August GAARMS Report fred-gibbs
by Fred Gibbs 

By the time you read this, we will have turned the corner into the 8th month of the year, and I am most pleased to report that we have only had 2 fatal accidents in Arizona during the first 7 months of the year. This is the best fatal accident record I’ve seen in 10 years. You all are doing an outstanding job!

 

And then someone asked me, “Why? How come?  What are we/you doing this year to earn such a good safety record?”  Well, if I really knew the answer to that question, I could bottle it, sell it, and retire a rich person.  I’d like to think our membership, and the rest of the pilot community that attends our safety programs, are reaping the benefits and knowledge of the safety culture we are preaching every day. And perhaps Lady Luck is smiling on us for a change….

 

Charts and Automation

Over the past several months I’ve been having some interesting discussions about pilot training and the requirements as they exist today vs. the explosion of automation into the system.  For example, with the FAA leaning towards a GPS-derived, ADS-B positioning airspace system, why do we still test VOR navigation, ground reference checkpoints for flight planning, top-of-climb and start-of-descent calculations, or even basic flight planning?  GPS navigation is point to point, with distances, bearings time, ground speed, etc. already done for you.  Flight planning programs are readily available, so you just plug in some pieces of information and the computer does it all for you.  With GPS, all I have to do is follow the magenta line to my destination – some GPS’s even tell me when I’ve arrived at my destination!  Diversion to an alternate? Heck, just press “Nearest!”  It automatically computes bearing, time and distance; plus, with the push of a button (or buttons), I can ascertain all the information on that airport, and it gives me options.  If automation is the wave of the future, why do we insist on training/teaching the old ways??

 

How about charts?  Seems like paper charts are harder to come by.  This is a result of the FAA’s decision to reduce paper charts. They want everyone to go electronic, to force you into automation so you spend the money and they can reduce their costs.  FBO’s that do not sell enough charts (volume) are dropped because they are seen as being not efficient enough.  FBO’s need to find another source of paper charts for their transient customer base.  Me?  I simply subscribe to mypilotstore.com for the charts I want, and they just show up a week or so before the effective date(s) of the new charts.  And YES, I still carry, and use, paper charts even though I have an IFR certified GPS as well as my iPad with WingXpro7 and all the appropriate subscriptions.  Some might ask why I do both.  Simple answer - because I am old school, NOT a computer geek, and simply don’t trust my life to a piece of technology.  Maps help me see down the road, far better than just a 6-inch section on my iPad.  Maps help me plan a trip overall, not in tiny segments on a small screen.  Sure, I can get the entire route on my iPad – can’t read a damn thing though because the print is so small!  And my charts serve many other purposes. I can annotate them with notes on information I would like to know that is not on the chart; they can serve as sun shades on the side windows when the blinding sun is killing you; and they cover my instrument panel/glare shield when parked down on the ramp at Sky Harbor in 115 degree temperatures!!!  So, no apology from me for being old school – I believe in charts. And I think that every student needs to know how to read and use charts, and the use of paper charts for a private pilot check ride should be required.

Weather and IMC

Even the FAA wants to introduce more automation into the flight service world.  They are talking about eliminating weather briefers, instead pushing the pilot to use automated systems and do self-briefings.  Those systems will convert the information into plain language, so why do pilots need to know how to read weather sequences (the data in that secret code format)?   The FAA has already introduced automation to file flight plans and to open and close VFR flight plans, and they are looking at the possibility of even closing IFR flight plans at non-towered airports.

 

If the FAA puts the responsibility for understanding weather entirely on the pilot – by eliminating access to a trained, professional weather briefer who could further explain the weather conditions – will this have an impact on flight safety?  Could weather related accidents start to creep up if pilots, with less understanding of weather conditions that a professional weather briefer could have explained, decide to take-off… despite the fact that the trained weather briefer may have convinced that pilot on the fence NOT to go?  Who is going to train the new student pilot?  Will it be the uneducated new flight instructor who grew up not really understanding weather conditions that he/she learned from his new uneducated flight instructor?  Do we eventually end up with the blind leading the blind?

 

Arizona is a great place to learn to fly.  We’re lucky to have lots and lots of beautiful VFR days, benign weather conditions, and good schools, both 61 and 141.  With Arizona’s diverse topography, there are many interesting things to learn about, like haboobs, monsoon season, temperatures above those on the aircraft performance charts, complex airspace and - for the adventuresome - the high country, with its mountains and density altitude issues. 

 

But, in my humble opinion, our state is both a great place and a bad place to earn an instrument ticket.  YUP, I can fly every day, into complex airspace, with almost any type of approach, arrival or departure procedure.  I can read about low approaches, fly to minimums under the hood, but NEVER experience 1 minute of real IFR in IMC  weather.  Believe me, it is very different in other parts of the country.  I learned to fly in the notorious northeast corridor, between Boston and Washington, DC/ Dulles, where every third day was IFR, and it hung around for a couple of days.  Low ceilings, poor visibilities, fog, rain, snow – all that stuff you’ve read about but never experienced here in Arizona.  It was routine flying – NOT the exception as it is here.  You became good at reading and understanding weather and weather patterns, good at approaches down to minimums, and good at go-arounds and diversions, alternates, determining what was really a good alternate, including sometimes deciding there was NO good alternate – in which case you actually cancelled your flight, and you learned that fuel minimums WERE IMPORTANT, not just something you calculate.  Student pilots learned that 1500 foot ceilings and 5 miles were VFR flyable, even on cross countries.  We could take off and land at 5 different airports within a 50-mile trip.  All types of airspace existed, such as the prohibited area around Camp David, restricted airspace over the Aberdeen Proving Grounds just north of Baltimore, and, of course, everyone knows about the FRZ airspace over Washington, DC, the class B airspace over Dulles/Washington, DC, and Baltimore airports, Class C down over Richmond, the TRSA up over the Harrisburg, PA area, and the list goes on…  It was not, and is not, the wide open spaces of Arizona.

 

Flying Over the Grand Canyon

On an entirely different subject, recently I flew a tour over the Grand Canyon.  Here in Flagstaff I get a fair amount of calls to do that for folks who have flown their airplanes out to Arizona and are interested in flying over the canyon but don’t understand the airspace.  Almost all of them have very nice airplanes, most equipped with ADS-B “in” with TIS.  It is amazing to see how much traffic there is over the canyon, mostly the tour operators right there at the Grand Canyon airport, and almost all of them well below the corridor-defined altitudes.  They have pre-defined FAA-approved routes. Obviously, it is very important to monitor the appropriate frequencies while flying in the airspace and in the corridors. One of the critical things about flying the corridors is that without GPS it is almost impossible to define the corridors.  You need to program in the latitude/longitude coordinates of the entry and exit points of each corridor to navigate (and stay in) the corridors. And you need to be very aware of the airspace-required altitudes when transiting from one corridor to another – you CANNOT just go directly from one to the other!   But once you figure out how to do it, the views are spectacular!  PS – store the entry/exit points in the “user” waypoints section of your GPS database for future use.  The Grand Canyon chart is old, or I guess properly stated: has not been updated in quite a while (due, I think, to politics).  So the entry/exit waypoints are not part of any GPS database as a visual checkpoint (VP) like Squaw Peak or Firebird Lake (part of the PHX transition routing).

 

So, in closing, I leave you with the following points to ponder –

  1. 1.Can Vx and Vy ever be the same speed?
  2. 2.If the POH states that 10 degrees of flaps are to be used for a short field takeoff, can I use 20 degrees (or even full flaps) because I feel like it?
  3. 3.How short is a short field landing?
  4. 4.How short is a short field landing for a Mooney?
  5. 5.If the runway is snow covered (you know, that white stuff), should I do a short field takeoff or a soft field takeoff?
  6. 6.Am I required to turn on my landing lights when landing at night?
  7. 7.When talking about CHT’s, how hot is too hot?
  8. 8.When talking about oil temperatures, how hot is too hot?
  9. 9.In flight, at cruise speed, is it safe to pull the propeller control all the way out?
  10. 10.

Should you desire a safety program at your local airport, simply contact APA via our website. You can connect with me through the Safety Program Director, or you can contact me, Fred Gibbs, at 410-206-3753 or email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The Arizona Pilots Association provides the safety programs at no charge. We can also help you organize a program of your choice, and we can recommend programs that your pilot community might really like.

 wingman-poster

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