Corral Gate, Northern Arizona

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An idyllic scene in high desert range land.

Mike and I own 40 acres of “ranch” land about 30 miles south of the Grand Canyon at Howard Mesa. For the past three years in a row, I’ve spent a good portion of my summer camping out there with my dog, bird, and horses.

I’m an explorer. I like to look at a map, find a potential destination, then hop in my Jeep (or helicopter) and see what it looks like. On a summer day in 2006, Jack the Dog and I took the Jeep to follow some of the dirt roads that run through National Forest land just south of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. My objective was to take a photo of the Grand Canyon Railroad’s steam engine as it made its way to the depot in Grand Canyon Village.

I wrote about that day in my blog, so I won’t spend a lot of time repeating myself here. I’ll cut to the chase.

Corral GateThis gate and corral was on one of the roads I followed near the railroad tracks before I got into the National Forest. Nearby were the remains of a few buildings. It had once been part of a train station where cattle had been loaded onto cattle cars and shipped south for sale and slaughter. Now it’s just a picturesque spot on a remote dirt road, captured with my camera during a Jeep outing with my dog.

How to Wash a Helicopter

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It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

I washed my helicopter today. It isn’t the first time I’ve done the job and it won’t be the last. I don’t like doing it — it rates right up there with washing Alex the Bird’s cage. But it has to be done periodically to keep it looking nice for the folks who spend big money to fly in it.

Take a moment to consider the task. The helicopter is about 32 feet long from the front of its cockpit to the end of its tail. (Or 38-1/2 feet, if you include the main rotor blades, lined up front and back.) It’s twelve feet tall, from the bottom of its skids to the main rotor hub. The surfaces are painted aluminum and Fiberglas and Plexiglas. Few of the surfaces are flat.

Over the past two years, I’ve developed a technique for washing the helicopter. I start by pulling it all the way out of my hangar so it’s parked in front, on its ground handling equipment. I get a bucket of warm (or hot) water from the airport terminal (I don’t have hot water in my hangar) and add some car wash liquid detergent. I like Rain Dance, but I had some other “spot-free” stuff that I used today. I make it all sudsy with the hose. Then, after making sure all the doors and vents are closed, I get down to business.

The first task is spraying down the tail section, from the end of the main part of the body to the tail rotor. I use a spray nozzle on a hose. Power washers are not allowed and some people think you shouldn’t use a hose spray nozzle either. My response: how are you supposed to rinse it off?

Once it’s wet, I start at the very end and work my way forward with a car wash sponge and the warm soapy water. It’s the kind of sponge that’s spongy on one side and a bit rougher on the other. I use the rough end on the leading edges of the horizontal and vertical stabilizers and the tail rotor blades to remove the dead bugs that have accumulated there. They usually come right off with a little elbow grease. I need to climb a ladder to get the top of the vertical stablizer. I use an 8-foot ladder that I keep in my hangar for preflighting the main rotor hub. While I’m doing this, I’m checking all the screws and rivets and the tail rotor’s pitch change links, looking for weird stuff that I might miss on a preflight.

Then I rinse where I washed and rewet the forward part of the tail cone. I do a lot of rinsing. Unfortunately, unless I wash the helicopter an hour or two before sunset, I have to wash it in the sun. The Arizona sun likes to dry things very quickly. That’s not a good thing, because the water has a lot of minerals in it and it tends to spot when it dries, no matter what kind of car wash detergent you’re using. So I keep it wet until I can get it out of the sun.

I continue washing and rinsing and checking screws and rivets, moving forward on either side of the tailcone until it’s all done. I make sure I wash off the strobe light and antennas back there, too. Then I move the helicopter back into the hangar a bit so the part I just washed and rinsed numerous times is now in the shade and the rest of the helicopter is still outside.

Now I’m up to what I call the R44 butt. It’s a panel that covers the rear end of the fan scroll at the back of the engine compartment. It gets coated with a white, kind of greasy film. Car wash soap cannot remove it. So I get out what I call R44 Butt Cleaner. It comes in an orange spray bottle. I spray it all over that panel, as well as at the bottom of the tailcone near it, which also gets that nasty film. I spray so everything’s coated. Then I get out a shop rag and wipe the film right off. This stuff works great and I’m thinking of repackaging it and selling it to R44 owners as a specialized R44 product at three times what I paid for it.

Although the panel is all shiny when I’m done, that’s not good enough. I want to wash off every trace of whatever that junk is. So I spray it down and continue with my wash, rinse, wash, rinse routine.

Next are the skid pants. That’s not what they’re really called, but it’s what I call them. The skids are the long black things that make contact with the ground when the helicopter isn’t flying. There are four legs that attach the rest of the helicopter to the two skids. Each leg has an aluminum fairing. That’s what I call skid pants. Their front, rounded sides get full of dried bugs, which I usually scrub off with warm soapy water and the rough side of the sponge. Today I used bug and tar remover with a brush.

I do the back end of the body next, along with the back windows. They’re “bubble” windows that kind of bulge out so passengers can stick their heads out a bit and look in all directions. I use the soft side of the sponge; they don’t usually get very dirty.

Washing a HelicopterNext is the mast, which has a cowling over it. The front, rounded side of the cowling is completely covered with baked on, squished on bugs. It’s bad, mostly because it’s so darn high off the ground that I need a ladder to clean it so I only clean it when I wash the whole helicopter. I used bug and tar remover with a brush on it today. Not a good solution, but it did work. I have to move the ladder and climb up either side of the helicopter to wash it all properly. Then it’s rinse, rinse, rinse and move the whole thing back a bit more into the hangar.

The front bubble comes next. It’s usually pretty clean — after all, it is the window I look through when I fly, so I wash it before just about every flight. The area under it — including the painted area around the landing lights — is another story. The bugs are really stuck there. On a whim, I decided to try the R44 Butt Cleaner. Would you believe it worked? No scrubbing required, either. Of course, I still had to wash that junk off, so I did double duty. But it is the cleanest it’s been in a while.

After a good rinse, I move the whole helicopter back into the hangar and begin the drying cycle. I use towels. I have a bunch of towels that are pink because I consistently wash them with red shop rags. They’re my helicopter and car wash towels. I use them to dry the whole helicopter, from the bubble back. The tailcone is usually just about dry by the time I get back there, but I dry it with a wet towel anyway, just to prevent the spots from setting in.

No, I don’t wash the main rotor blades. They’re drooping about 11-1/2 feet off the ground and are very difficult to reach to wash properly. I’d have to climb to the second to the last step on the ladder, which I’d have to reposition four times for each blade. It’s a ton of work and I get very wet, with soapy water running down my arms as I reach up. And I simply can’t deal with the ladder thing.

It’s kind of funny, because I had a perfect technique for washing the blades on my old R22. Those blades weren’t nearly as high up. I’d drive to the airport in Mike’s pickup truck and back it up, perpendicular to the helicopter, aligned with the mast. Then I’d turn the blades so one of them was lined up right over the bed of the pickup. I’d climb up in the bed of the pickup with my bucket and sponge and wash the blade, top and bottom, scraping all the dead bugs off the leading edge. Then I’d climb down, spray the blade to rinse it, and rotate the blades a half turn so the other blade was over the bed of the truck and repeat the process. Another wash and rinse cycle and I was done. One time, I even waxed them.

Unfortunately, the R44 blades are so high off the ground that I’d need a ladder inside the bed of the pickup to use the same method. And that’s not something I’m ready to do. So they go unwashed until their 100 hour or annual inspection. The guys who do the maintenance wash and detail the whole helicopter for me, including the blades.

The was job takes a good hour. It goes faster with help — one person can rinse while the other washes and it gets done very quickly. Then it’s usually still wet when we dry it off.

If I have time and it isn’t too hot, I use some spray wax to finish it off. It’s sold as RV cleaner/wax and it does a nice job, as long as you use it in the shade. It dries too quickly in the sun. I don’t usually do the whole helicopter. It takes too long. Instead, I start with the painted surfaces in the front and work my way back. I usually run out of steam before I get to the tailcone.

I didn’t wax it today. I ran out of time and had to get it out on the ramp for a flight. It sure looked good out in the sun, all clean and shiny.

Although I don’t like to wash the helicopter — primarily because it’s so much work and I always wind up getting dirty and wet — I’m glad I do it. It gives me an opportunity to look over the entire ship closely. I once found a loose screw on the mast cowling and have never forgotten it. Now I check every screw, every rivet. There hasn’t been a loose screw since, but if there is, I’ll find it.

Reader Engagement Site Improvements

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I add a few “engagement” features to this site.

Blogging is more than just using blogging software to create and edit posts. After all, if someone shouts in an empty room, does her voice make a sound? An important part of blogging is to attract and retain readers. That’s where content, SEO, and site design come into play.

I’m a strong believer that once you get a visitor to your site, the site’s overall design can help keep them there, at least for longer than the average 30 seconds. (Read Jakob Nielsen’s books for the sad truth about site/page visit lengths.) You can do this by making sure the site is legible and by including navigation features that make it easy to find interesting content.

I read an excellent article on Connected Internet today: “Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts“. The author lists several plugins — some of which I already use or have tried in the past — that’ll help keep site visitors on your site, reading more content. I added two of them today.

Readers Posts

Readers Posts is a plugin that offers three features:

  • Within The Loop, indicate how many readers have read a post before you.
  • List the most recently viewed posts.
  • List the most viewed (i.e., popular) posts.

I installed the second of these three options in the sidebar of aneclecticmind.com. It began working immediately, drawing information from the WordPress database to list the ten most recently viewed posts. Refresh the page after a few minutes and the list changes. This site has, on average about 5 visitors online at any time and they don’t always come to the site’s Home page. That, of course, is the drawback of any plugin that lists recently read posts — it only lists the posts that have been read on their own page — not on the Home page or archive page. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means the person reading a post is reading it because he found it via a search engine or used a link on the site to read it. He’s reading it because he wants to read it (or thinks he does; as we all know, search engines don’t always display desired results). That’s more meaningful than Home page reads, which could include lots of articles that the visitor just isn’t interested in at all.

The benefit of this: site visitors are shown a list of articles that other visitors have found interesting. I love this feature because it shows me what people are coming to the site to read and it helps me write more content of interest to visitors.

If you try this plugin, don’t be alarmed when you click the link above and arrive at a German-language site. Scroll down on that page and you’ll find an English-language translation. Although it isn’t perfect grammar (what is?), it’s certainly good enough to understand the installation and configuration process.

Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a very cool plugin that does a bunch of things, when installed correctly:

  1. It checks to see if the visitor was referred to the page from one of several popular search engines. It the visitor has not, it stops working.
  2. It displays a message with the name of the search engine and the search word(s) or phrase used to find the page.
  3. It displays a list of links to posts on your site that also match the search criteria.

What I like about this plugin is that it only displays content if a visitor has arrived at the site by clicking a link in a popular search engine’s results list. I put it at the top of the sidebar, where visitors are most likely to see it when they arrive at the page.

Installing the plugin isn’t difficult, although you really do need to follow the instructions on the page you download it from. If you copy and paste the code right from that page, you’ll need to modify all the single and double quote characters so they’re straight quotes when pasted into your template file. (I didn’t notice this at first and got PHP errors. It was an easy enough fix.) The result is what you see if you happened to arrive at a page on my site via popular search engine results link. You can try searching for Hermosa Ranch Insanity (the test link I used) and clicking the link to content on my site to see what I mean.

The benefit of this, of course, is that if the article the visitor came to read isn’t enough for him, he’s given other possible articles to try. He may or may not follow the links, but at least they’re there for him. You could keep him on the site longer.

Conclusion

Read the Connected Internet article. It tells you more about these two plugins, as well as others I currently use or have tried in the past. You might find overlap among features; pick the plugin you like best. Give them a try and see how they affect your visitor stats.

The Hermosa Ranch Insanity

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Greed and stupidity collide.

In early October, the Wickenburg Town Council approved a 34-unit subdivision on 35 acres of land on “Vulture Mine Road near the Country Club.” That’s how the land’s location was described in the newspaper and likely in the P & Z and Town Council Meetings. It was not given its other descriptor: approximately 3400 feet from the departure end of Wickenburg Municipal Airport’s runway 5 (see photo).

Hermosa RanchI heard about this newly approved subdivision and did some research. I learned that it had been proposed in mid August and had miraculously gone through the approval process in about six weeks. A miracle of Town efficiency — the same town that took four months to choose between two bids for an Airport Fuel Manager last year. The same town that routinely keeps old business “old business” at many commission meetings, including the Airport Advisory Commission’s monthly meetings.

Perhaps that’s why it didn’t take so long to approve. It was never presented to the Airport Commission, despite the fact that it lies well within the airport’s area of influence.

As most regular readers know, one of my jobs is as a pilot. I operate an FAA-certificated Part 135 charter operation at Wickenburg Airport. That means a few things. It means that I’m a commercial pilot who has undergone extensive flight training and testing to meet certain standards. It means that I have gone the extra step to get special certification from the FAA to perform operations above and beyond those allowed by basic, “Part 91” commercial operators. It means I meet with the FAA regularly for flight checks and am subjected to unannounced inspections of my aircraft, hangar facility, and documents. I also operated the Airport Fuel Manager concession at the airport for a year and a half not long ago — a fact that a few people seem anxious to forget.

In other words, I know a little bit about aviation, airport operations, and FAA regulations.

And I know that putting homes within 100 feet of an airport’s runway centerline is not only stupid, but potentially dangerous for home and property owners.

Sure, someone will buy these homes. There are deaf people who won’t be bothered by the sound of flight school airplanes from Deer Valley and Goodyear doing touch-and-gos past or over their homes throughout the day every day. I’m not sure how they’ll like the rattling of their china when a jet departs. And there are lots of people who make home purchase decisions on the very day they see a piece of property — perhaps a windy or overcast day or a summer day when the airport isn’t very busy and the Realtor says something like, “There’s an airport to the west, but you can see how busy it is.” (A local Realtor once told me that he spent all day at his west-side subdivision and only saw two planes operating. His subdivision’s homes are right under the airport’s traffic pattern where at least 75% of the pilots fly. I can only imagine what he tells potential buyers.) There might even be a few people who think they like planes and might find living under the approach and departure path to an airport kind of interesting. I assure you, the novelty will wear off quickly. It sure wore off quickly when a train lover like me moved into a home next to a railroad track. It wasn’t easy to find another sucker to buy the house, either.

But what happens when Wickenburg gets commuter airline service? This isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Such service is already available in Prescott, Kingman, Lake Havasu, and Bullhead City. As Wickenburg’s precious roof count soars, it’s only a matter of time before such service is demanded by its citizens. Wickenburg won’t have 737s landing on its newly extended 6,000 foot runway, but it’s likely to have large turboprop planes or small commuter jets. The runway already accommodates 10 to 20 jet operations per week in the peak season — why do you think the town wanted the runway extended in the first place? What if there were an additional 14 operations per week with daily flights by Mesa Air or some other regional carrier? Do you know how much noise these kinds of planes make during takeoff?

And don’t hand me that tired old line about Forepaugh. Forepaugh is a dirt strip 15 miles west that isn’t even marked by name on a chart. Wickenburg has no jurisdiction over it and it straddles State and BLM land. Even if the Town of Wickenburg did manage to cough up the money to buy or lease the land (don’t forget airport insurance), it would take years and millions of dollars to get it up to the standards needed to allow commercial jet operations. And don’t forget — the Town would probably have to use eminent domain to get possession of the ranch that already exists on the south end of that runway, right on Route 60. How long do you think that will take? Forepaugh as a regional airport is at least 20 years away. Wickenburg will have likely annexed all the land up to Aguila by then.

But noise is only one problem with locating homes at the end of a runway. The other, more important problem is safety.

Think for a moment about how a plane takes off. Even if you’re not a pilot, you should be able to visualize a takeoff. The plane starts at one end of the runway, where the pilot opens the throttle wide for power. The engine roars as the props (or jet engine) produce thrust. The plane rolls down the runway, gathering speed. When the plane reaches a certain velocity, the pilot pulls back on the yoke (or stick) and the plane’s nose tilts up. The plane lifts off the ground. It then begins its climb into the air.

The steepness of an airplane’s climb (and the amount of runway it needs to reach takeoff speed) depends on a few things:

  • How powerful is the airplane’s engine? A powerful plane can climb out at a steeper angle than one with a less powerful engine.
  • How heavy is the airplane? A lighter plane — one with just a pilot and a light load of fuel — can climb out at a steeper angle than one full of people and fuel.
  • How hot is it outside? Hot temperatures reduce aircraft performance, making it more difficult to climb out on takeoff.

All kinds of planes come to Wickenburg Airport and every takeoff is different. An ultralight with one person on board can climb out at an amazing angle, using only a little bit of runway. But a fully loaded single engine air tanker (SEAT), like those that operate at Wickenburg airport during the hot summer fire season, uses every inch of runway and climbs out at a very shallow angle. Other planes have takeoff profiles somewhere in between.

The FAA recommends a 20:1 ratio for a runway’s approach/departure corridor. That means that for every 20 feet away from the runway end, a plane is expected to climb at least 1 foot. With 3400 feet from the end of Runway 5 to the property line of Hermosa Ranch, that means planes could be flying over Hermosa Ranch as low as 170 feet off the ground. Would you like an airplane flying that low over your house on takeoff?

It’s this shallow angle that should concern the developers of Hermosa Ranch. Imagine a freshly refueled SEAT, heavy with a load of fire retardant. The pilot rolls down the runway, gathers speed, and lifts off less than 3500 feet from a Hermosa Ranch house to fight a fire at Lake Pleasant. He’s only 200 feet off the ground as he nears Hermosa Ranch. Suddenly and without warning, his engine quits. Where do you think that plane is going to hit the ground? And with a load of Jet fuel on board, how much damage do you think the post-crash fire will cause? Are you still imagining? Then imagine that plane crashing near a birthday party around the pool in someone’s backyard.

Right now, there’s a big empty patch of land that stretches from the departure end of Runway 5 to Vulture Mine Road (see photo). If Hermosa Ranch didn’t exist, that plane would crash and burn in that empty land. The world would lose a pilot and a plane, not one or more homes or possibly dozens of people.

Think engine failures on takeoff don’t happen? Go to the NTSB Accident database and search for “engine failure takeoff” and get the truth. Just because you didn’t hear about it on the evening news doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The NTSB’s Web site lists scores of accidents all over the country that occurred on takeoff or landing. Engine failure is just one scenario.

So it appears to me that either the Hermosa Ranch developers don’t care about the safety of their subdivision’s home buyers (not likely) or they didn’t fully think out the safety implications of building so close to the end of a runway.

What’s troubling to me, however, is that the Town of Wickenburg failed to fully investigate the potential conflicts of such a development with airport operations. Although the proposal was presented to the P & Z Commission, the warnings presented there by then-Council Candidate George Wilkinson went completely unheeded. There was no effort on the part of the P & Z staff or Town Planner, Miles Johnson, to investigate the FAA guidelines regarding building near airports. These guidelines are available on the FAA’s Web site 24/7. If Dr. Johnson or his assistant didn’t have the time to look them up, a few phone calls would have gotten them an answer. The phone numbers are on the Web, too.

I got the documents and made the phones calls to the FAA to confirm my belief that the FAA would not be happy with the Hermosa Ranch subdivision proposal. It took me about 20 minutes. The FAA compliance person I spoke to was amazed that such a subdivision would even be considered at that location. If Dr. Johnson — who is also Airport Manager — had done his job, he would have been better informed about the potential problems with this proposed subdivision.

It has been claimed that the “airport consultants” approved the development. Who are they and what kind of authority do they have? And is their approval in writing? I seriously doubt it, since making such an approval could get them into hot water if liability issues arose. (I can only imagine the lawsuits generated by a plane crash/birthday party accident like the one we imagined earlier.)

Why wasn’t the Airport Advisory Commission consulted about the Hermosa Ranch proposal? The commission, which has 5 (of 7) members who are active pilots in Wickenburg, would certainly have pointed out the conflicts between the airport and proposed development. Yet Dave Lane, who sits on the Town Council and Airport Commission (as its Chairman for the past four or more years) failed to bring it up to the Commission for discussion. The Airport Commission members I spoke to didn’t even know about the development until after it had been passed by the Town Council. Councilman Lane’s failure to bring up this project for discussion and his rubber-stamping of the approval were irresponsible and a complete neglect of his duties as Councilman and Chairman of the Airport Advisory Commission.

So what are we left with? A 34-home subdivision in the path of arriving and departing airplane traffic at Wickenburg Municipal Airport, with homes less than 100 feet from the extended runway centerline — that’s the path planes attempt to follow when taking off or landing. A subdivision approved in what’s probably record time by P & Z and the Town Council after ignoring safety and noise issues presented by at least two Wickenburg residents. A proposal never presented to the Airport Advisory Commission for discussion, never researched with the FAA for compliance with “airport-compatible zoning” requirements. A development that appears to have the only goal of adding to Wickenburg’s roof count, placing high-priced homes in an undesirable and potentially unsafe location.

Why did I start a petition to stop this insanity? Do you really have to ask?

When the elected officials fail to make decisions that are in the best interest of all citizens (rather than a handful of supporters), it’s the duty of the public to step forward and, using the democratic process guaranteed by the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, provide input and guidance. My petition was a wake-up call, the only way I knew of to get the attention of the Town’s elected officials and staff and the public. It was a way to get the FAA involved to offer guidelines to the Town for making airport-vicinity zoning decisions. It was a way to propose a safety zone around the airport, one that can prevent the horror of a plane crash on take-off from taking more lives than just the ones on the ill-fated plane.

I’m not the only person who thinks that Hermosa Ranch and any building at the end of the runway is a bad idea. Of the 79 people I approached for signatures, 76 of them signed. Two of the signers are Airport Advisory Commission members. If they’d been consulted before this got to the Town Council — as they should have — the proposal is likely to have been denied on the very grounds I cited in my petition and in this article.

Safety should come first. Lifestyle should come next. Profit should come near the end of the list. Shouldn’t it?

Now, I understand that members of Wickenburg’s Good Old Boy Network are whining that this petition will cost the Town of Wickenburg $10,000 to run an election and put it to vote. I want to remind those people — and the rest of Wickenburg’s citizens — that if the Town Council and P & Zoning Commission had done their jobs and made a responsible decision, this petition and the costly election would not be necessary at all.

What do you think about this? Don’t tell me — I’ve already done my part. Call the Mayor, Council Members, and the Town Planner. Town Hall can be reached at 928/684-5451. Call the members of the P & Z Commission — you can get their names from the Town Clerk. Ask them why they approved such a plan. Ask them if they care about Wickenburg and the safety and well-being of all of its residents.

And let them know that you care — at least as much as I do.

Flying M Air Videos on YouTube

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I take the videos mainstream.

Well, with YouTube pulling copyrighted video content from Comedy Central off its site every day, I thought I’d help fill the gap by adding Flying M Air‘s video podcasts to the YouTube servers. [Insert smiley here for the benefit of people who believe that I think my little videos can replace Comedy Central content.]

You can find all of the videos on the Flying M Air Channel.