Tag Archives: aviation

Flight Time = Experience

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And that can safe your life.

After guesstimating for a while that I had about 2,000 hours of flight time, I finally got around to adding up all those columns of numbers in my log book. Although I make entries pretty regularly, the chore of adding them up is only done a few times a year. I’m prepping for a Part 135 check ride this week and figured it was about time. I discovered that I passed the 2,000 hour mark back in October — about ten years to the day after my first flight lesson.

Flight time is one of the few real gauges of experience that pilots have. While many passengers ask me how long I’ve been flying, very few ever ask the real question: how many hours have you flown? I know plenty of pilots who have been flying far longer than I have, but don’t have as many hours logged. Who is more experienced? I think hours is a better indication than years.

The more you fly, the more you really experience as a pilot. Let’s face it: shit happens. But it won’t happen to you if you’re not out there in a situation where it can happen. How can you learn how to deal with the kinds of weird things that happen to pilots if you’re not flying enough for them to happen?

You might wonder what kinds of things I’m talking about. Here are a few of them:

  • Weather is probably the most obvious — and most insidious, as anyone who has analyzed what happened to Colgan Flight 3407 near Buffalo the other day. Weather can be wind, rain, snow, hail, ice, turbulence, fog, clouds, and thunderstorms, among other conditions. The more weather a pilot has experienced, the more comfortable and knowledgeable he about flying in that weather. I’m not saying a pilot should take unnecessary risks. I’m just saying that no one can be a good, experienced pilot if he is a “fair weather” pilot who only flies in perfect conditions.
  • Aircraft capabilities can only be truly known through experience. Sure, an aircraft’s Pilot Operating Handbook (POH) will give you performance data and explain emergency procedures. And yes, you should know the contents of that book to fly the aircraft safely and legally. (This falls under FAR Part 91.103, which begins: “Each pilot in command shall, before beginning a flight, become familiar with all available information concerning that flight.”) But it’s only though experience that you can learn how an aircraft will handle in any given situation. CG a little skewed? What will that do to the controls? Landing heavy on a 95°F day at an airport at 5,000 elevation? With no wind? A crosswind? How will the aircraft perform? The more aircraft you fly and the more time you spend in each one will help you understand the different capabilities of what’s out there. It’ll also teach you “tricks” (for lack of a better word) that can help you cope in difficult situations.
  • Radio communication is another thing that smoothes out with real experience. New pilots who have 95% of their flight time in the pattern at their home airport know every controller and nearly every request they’re likely to get. But put those pilots in the busy airspace of another airport 100 miles away and they’re often completely at a loss for words. It’s even worse when that airspace is around an airport without a tower, where local general aviation (GA) pilots are getting in some Sunday flying. But the more a pilot flies and the more airspace he visits and interacts with, the better he will become as a radio jockey, communicating with Air Traffic Control (ATC) and other pilots. At some point in the experience curve, the pilot will stop reciting requests and responses by rote and begin actually communicating in a language he’s more comfortable with.

These are just a few things a pilot learns with experience. If you’re a pilot, you can probably think of others. Please share them in the comments for this post.

My point is this: don’t whine and complain when a job you want to do requires 1,000 hours of experience to get your foot in the door. The folks hiring you know the simple equation: flight time = experience. And you can never have too much experience when you’re a pilot.

View from My New Hangar

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Whoa.

January 2013 Update
This hangar is now for sale. I’ve decided to relocate my business to Washington State and no longer need the hangar. Asking price $45K. I may finance 50% depending on terms. If you’re interested, contact me.

Mike and I flew up to Page, AZ yesterday. We had a few business-related things to do. Among them was to take measurements and photographs of my new hangar.

The hangar is at Page Municipal Airport and overlooks a huge, underused parking area. Beyond that is Lake Powell with Tower Butte and Navajo Mountain. See for yourself:

View from my Hangar

Not too shabby, huh?

I start flying photo flights out of there in March. I can’t wait.

HeliNews

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A magazine for helicopter pilots and operators.

One of the things that has always bothered me about being a helicopter pilot — rather than an airplane pilot — is the dearth of good reading material about flying helicopters. The standard flying magazines here in the U.S. — Flying, Plane & Pilot, AOPA Pilot, Flight Training, etc. — rarely have an article written specifically about helicopters, for helicopter pilots, or by a helicopter pilot.

Sure, sometimes they throw us a bone, but it’s always with a catch. For example, in 2003 Flying magazine did a review of the Robinson R44 Raven II, but it had to share its pages with a review of a Porsche Cayenne. (You can read the article here.) It’s more common for them to put one of their airplane pilot/writers in a helicopter for a flight to write a “gee whiz, that’s cool” piece about helicopters, often fraught with technical errors. I remember one piece I read in a magazine where the author claimed that you must never let go of the collective, but you could let go of the cyclic. That author has obviously never flown a Robinson or Long Ranger — both of which I’ve flown extensively. I assume they’re representative of most helicopters: they have a pilot-friendly collective but a cyclic that’ll have the aircraft doing aerobatics if you let go of it.

What’s Out There

In the U.S., there are several helicopter-specific magazines. Rotor & Wing is the granddaddy, a monthly magazine with industry-specific content. Like most print publications, its page count has dwindled considerably in recent years. Content seems geared toward the heavy hitters of the industry, with articles about helicopter sales, new developments in helicopter technology and avionics, and reports from the North Seas and military operations. While I realize that it’s an important source of information for the industry’s heavy hitters, it can be pretty dry reading sometimes — especially for a small desert-based piston pilot like me.

Rotor, the magazine of the Helicopter Association International (HAI) is a quarterly publication. HAI is the helicopter industry’s big association. I was a member for about 2-1/2 years but soon realized that they really didn’t give a damn about operators with fewer than five helicopters. Everything they do is for the “big guys.” Their magazine isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if you’re interested in anything other than HAI’s internal operations and the big operators they service. And their Web site is ugly, difficult to navigate, has many non-functioning links and “features,” and contains little content of value to non-members. (One of these days, I’ll have to write more about my experiences with HAI.)

Vertical MagazineVertical magazine is a slick publication from Canada. Of all the aviation magazines that arrive on my mailbox regularly, it’s the one I prefer. It’s got more content geared toward helicopter operators and pilots. It regularly covers issues such as flight training and does profiles of specific helicopter operators and operations. The photography is outstanding. And while I feel that they still gear content toward the big operators, there’s enough in each issue to satisfy the reading needs of little owner/operators like me.

HeliNews

HeliNewsApparently, however, the best helicopter-specific magazine comes from down under. Australia-based HeliNews is a magazine any helicopter owner or pilot can really sink his or her teeth into. It combines photography that’s almost as good as what you’d find in Vertical with articles written by helicopter pilots for helicopter pilots.

I recently received two sample issues of the magazine. The May 2008 issue has articles covering the following topics:

  • Profile of a corporate CEO who does mustering (cattle herding) with an R44
  • A day in the life of a New Zealand contract pilot in Scotland
  • Australian Navy – U.S. Coast Guard pilot exchange program.
  • Australian Federal Police helicopter operations
  • Helicopters in the movies (just part one in this issue; I don’t have part two!)
  • Military helicopter air show team
  • Practicing autorotations to grass
  • How ADS-B works
  • Switching from Robinson R22 to turbine helicopters and back

All this in addition to the usual collection of columns, editorials, and news about the helicopter industry.

My question: Why can’t a North American publication give us more content like this? Rotor & Wing? Vertical? Are you listening?

Me? Writing for HeliNews?

You might be wondering why I have two copies of this magazine. After all, I don’t think it’s widely available — or perhaps available at all — in the United States.

Well, I’ve been asked to submit an article for the magazine and, if I don’t drop the ball by procrastinating and I submit something worthy of publication, I’ll be a HeliNews author. At least once.

There’s nothing more pleasing to me than to have some of my work published in a high quality magazine.

So if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work.

On Bird Strikes

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Not nearly as rare — or as dangerous — as you think.

Yesterday’s dramatic landing of an Airbus plane in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey has put the topic of bird strikes on everyone’s mind. As usual, the media is spinning stories about it, apparently to generate the fear that sells newspapers, gets listeners, and keeps viewers glued to the television set.

Pilots — the people who know aviation a lot better than the average news reporter — also know a bit about bird strikes.

Bird Strikes are Not That Rare

The truth of the matter is that bird strikes aren’t nearly as rare as many people think. I can think of five bird strike incidents that touched my life:

  • Years ago, on a Southwest Airlines flight taking off from Burbank, our plane flew through a flock of white birds. It was nighttime and I don’t know what the birds were — seagulls? — but I clearly saw them in the glow of the plane’s lights, flying past the wings as we climbed out. When we landed in Phoenix and I left the plane, I glanced through the open cockpit door and saw the blood on the outside of the windscreen. Bird strike.
  • On my first day of work as a pilot at the Grand Canyon, one of the other pilots had a bird strike during a tour. The bird had passed through the lower cockpit bubble and landed in a bloody heap on the pilot’s lap. He flew back with the bird there and a very distraught front seat passenger beside him. The cockpit bubble needed replacement, of course.
  • While waiting at the Grand Canyon for my charter passengers to complete an air tour with one of the helicopter operators there, the helicopter my passengers was on suffered a bird strike. The pilot calmly reported it as she flew in. When she landed, there was bird guts and blood at the top center of the helicopter’s bubble. She’d been lucky. The helicopter, an EC130, has a central intake for the turbine engine and the bird hadn’t been sucked in.
  • On my very first rides gig with my R44 helicopter, I was taking a group of three passengers for an 8-minute tour around a mountain near Aguila, AZ when I heard a loud clang. Instruments okay, controls felt fine, passengers weren’t reacting. I didn’t know what it was until I landed. That’s when one of my ground crew pointed out the dent in my landing gear’s fairing. My first (and hopefully, only) bird strike had been a non-event for me, but likely a lot more serious for the bird. (Of course, I wasn’t very happy to get a dent on an aircraft only 11 hours old.
  • When a friend of mine took me up in her Decathalon airplane for a little aerobatic demonstration, we hit a bird on takeoff. It went right into the engine at the base of the prop and we instantly smelled cooking bird. My friend climbed enough to circle back and land safefly at the airport. She shut down the engine and climbed out. I watched from the passenger seat as she pulled the remains of a relatively small bird out of the cooling fin area of the engine. After discarding the bird bits, she climbed back in, started up, and we took off again.

That’s five examples of bird strikes I had firsthand knowledge of. In three of those instances, I was on board an aircraft that struck one or more birds. So when people seem amazed that an airliner hit a bird or two, I’m not amazed at all.

According to Wikipedia’s Bird Strike entry:

The first reported bird strike was by Orville Wright in 1905, and according to their diaries Orville “…flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard’s cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.”

I’d venture to guess that it happens to at least one airliner every single day.

Bird Strikes Rarely Cause Crashes

The media would like you to think that bird strikes cause crashes. They can, of course — yesterday’s Airbus ditching proved that. They can even cause fiery crashes with deaths. The media wants you to be afraid — very afraid.

But as my above-listed examples also prove, bird strikes can be non-events, often without causing any damage at all to the aircraft.

So what’s an air traveler to do? Worry that his next flight might end with a swim in an icy river or a fireball death? Or stop worrying about it?

What do you think?

On a more personal note: I’m glad the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 didn’t attempt a landing at Teterboro. My sister lives in an apartment building on the approach end of one of the runways there. A crash there wouldn’t have had a happy ending.

Photos from Our Flight to San Diego

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The view from above.

In November, Mike and I took my helicopter to the San Diego area for business. The flights to and from San Diego were over some of the most interesting — and boring — desert terrain out there.

Our route to San Diego from Wickenburg (E25) took us southwest, skirting around the restricted area north of Yuma, where we landed for fuel. (Fuel there was $1.20/gallon cheaper than at my home base.) Then almost due west along I-8, over the Glamis Dunes and Imperial Valley, which lies below sea level. Finally, a climb over some mountains and a descent down to Gillespie Field (SEE).

On the return flight, we took a different route. We flew east along I-8, then northeast to the northern tip of the Salton Sea to Chiriaco Summit and then along I-10 to Blythe, where we refueled. (The fat guy is gone.) From there, we overflew Quartzsite before making a bee-line for Wickenburg.

You can see the approximate routes below; click the map for a larger view with readable labels.

Route of Flights

Mike’s got his private pilot certificate and 100 hours of flight time in helicopters, so he’s legal (per my insurance company) to fly passengers. So he did most of the flying. I had my door off for the Yuma to El Cajon part of the flight and took photos — mostly over the Glamis dunes. It was nice to be a passenger for a change — to be able to use my camera without left-handed contortions. I also had the POV.1 video going for part of the flight, although the sound crapped out part of the way.

Anyway, here are a few of the photos I took on the flight. You can find more of my aerial photos — as well as larger versions of these — in my photo gallery.

Glamis Sand DunesGlamis Sand Dunes

Formally known as the Algodones Dunes or the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, the Glamis Dunes is a huge series of sand dunes west of the Colorado River, northwest of Yuma, AZ in California. The dune field stretches 45 miles north to south and 6 miles east to West. This photo shows only a portion of the dunes, looking north from the I-8 area. The dunes are extremely popular for off-road vehicles; this photo was taken on a relatively quiet Friday morning.

Sand DunesSand Dunes

Here’s a closeup shot of the Algodones Dunes from the air. This shot was taken from about 500 feet above the ground, over I-8, just west of the Arizona-California border.

Desert FreewayDesert Freeway

The folks back east probably have no concept of the long distances of nothingness on a freeway that cuts through the desert. This shot of two tractor trailer trucks passing each other in the barren wasteland of the Imperial valley’s southern extremities might give them an idea.

Desert MountainsDesert Mountains

The mountains just seem to go on forever in this aerial shot of mountains in southwest Arizona, not far from Quartzsite. Lake afternoon light casts long shadows.

CAP CanalCAP Canal

The Central Arizona Project (CAP) snakes its way through the Arizona desert, bringing water from the Colorado River and its lakes to Phoenix and its suburbs. This shot was taken just north of Hope, AZ on our return flight to Wickenburg.

Forepaugh RanchForepaugh Ranch

This ranch is nestled at the base of two hills in Forepaugh, AZ, out of sight from the main road (Route 60) only a mile or so away. It reminds me of an earlier day of ranching, when remote ranches were self-sufficient homes on the range.