent’s permission. As long as they listened and followed directions they could fly, but I found that many of the younger ones were more interested in looking out the side window than flying the airplane.

The Dubroffs told media outlets that it was their daughter’s idea to try to set a new record for the youngest pilot to fly across the U.S., although at the time of the crash, the Guinness Book of Records had already eliminated its “youngest pilot” category, citing concerns it might encourage unsafe flying in the pursuit of record setting. The FAA also takes a dim view of this. Even before the Dubroff crash, the FAA stressed that the youngest age a person can pilot a powered aircraft is 16. In the accident report, both Dubroffs are listed as passengers.

Television Cameras Make People Foolish

You may notice that when television cameras appear, people get silly. They interrupt live interviews or run in front of the camera and wave. It’s all about getting attention. Lloyd Dubroff knew this, and was working with media, both national and local, to promote the flight.

ABC News supplied Dubroff with a video camera and blank cassette tapes to record the flight. At various stops, Dubroff was to exchange the used video tapes for fresh ones. There was ostensibly no financial compensation for the videos, but they would be used in a story in the future. The aircraft also carried boxes of baseball caps with the slogan “Sea to Shining Sea ” that were supposed to be handed out along the way. To pilots who saw the video of the packed aircraft, it looked overloaded —and it was.

The gross weight of the C177B is listed as 2,500 pounds. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) estimated the actual weight of the aircraft at the time of the accident to be 2,596 pounds.

Reid was somewhat skeptical at first about the idea of teaching a 7-year-old to fly, and viewed the Sea to Shining Sea event as getting paid to fly across the country with a little girl and her father on board, his wife told NTSB investigators. To his wife, he described the flight as a “non-event for aviation.”

At the time of the accident, he had logged 1,484 hours. It was noted that most of his experience was along the California coast, although his logbook reflected he had conducted eight flights out of airports that had field elevations of roughly 4,500 feet msl prior to the accident flight. Reid had several students in addition to Dubroff, who had logged approximately 33 hours with Reid.

The route was planned in effect by Lloyd Dubroff, who did not have a pilot certificate. According to a hand-written itinerary found on the body of Lloyd Dubroff, each day consisted of several hours of flight and several media stops. It was not determined if he understood how flight time desired and actual flight time acquired are often different things. One wonders if he had ever heard the phrase ‘time to spare, go by air’.

The days preceding the launch of the transcontinental flight included multiple media interviews, some of them before 7 a.m. to accommodate east coast live television morning news shows. On April 10 there was an early morning live television interview at the airport, and at 0700 the aircraft took off from Half Moon Bay, California (KHAF), and headed east to Elko, Nevada (KEKO). The aircraft refueled then headed to Rock Springs, Wyoming (KRKS), for a brief stop. The airport manager noted how worn out the pilot looked. The flight made it to Cheyenne at 1756. Reid called his wife that evening, saying he was elated by the reception they had been getting along the way, but added he was very tired.

From a TV producer standpoint, I found it hard to get behind the story, which was the same every place they stopped, be it on television, newspaper, or radio. People were always excited to meet the little girl. She was asked if she wanted to be a pilot when she grew up. She was asked if she liked to fly. I maintain that if they had delayed a departure to get more rest or to wait out the weather it would have made for a much better story—at least it would be different than the previous ones—what does a 7-year-old pilot do when she is waiting for the weather to clear? Does she play with the airport dog? Does she read magazines in the FBO? Drink the FBO coffee and raid the popcorn and candy machines? She certainly wasn’t doing the flight planning.

Accident Details

Per the witness statements in the NTSB report, Reid obtained a weather briefing on the morning of April 11 and performed the preflight inspection. The weather was deteriorating as a thunderstorm approached the airport, and they were in a hurry to leave because they had media interviews with the local television stations to get to. 

Think about that for a moment: taking off and trying to outrun a thunderstorm in a Cessna 177B to get three minutes of facetime on a small-market television station.

When you are in a hurry, you make mistakes. The NTSB report depicts several slips, including forgetting to pull the wheel chocks prior to engine start and stumbling on a few radio transmissions, including asking for “special IFR” rather than “special VFR.” The aircraft took off in strong, gusting winds and heavy rain. There was hail, reduced visibility, and lightning in the vicinity. At the time of the accident, the Cheyenne Regional Airport (KCYS) density altitude determined from the ASOS was approximately 6,670 feet.

There were other pilots at the airport as the storm approached. A few were interviewed by the NTSB after the accident and described the heavy rain and strong and gusting winds that created issues even while taxiing.

It began to rain before the Cardinal departed. In her last telephone call with her mother, just moments before takeoff, Jessica Dubroff commented on the weather, asking her mother if she could hear how loud the rain was.

Witnesses say the aircraft took off from Runway 30 and appeared to struggle to gain altitude as it never got higher than 400 feet. The aircraft appeared to be turning to the right when it plunged nose down, coming down on a street and the end of a driveway some 9,600 feet off the end of the runway. The aircraft had 10 degrees of flaps in at the time of impact. There were no injuries other than to the persons on board, and only the aircraft was damaged. The NTSB noted the nose section and forward cabin area were crushed and displaced rearward along the airplane’s longitudinal axis. Fuel poured out of the wings, but there was no fire.

The photographs of the wreckage are jarring. What is left of the cockpit is a mess of fragmented instruments and the ear cup from a David Clark headset. There are photos of the front seats. They are bent, misshapen, and bloodstained.

Witnesses told investigators that the aircraft hit so hard they knew no one could have survived. The cause of death for all three was listed as traumatic injury. Lloyd Dubroff, who was sitting in the rear left seat, had his arms wrapped around his daughter at the time of impact. Jessica had a fractured right foot. Based on the multiple fractures in Reid’s arms and legs it was determined that he had been on the controls at the time of impact.

The Fallout

Any time there is a high-profile accident, there will be blowback in the form of people trying to legislate ways to prevent poor decision-making. This was no exception. Almost immediately, there were cries to pass laws to prohibit children from taking flying lessons. Thankfully, the furor died down after people realized this horrible accident wasn’t so much caused by a child flying but rather the choices the adults made for the child.

However, as part of the Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act of 1996, President Clinton approved the Child Pilot Safety Act, amending Federal aviation law to prohibit a pilot in command of an aircraft from allowing an individual who does not hold a valid private pilot’s certificate, and an appropriate medical certificate, to manipulate the controls of an aircraft if the pilot knows or should have known that the individual is attempting to set a record or engage in an aeronautical competition or aeronautical feat.

A pilot who allowed this to happen could face revocation of their airman certificate.

Fortunately, most pilots who fly with children—either their own, friends of the family, or as EAA Young Eagles ambassadors, are more careful about the choices they make. For children under 16, the purpose of the flight is, more often than not, to generate interest or as a reward. I have flown with these children at the request of their parents, with the understanding that when they were old enough, if they wanted them, flight lessons would become much more serious business. But only if the child wanted it.

Parents are supposed to protect their children. My instructor at the time of the Dubroff crash had a little girl of his own, and he was dismayed by the behavior of both the CFI and the father. He remarked we will never be able to remove all the poor decisions from aviation—I believe the technical term is ‘you can’t fix stupid’, but you need to learn to recognize when you’re heading down that path—and know when to divert.

The post Remembering the Dubroff Cardinal Accident appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

We are excited to embark on reimagining what Plane & Pilot will be in the future. The brand has a storied history and we want to honor that legacy so Plane & Pilot can live on for another 50 years. 

Our goal is to make Plane & Pilot a brand that is an integral part of FLYING Media Group. We also want to ensure that it maintains a distinctive voice that is different from the other brands in the aviation industry, including FLYING Magazine.

When I first took up flying in 1992, I flew a Beechcraft Skipper and subscribed to two print magazines—FLYING and Plane & Pilot. 

FLYING was exciting because I always viewed it as an aspirational brand, showing what was possible. It featured the most exciting new aircraft, gear, and technology—ranging from the latest model pistons to the most powerful business jets. When I bought FLYING two years ago this summer, we doubled down on the aspirational elements of the magazine, improving the quality of the print edition and focusing on what is possible in aviation. 

Plane & Pilot was always a bit different. It had a “down to earth” essence to it, and as a young piston pilot, I always related to the content a bit better. At the time, I had limited resources and the content of the magazine was centered around the experiences of a recreational piston pilot. At the same time, it always illuminated the love and passion that its readers have had for flying piston airplanes. 

Today, I exclusively fly piston aircraft. I am a 500-hour pilot only qualified to fly VFR—I took 20 years off between college and my rediscovery of aviation. I fly because I love it and try to get in the air every few days.

While running FLYING, I was always a bit jealous of the potential of Plane & Pilot—to provide depth and focus on the recreational piston pilot and market. The magazine zeroed in exclusively on one aspect of aviation—and a part of the world that personally I had nearly all of my piloting experience in. 

FLYING Magazine is a special brand, but the mission of FLYING is to cover all aspects of general aviation (and at times delving into topics outside of GA), which leaves little room for the deep dives into the recreational piston story, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. 

Now with the two brands under the same umbrella, we can do exactly that—we can double down on Plane & Pilot as the brand dedicated to the mission of the recreational piston pilot, while continuing to focus FLYING Magazine on the aspirational stories of general aviation. 

I am honored to have the opportunity to participate in the journey of two of the greatest magazines in aviation. 

I hope you will join me in this journey and subscribe to both FLYING and Plane & Pilot. I promise it will be worth it! 

I would love to hear your feedback. You can reach me at @freightalley on Twitter.

—Craig Fuller, new owner of Plane & Pilot and founder/CEO of FLYING Media Group 

The post A New Era for ‘Plane & Pilot’ appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

The fuel is brilliantly and deceptively named. It’s in no way low in lead, just slighter lower than the most-leaded aviation gasolines that came before it. But for decades now, the fuel has been largely ignored by the EPA, in large part because there were no good lead-free replacements, and the path to an industry-wide transition is complex and problematic in many ways. It’s human nature for people to put off addressing a problem that’s tolerated, and aviation over the past few decades has done just that. There have been initiatives to develop unleaded aviation fuels, but they have not moved the needle much at all.

To their credit, organizations seem at last to understand the danger of the path we’re on. The formation last year of a coalition, called the Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions (EAGLE), lays out the current vision. Lead in our avgas is going away, so we need to make the transition to an unleaded alternative as smooth as possible, and no one thinks it will be anything other than a wild ride.

With its publishing of its endangerment finding on 100LL, the EPA has essentially started the clock. Most folks believe that 100LL will be history by 2030, though to be clear, the EPA could ban it tomorrow. It won’t, but it could.

Uncertainty abounds. How do we get to that lead-free future? Who will manufacture it? How will it be delivered to vendors? How will it be stored and then distributed to end users? Each one of these issues is a hornet’s nest of potentially fiendishly-difficult-to-resolve issues. We need the work of EAGLE and we need it now. Well, we needed it in 2010.

In an open letter to the EPA, a group of aviation alphabet organizations sent the EPA a clear message, which is, to paraphrase, “Slow your roll.” Unparaphrased, the coalition laid out the landscape and underscored the stakes, “The General Aviation (GA) industry consists of some 220,000 aircraft, supports nearly 1.2 million jobs, and generates an estimated $245 billion in economic impact annually. It does not include military or commercial airline aircraft, although it does support those industries in ancillary ways. GA supports many additional functions besides recreational flying including but not limited to air ambulance, law enforcement, charter, commercial transport, business, disaster response, aerial firefighting, and critical flight training activities.”

That’s not as much a comment as a statement on the facts. It also added that while there exist alternatives to 100LL for many, many small aircraft, there remain a number of higher-performance models that need a fuel that can, like 100LL, protect engines from harmful effects of high-compression ignition, including knocking and preignition. Those aircraft, the coalition added, “!consume 70-75 percent of all avgas sold in the United States.”

There’s much ignorance about the subject. For most owners of small aircraft, there already are alternatives, such as GAMI’s 100UL, though how and when it will be widely available remains to be seen.

One writer penned a letter to me a few weeks ago taking me to task for reporting on the current tumultuous avgas situation, saying that no airplane can fly with unleaded gas, which is just flat-out wrong. This kind of ignorant luddite is uncommon in aviation. Pilots are smart and informed. But they are loud and the likes of AOPA and EAA (and now us at Plane & Pilot) are forced to deal with them.

But in the real world, there are things we know are true and that will very probably come to pass. Our common avgas, 100LL, is living on borrowed time. Whether we do anything about developing alternatives or not, it’s going away, almost certainly by 2030. Insisting that leaded avgas is an absolute requirement is a view that will doom us.

Survey Results: Your Thoughts On the Future Of 100L and the Threatened Closing of Reid- Hillview Airport 

The post Aviation to EPA: Slow Your Roll appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

There are stories of SWA pilots waiting on the phone for more than a dozen hours to talk to a dispatcher—one pilot reportedly was on hold for 17 hours. This is not to mention the tens of thousands of customers who were left in the lurch, with SWA unable to provide to many of them the kind of cancellation care, hotels and/or rental cars, that isn’t just the right thing to do but required by law.

How bad was it? As you might know, airline pilots are notoriously reluctant to share publicly anything bad or good about their work life. Yet after this debacle, hundreds of Southwest pilots took to social media to detail the degree of the misery, though several have showered praise on customers, who were said to be were largely supportive and understanding. Others, of course, were asked to get the plane going right now! There was even an (unverified but legit-sounding) memo from SWA telling pilots not to go into SWA employee lounges to shop for flight attendants to work their flights, though the attempt by pilots to find flight attendants who hadn’t been able to talk to dispatch for a day or more seems a reasonable alternative to us.

The other bad news for SWA is this: In a political climate that has become polarized beyond easy repair, this is one issue, Southwest’s failings, that has united the parties like few other issues have done. DotSec Pete Buttigieg appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, including Meet the Press and Face the Nation, where he made no effort to disguise his unhappiness over the meltdown and express wonder that the company could have been relying on a system that has been in use for decades—this is not an uncommon practice, by the way. Pilots at other airlines have shared with P&P their gratitude that it didn’t happen to their carrier.

Legislators are riled—after all, every one of them has constituents who were left stranded by SWA’s failures, many of whom have yet to see a penny in reimbursement for their fares, never mind the required penalties airlines must pay when something like this happens. There is certain to be a Congressional investigation, perhaps more than one, and the DoT is also likely to issue fines after it gets a handle on the extent of the damage done. What kind of financial hit is SWA looking to take? It’s too early to say with any certainty, but industry it could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Politico‘s Weekly Transportation newsletter noted two other areas of concern. One is consolidation. With mergers among airlines at an all-time high, consumers are left with fewer choices and higher fares. And Southwest, the author notes, was the first airline to resume shareholder dividends once the legislative ban on them expired late last year.

One agency that can’t get too high and mighty right now is the FAA, which had a three-hour ground stop into all Florida airports after one of its air route traffic control systems failed, forcing airlines to cancel hundreds of flights and leaving, again, thousands of flyers stranded, at least temporarily.

A Pilot’s Views from The Jump Seat

The post Why the Southwest Holiday Meltdown Blowback is Coming appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

I’m reluctant to use the word “stunt” to describe even high-profile flights, though I did use it to discuss the Red Bull Plane Swap fiasco, the Trevor Jacob “engine failure” cluster and a few others. Despite my reticence at categorizing anything in this way, the term repeatedly springs to mind when I read about flights of electric-powered aircraft.

But are they stunts? By definition, a stunt is an action that is undertaken for the visibility and notoriety rather than for more meaningful reasons, such as scientific advancement or development of technology. Dropping a bowling ball off of a high bridge onto a trampoline is a stunt. Building an aircraft with a new wing configuration isn’t, even if it’s not successful.

So, aren’t flight programs to retrofit existing aircraft, like the Robinson R-44 powered by batteries and electric motors, research and development pure and true?

I don’t think so, and here’s why they’re not. The quandary I have isn’t with the development of electric tech; it might very well be the future, at some point. But let’s face facts. The current state of the battery art is insufficient to realistically support any but the most restricted missions. Short training flights, as demonstrated by Pipistrel, now owned by Textron Aviation, are the sole practical example so far of a useful electric airplane system, and even that one is living on the ragged edge of practicality.

And every electric aircraft development company that is honest with the public says up front that what they really need are better batteries. The energy density of today’s batteries, even the most exotic of them, is miniscule compared with the energy stored in fossil fuel. Electric aircraft take a hit on almost every element of use. They have less payload, can operate at high power only briefly without draining the batteries at light speed, they weigh more and can go a lot less far (range) and for a far less time (endurance).

What these companies are apparently trying to show is that they’ll be ready to make electric versions of aircraft once battery tech has advanced to the point where it is more useful.

The problem is, we already knew that. So, the development of an electric-powered helicopter that turns it from a four seater that can go hundreds of miles at high speed to a single seater that can fly for a half hour at reduced power isn’t showing anyone anything. It’s just their 15 minutes of fame. Which is only slightly less time than one of these craft can fly.

Skeptical About Electrical

The post Are Electric Flights Anything More than Stunts? appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

A competing aviation news outlet asked that very question the other day, and there was, predictably, a something-storm of response. Who knows, maybe that was the entire point of the piece. And good on them. The question, even if you don’t like it, deserves to be asked, though the answer might not be what the asker anticipates.

Our view? At this point, we’re grown-ups, we recognize the risk and we felt that the greatest airshow in the world was worth the risk. I sure felt that way.

I was one of the only people in the crowd wearing a mask the first few days, not because I was trying to avoid other people’s germs as much as I was protecting them from me. My spouse came down with COVID after a trip to a conference that, like Oshkosh, was not to be missed, but I didn’t find out until I was on the road to the show. I was upset that my streak of Oshkosh AirVenture attendance might be snapped at 30, but I tested negative twice before the first day of the show, so I attended and wore a mask the first couple of days until I tested negative a third time, which I did on Monday evening.

It’s doubtful that more than a handful of others in the hundreds of thousands at OSH were as careful, and at this point, that’s the way it is. I know that, and if I choose to interact, I’m taking the risk that the person I’m chatting with has the virus and might even know they do but have mild symptoms.

At this point, anyone who has been vaccinated and boosted—I’m there and then some—has a really low risk of serious illness if they catch it. Some of us have a greater risk, but it’s still small, according to the CDC. And if you’re looking at numbers of infections from one of those trackers still monitoring the progress of the impact of the virus, you’ll notice the numbers are low. That is not because there are few cases but because few people are reporting them.

At this point, let’s face it: Life is a super-spreader event. If you go out and play with thousands of other people without socially distancing or wearing masks, people are going to get it. There was nothing special about Oshkosh in this regard, except perhaps that it was way, way more fun than your average super-spreader event.

The post Was Oshkosh a Super-Spreader Event? Of Course, It Was. appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.