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Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot
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In the Citation III Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot
Life would be sweet, I thought, now that I’d successfully passed my Cessna Citation III (CE-650) type rating check ride (this was a few years back). It meant I’d be flying my first swept-wing jet. Surprisingly, my first day at the new job at Chicago Executive Airport (PWK) would also be the first time I’d been up close to a real Citation III since all the training and even my check ride happened in FlightSafety’s full-motion simulator.
From my research, though, I knew the 650’s cabin was roomy enough for eight, and its rocket-like performance was nothing short of spectacular with a VMO (maximum operating Mach) of Mach 0.85 and 39,000 feet on a standard day. In its day, M.83 was pretty fast. That meant we could make the West Coast out of PWK with four people in the back. I learned quickly, too, that the 650’s awesome performance meant I needed to stay much farther ahead of the airplane than I’d had to in the much slower Citation II (CE-550) I’d been flying in a 12-pilot charter department.
A privately held corporation owned this Citation III and I was the junior of three pilots. The chief pilot, my new boss, brought experience from several other flight departments, while the other pilot, I’ll call him Tom well, I was never really too sure where Tom had come from because the guy kept to himself as much as possible and wasn’t the chatty type. That made three-hour flights long when the entire conversation at FL390 ended with an occasional shrug of the shoulders.
But who cared what one guy acted like, I thought. I was there to learn how to fit into a flight department that needed another pilot on their team. Just like in charter flying, my job was to keep the people in the back happy. I came to know these passengers much better than we ever did in the charter world. These folks sometimes invited the flight crew to their home on Nantucket when we overnighted there.
The Interview
Looking back on this job now though, I guess the 10-minute interview the chief pilot and I engaged in before he offered me the job should have been a tip-off that maybe something was a little odd. But with a four-year-old daughter growing up at home, the chance to dump my charter department pager that always seemed to ring at 2 a.m. beckoned hypnotically.
Cessna Citation CE-650 Corporate line training began right away with me flying in all kinds of weather, where I regularly rotated flying left seat with the chief pilot and Tom. Having flown left seat on the Citation II, I wasn’t brand new to jets, just speedy ones.
After a few months, however, I began to notice a few operational oddities that started making me a little uncomfortable. Some sketchy flight planning and questions I asked were sometimes answered with annoyed expressions. If I appeared not to agree, someone might ask if I’d finished all the Jepp revisions (In those days there were no electronic subscriptions. Updates were handled by hand). I found the best solution for getting along seemed to be to just shut up and fly the airplane. Ignoring those distractions did help me pay closer attention to the little things that made my flying the jet smoother.
Then again … On one flight back from Cincinnati (CVG), I was flying left-seat with the chief pilot in the right. I wanted to add fuel before we left since the Chicago weather was questionable, but the boss overruled me explaining, “We’re fat on fuel.”I didn’t say anything. As we approached PWK, the ATIS reported the weather had worsened, considerably. The Swiss cheese holes began to align when Chicago Approach dumped us early. We ended up burning more fuel than planned. I flew the ILS right down to minimums, but my scan uncomfortably included the fuel gauges every few seconds. After a safe landing, we taxied in with 700 pounds of Jet-A, not much for an airplane that burns 1,800 pounds an hour down low. What if we’d missed at Chicago Executive Airport and needed to run for Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport I wondered? We’d have arrived on fumes. The boss looked at me after we shut down. “Don’t tell me that whole thing bothered you. It all turned out fine, didn’t it?” (more…)
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Remembering Gordon Baxter: Bax Seat was a Flying Magazine Reader Favorite
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(Reposted by request)
Each time I stand near my desk, my eyes naturally focus on the framed cover of the August 1983 Flying magazine. Below it is page 100, the “I Learned About Flying from That” (ILAFFT), where my first column appeared. On it, the author of Bax Seat, scrawled in brown ink, “To my friend Rob Mark. His story, my push. Gordon Baxter, August 5, 1983.”
Many months before, Gordon Baxter had given me the Flying editor’s phone number. When I rang with my brief pitch, all I heard was “yes.” I suddenly had an assignment for my first column. That 1983 issue was the first, but not the last, time my name and stories appeared in the aviation industry’s iconic magazine. That same issue also ran a pilot report about the then-new Cessna Citation III, an aircraft I later added to my list of type ratings. Looking back, there were so many aspects of my aviation career that came to life around Bax and that August 1983 issue, not the least of which was that we became friends.
Gordon Baxter, Bax as he preferred folks call him, helped shape my career as an aviation journalist like no one before him and only a few people since. The author of 13 books, Bax’s own magazine writing career at Flying spanned 25 years. His monthly column, Bax Seat, focused on vivid descriptions of his adventures. It was known simply as “Bax Seat.” Did I mention he was also a long-time radio personality in Beaumont, Texas, another interest we shared.
A Bit of Bax’s Background
I first met Bax in the mid-1970s. He brought his show, his act, or whatever the heck he called his evening of storytelling, to the Stick and Rudder Flying Club at Waukegan Airport. I was a tower controller not far away at Palwaukee Airport. Having been an avid Flying reader since high school, I switched shifts with another controller so I wouldn’t miss the event. Bax captured the audience for over an hour with stories from his flying career and his columns that often alternately “em rollin’ in the aisles” with gut-wrenching laughter and an emotional Texas-guy style that also brought tears to many an eye. Another way to think of Bax’s storytelling night was like an evening of improv but all about flying and airplanes.
Born in Port Arthur, Texas, he learned to fly after World War II following his stint as a B-17 turret gunner. Bax was no professional pilot—just a guy with a private certificate, an instrument rating, and eventually his beloved Mooney. On the back cover of one of his books, appropriately titled Bax Seat, Flying’s Stephan Wilkinson said “Bax tries to pass himself off as a pilot, but don’t believe him. He never could fly worth a damn. But Gordon feels airplanes, loves and honors them in ways that the rest of us are ashamed to admit. And he’s certainly one of the few romantics who can express what he feels so perfectly.” I couldn’t have written that myself, but I, too, felt it.
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Making the Brazilian ATR-72 Spin
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Note: This story was corrected on August 10th at 10:23 am, thanks to the help of a sharp-eyed reader.
Making an ATR-72 Spin
I wasn’t in Brazil on Friday afternoon, but I saw the post on Twitter or X (or whatever you call it) showing a Brazil ATR-72, Voepass Airlines flight 2283, rotating in a spin as it plunged to the ground near Sao Paulo from its 17,000-foot cruising altitude. All 61 people aboard perished in the ensuing crash and fire. A timeline from FlightRadar 24 indicates that the fall only lasted about a minute, so the aircraft was clearly out of control. Industry research shows Loss of Control in Flight (LOCI) continues to be responsible for more fatalities worldwide than any other kind of aircraft accident.
The big question is why the crew lost control of this airplane. The ADS-B data from FlightRadar 24 does offer a couple of possible clues. The ATR’s speed declined during the descent rather than increased, which means the aircraft’s wing was probably stalled. The ATR’s airfoil had exceeded its critical angle of attack and lacked sufficient lift to remain airborne. Add to this the rotation observed, and the only answer is a spin.
Can a Large Airplane Spin?
The simple answer is yes. If you induce rotation to almost any aircraft while the wing is stalled, it can spin, even an aircraft as large as the ATR-72. By the way, the largest of the ATR models, the 600, weighs nearly 51,000 pounds.
Of course, investigators will ask why the ATR’s wing was stalled. It could have been related to a failed engine or ice on the wings or tailplane. (more…)
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How the FAA Let Remote Tower Technology Slip Right Through Its Fingers
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In June 2023, the FAA published a 167-page document outlining the agency’s desire to replace dozens of 40-year-old airport control towers with new environmentally friendly brick-and-mortar structures. These towers are, of course, where hundreds of air traffic controllers ply their trade … ensuring the aircraft within their local airspace are safely separated from each other during landing and takeoff.
The FAA’s report was part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted on November 15, 2021. That bill set aside a whopping $25 billion spread across five years to cover the cost of replacing those aging towers. The agency said it considered a number of alternatives about how to spend that $5 billion each year, rather than on brick and mortar buildings.
One alternative addressed only briefly before rejecting it was a relatively new concept called a Remote Tower, originally created by Saab in Europe in partnership with the Virginia-based VSATSLab Inc. The European technology giant has been successfully running Remote Towers in place of the traditional buildings in Europe for almost 10 years. One of Saab’s more well-known Remote Tower sites is at London City Airport. London also plans to create a virtual backup ATC facility at London Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe.
A remote tower and its associated technology replace the traditional 60-70 foot glass domed control tower building you might see at your local airport, but it doesn’t eliminate any human air traffic controllers or their roles in keeping aircraft separated.
Max Trescott photo Inside a Remote Tower Operation
In place of a normal control tower building, the airport erects a small steel tower or even an 8-inch diameter pole perhaps 20-40 feet high, similar to a radio or cell phone tower. Dozens of high-definition cameras are attached to the new Remote Tower’s structure, each aimed at an arrival or departure path, as well as various ramps around the airport.
Using HD cameras, controllers can zoom in on any given point within the camera’s range, say an aircraft on final approach. The only way to accomplish that in a control tower today is if the controller picks up a pair of binoculars. The HD cameras also offer infrared capabilities to allow for better-than-human visuals, especially during bad weather or at night.
The next step in constructing a remote tower is locating the control room where the video feeds will terminate. Instead of the round glass room perched atop a standard control tower, imagine a semi-circular room located at ground level. Inside that room, the walls are lined with 14, 55-inch high-definition video screens hung next to each other with the wider portion of the screen running top to bottom.
After connecting the video feeds, the compression technology manages to consolidate 360 degrees of viewing area into a 220-degree spread across the video screens. That creates essentially the same view of the entire airport that a controller would normally see out the windows of the tower cab without the need to move their head more than 220 degrees. Another Remote Tower benefit is that each aircraft within visual range can be tagged with that aircraft’s tail number, just as it might if the controller were looking at a radar screen. (more…)
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Commercial Pilots and the CFI Crossroads
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Talking last week to a 30-something professional pilot about his journey to a Gulfstream cockpit, he brought my interrogation to a dead silent stop with his answer to one question. After he summarized the chronology of his pilot certificates and ratings, I asked about the one he didn’t mention, the CFI—certificated flight instructor.Like a lot of younger pilots striving for paying careers, he said, given the pilot job market, the CFI is a crossroads between spending a lot more money and time to earn the most demanding and challenging pilot certification in all of aviation, and getting a job that pays money. The answer is clear, he said, especially if a new commercial pilot also has a multiengine rating.
In three decades of interrogating professional pilots, the only ones who typically didn’t have a CFI earned their wings in the military (but many of them earned their CFI after they transitioned to their airline life). I’m sure there are some professional pilots who clawed their way up the civilian ladder who skipped the CFI rung, but I don’t remember ever talking to any of them.
Talking to one who might be an exception does not define a new rule in today’s training and professional pilot markets without some quantification. Absent the resources to survey today’s population of pro pilots, I turned to the FAA’s U.S. Civil Airman Statistics. Among the many tables in each year’s spreadsheet is one that gives a 10-year look at initial certificates issued.
Here is the table of the initial issuance of commercial and flight instructor certificates earned in 2013 to 2022. (I added the yellow to remind me of the pandemic disruption.) At first glance, the numbers don’t seem to support that the CFI crossroads is trending no CFI. And without a doubt, the pilot job market is much better now than it was a decade ago.
What’s interesting is that the number of commercial certificates peaked in 2020, the year the CDC shutdown the nation on March 15, a shutdown that continued through the end of April 2020. The initial CFI issuances peaked last year. Equally interesting is the shared trend of increasing totals of issued certificates, which only took a short step back during the shutdown.
The low numbers in the early teens are surely the nagging consequences of the Great Recession of 2007-2008. But an equally important trend is the difference between those issued a commercial and a CFI. It was roughly 50/50 in 2017, the year my subject graduated from college. Naturally, this isn’t the best measure of a pilot’s crossroads’ decision, but it’s the best one readily available.
The number of commercial pilots who didn’t earn a CFI trended higher until the pandemic, so maybe there’s something to my pro pilot’s crossroads observation. Certainly, this topic might make an excellent survey and statistics project for someone now enrolled in an aviation degree program. What decision did you make at the CFI crossroads. — Scott Spangler, Editor
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The Happiest Hour Among Total Flight Time
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Aviators track their flying lives one hour at a time. No matter where they are in their aeronautical journey, just starting or finally resting on retired wings. Every hour is important. Some were more exciting. Others were more meaningful because they taught an important lesson. Some lessons made the DO-NOT-REPEAT list. And then there is the hour that deserves some thought and reflection—the happiest hour.Finding this hour was not an effortless endeavor for me. Checkrides didn’t make the initial list because I find little happiness in the deep end of the pool of performance anxiety. Successful outcomes offered the reward of relief, not happiness. Flying the trench from Arlington, Washington, to Anchorage, Alaska, fell from the list because no single hour stood apart from the sum of my ultimate aviation experience. The same goes for the air combat and formation flying courses at Sky Warriors in their blue camo T-34s.
Paging through my logbook, that was not the case for my 15-hour tailwheel transition course at Stick and Rudder Aviation of Watsonville, California, the “Academy of Flight and Taildragmanship.” On the eve of Kitty Hawk Day, December 16, 1996, I flew my happiest hour in an 85-horse clip-wing Piper L-4 with instructor John Coplantz, who grabbed two rolls of toilet paper before we walked to the bright red airplane, its white lightning bolt segmented by the Piper’s yawning bifold doors.
Toilet paper was not part of the lesson’s preflight briefing. Our mission was three-point and wheel landing practice combined with 180-degree power-off approaches in a moderate crosswind blowing 10 to 15 knots across the Watsonville Muni Airport (WVI). But the course synopsis foretold of comprehensive training — and fun. For example, after “Pitch Attitude Flying,” it says, in parenthesis, “Look, Ma. No airspeed indicator!”Using an airplane to subdivide a streamer of toilet paper was something I’d only read about, and the tacit promise of another new experience made me eager to tackle the lesson objectives. With them successfully flown, John told me to depart the pattern and climb over Monterey Bay. At some higher altitude I don’t now remember, John dropped the first roll from the L-4’s front seat.
Watching it unroll, John challenged me to cut a 5-foot length from the top end of the streamer with the left wingtip, then to cut another segment with the right wing midway between the tip and where the strut supported the wing. With the Cub’s clipped wings, that’s not a lot of wing to work with. John continued to issue his challenges over the battery-powered intercom (Stick & Rudder’s 85-horse training fleet of two Aeronca Champs and the L-4 don’t have electrical systems).
I was having so much fun swooping, turning, and shortening the slowly-falling streamer, I didn’t think about the mechanics of flying. As I focused on my target, the Cub told me what it needed by the sound of the engine, the wind passing by the open door, and the feel of the stick and rudder and seat of my pants. And that, I’m sure, was the point of the exercise, but as the setting sun glittered off the bay, all I wanted was altitude and the freefall of the second roll.So, what about you? What has been your happiest hour? Don’t be shy! Share it with us in the comments. Scott Spangler–Editor
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Airline Fees = Ticket Tax Avoidance
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During the State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden said he wanted to crack down on airline “junk fees” that airlines added to their ticket prices. Given the motivation for the ever expanding menu of these fees, I’m not holding my breath for their demise. Simply put, these fees are exempt and do not contribute to the price of a ticket that’s subject to the 7.5% tax that airlines pay to support the national aviation infrastructure. General aviation pays its way with taxes on avgas and Jet-A.This reality is rarely mentioned in media coverage of the junk fee vendetta. It is easier—and attracts a larger audience for the advertising media (are clicks and page views the media’s junk fees?) than digging into the history of the subject. Or maybe it doesn’t matter because avoiding taxes that support an industry-supporting culture is so commonplace that it is considered the American way. Given the frequency of airline close calls and railway disasters, it sure seems to be the case lately. Or maybe it is just coincidence.
In a thumbnail history, airline junk fees were born with airline deregulation in the 1980s, which introduced low-fare lines to the marketplace. To compete, the legacy lines subtracted their costs for baggage (and everything else, over time) and provided for the service that used to be covered by the ticket price. And when the government let them use this scheme to reduce their ticket tax bill, the new era soon became firmly entrenched.
Last year the Department of Transportation published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would “require U.S. air carriers, foreign air carriers, and ticket agents to clearly disclose passenger-specific or itinerary-specific baggage fees, change fees, and cancellation fees to consumers whenever fare and schedule information is provided to consumers for flights to, within, and from the United States.”
Really, it doesn’t matter if this proposal becomes a final rule. Either way, passengers will still have to pay the fees, the fees are still exempt (as far as I can discern), and the airlines are still getting away with their ticket tax avoidance to support an aviation infrastructure designed with them as first in line. If we really want to be fair about it to all Americans, add a line to the NPRM that makes the total cost of the ticket and all of its fees subject to the infrastructure-supporting ticket tax. — Scott Spangler, Editor