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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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An Air Zoo View of Space
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In introducing the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Experience, its president, Troy Thrash said it was purposely designed “to be a different environment for an air and space museum.” There is no better example of this than the exhibit focused on the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. Instead of telling the story with space hardware, the Air Zoo connects to the environment in which we all (at least all of us who were sentient beings then) shared in the experience, on TV in our living rooms.Turning the corner to the exhibit, with its shag carpeting, cathode cabinet television on which Neil Armstrong made that first step for a man in an endless loop, and the fiberglass TV tray where many of us ate many a night, was a time traveling gut punch that stopped me in my tracks. It revived my mom and dad and shaved the decades of life from memory and put me rapt and cross-legged on the floor with my sister. Short of looking at Michael Collins’ lunar station at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, this is the most important Apollo exhibit I’ve ever seen because it allows people to relate to a moment in history personally and physically.
It’s a theme that continues through this section of the Air Zoo. Gort, the robot enforcer from one of my favorite science fiction films, 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Robby the Robot, who first appeared in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and made subsequent appearances in other films and TV shows, including Lost in Space, flank the portal to Alien Worlds and Androids. The Air Zoo rented the traveling exhibit in 2015, said Thrash, and set it up to expand the space exhibit and tell the story of planetary space exploration beyond the shuttle and space station. The exhibit’s owner retired it in 2019, and Kalamazoo is its permanent home.Building on the theme of robotics and exploration of space, visitors meet other pop icons like C3PO, R2D2, and BB8, “and no discussion of exoskeletons would be complete without Iron Man,” said Thrash. Standing in testament to the possibility of other life forms is the eponymous Alien, which helps tell the story of the microbiome. “It’s a different way for kids to connect with science.”
But this section of the Air Zoo has not forsaken the hardware geek. There are wheels from several different Mars rovers, and capsules from Projects Mercury and Gemini. First, there is a Gemini crew trainer, a fixed spacecraft procedures simulator. The orange and white El KaBong is a boilerplate Gemini capsule that NASA used in tests of the Para-Sail Program, a Rogallo wing that replaced the traditional parachutes used to slow the final descent. “It is a NASA artifact, and it was in pretty bad shape” Thrash said. “NASA said if you want to restore it, you can display it here.”The Air Zoo’s space has its own moon rock, from Apollo 15. But turning to the living room exhibit, this is “my favorite space,” Thrash said, and they christened it on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. “Everything here was donated by someone locally—this was in my house when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. It’s really cool to see grandparents come and sit on the couch and tell their grandkids this is where I was when it happened, watching it on TV.”
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Air Zoo: Unique Airplanes
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What makes the aerospace menagerie on display at Kalamazoo’s Air Zoo special is its unique airplanes, as in the only one in the world, the sole survivor of a specific make and model. With its black skin fading into the main display floor’s studio lighting, you have to look closely to see the second cockpit bump on the SR-71B trainer (or read the sign). The Curtiss XP-55 Ascender, on the other hand, is spotlighted in a back corner, standing guard next to the entrance to the World War II exhibit hall. And in the restoration building, which faces the Kellogg/Kalamazoo International Flight Line, visitors can watch, and learn from, the volunteers restoring the only F-117 Nighthawk on display at a civilian museum.
All three aircraft are on long-term loan from either the National Museum of the United States Air Force or the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. Lockheed built two SR-71B trainers. One of them was destroyed in a landing accident and the survivor retired to the Air Zoo after its last flight in 1999 with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base. The Air Zoo welcomed it to its exhibit area on April 23, 2003. It built steps and a platform so the curious can peer into the cockpit windows, and it opened the canopies on one of its open-cockpit weekends in September.
The other unique airplanes required a bit more work, said Air Zoo President Troy Thrash, and it was the institution’s restoration reputation that brought them to Kalamazoo. Curtiss built three XP-55 Ascenders during World War II. All three of the canard pushers crashed, Thrash explained. “Only this one was salvageable. It is a Smithsonian artifact. Knowing our restoration capabilities, the Smithsonian asked us if we wanted to take on this project. If we did, then we could have it here on long-term loan. It took us quite a few years to restore this airplane, but we are happy to say that we have the only XP-55 Ascender in the world.”Another unique aspect to the Air Zoo’s restoration effort realized the only civilian museum display of the F-117. “About four years ago we found out that the Air Force was going to release four F-117s per year (for about eight years) to museums,” said Thrash. “Everyone who wanted one put in an application, so we did. Three years ago, they invited us to Tonopah [Nevada], where these airplanes live so we could see first-hand the challenges. It is really cool to say we want an F-117, it is another when you think about what’s involved.
In deciding who among the requesting institutions would receive the aircraft, Thrash said, “The Air Force concerned that a museum would get an airplane and wouldn’t have the time or money needed to restore the [demilitarized airframes stripped of all their stealthy secret stuff]. Their big question was, How long, from the time the airplane arrives will it be on display? About 10 minutes, because we do all our restoration work on the exhibit floor in the Flight Discovery Center.”
Earning his jet experience in the Air Force as an F-104 Starfighter crew chief (including the F-104 in the Air Zoo collection), Dick Klass is the F-117 restoration project manager. “When the F-177 arrived, the wings and vertical tails were off, as were all of the leading edges, which were proprietary secrets that actually belonged to Lockheed, who leased them to the Air Force.”Receiving little more than the airframe, the restoration crew had to figure out how to fabricate 210 feet of leading and trailing edges. “And we had to figure out all the angles. There are more angles than you can shake a stick at,” said Klass. “Our problem was to connect the top and the bottom. Do you weld it? Do we make some sort of blocks that we could screw into it? One of the guys came up with the idea of using piano hinge. It adapts itself to any angle.”
When the team of volunteers gets the edges finished the way they want, they will fill the piano hinge’s nooks and crannies with a filler that has the consistency of warm butter. “It gets in between all the seams. We put it on with a spatula and push it in with a rubber gloved hand,” said Klass. “When it dries, we sand it smooth.” The team uses a heavier filler over the rivets that hold the hinge in place.
Unlike traditional jets, the F-117 doesn’t have tailpipes. Klass fou
nd a photo of the louvered trailing edge exhaust of the engines buried in the wing. Looking at the photo, Klass wondered what the white rectangles were, so he Googled F-117 exhaust. Leading the results was “Part 5: Nozzles and Exhausts” of an Aviation Week series, “A Closer Look a Stealth.” Once the team finds the right color, it will add the replica heat reflecting tiles.Before the Air Force released the F-117s to museums, it sandblasted the radar absorbing material that coats the airframe. “They did a very poor job of it,” said Klass, pointing to hollow spots in the skin between the underlying frames. “We debated replacing the panels, but they are .125 thousandths thick, and new aluminum to replace them would cost about $3,000 a panel.”
Bondo doesn’t work well over large areas because it will bow and crack, especially with temperature changes. Looking at photos of other F-117s on museum display to suss out the solutions employed by other museums, “they all have the same [hollow-spot] problem,” Klass said, so like all the others, the Air Zoo’s F-117, called Shaba, will have hollow spots.
Pointing to the airplane’s name painted on the open door of the weapon bay, Klass said each F-117s in the Air Force fleet received a unique name. “Shaba” is Arabic for “ghost.” The signatures of many of the airplane’s maintainers and pilots surround the moniker. The pilot’s call sign was a combination of “Bandit” and ang graduation number from F-117 transition training.“Here’s Bandit 512; he was the 512th pilot graduated to fly 117s. There were only 62 F-117s, but they flew for a long time so I’ve seen pilot numbers into the 700s,” said Klass. And with its arrival, it adds the modern era to the Air Zoo’s display of unique aircraft.
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Christy Kincaid, Keeper of the Air Zoo Artifacts
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Illuminating the spectrum of science, technology, and engineering opportunities embodies for people of all ages is one of the premeditated objectives of the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Experience in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Its many hands-on youth and adult education programs are the foundation of this effort. Built on it are volunteer and internship opportunities that reveal previously unknown professions such as the archivist who preserves and keeps track of a collection’s artifacts.“I’ve been at the Zoo almost 14 years,” said Christy Kincaid. “I started as a high schooler and never left.” Education was one of the majors she worked her way through in college, she said, but she found the structure imposed on classroom teachers stifling. “It really takes the creativity out of being a teacher. I wanted to teach in a more informal setting, and that’s how I ended up as a museum person.”
Teachers are students who share what they’ve learned with others. An archivist since 2003, Kincaid interned at the Air Zoo and moved through a variety of roles. “Last February, before the pandemic hit, I was promoted to manager. It’s been a fun and interesting time. The majority of an archivist’s skills are learned on the job. I’m always learning, reaching out to my colleagues and different museums about the best ways to take care of something. My job is always fun—never boring. I’ve always got a project going on.”
One of them is guiding a team of colleagues and volunteers who are building a new computer database that keeps track of the Zoo’s menagerie. “We have about 100,000 objects and archival materials in our collection,” she said. “Everything will get a picture and tag and its own number. Only about 40,000 items in the collection are in the new database, so we have a lot of work ahead of us. One of my volunteers doing a high-level index said it’s taken her a month to work her way through one file drawer [of Guadalcanal contents] because she keeps going down an interesting rabbit hole.”Beyond the aircraft on display, the collection “deals with everything from the weaponry pilots carry when they are flying and the everyday items a paratrooper has in his pack to the recognition cards Coca Cola created [during World War II] for citizens so they would feel more connected to the war and their loved ones in the service. We even have a happy birthday letter Hitler wrote to a member of his staff. The Guadalcanal collection is one of our pride and joys, and we rotate the items on display to help preserve them.”
Not quite as vast as the storeroom in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s still a good walk from the door to the back wall. Almost everything is organized by category, Kincaid said. Weaponry, machine guns to pistols. Everyday items services members carried—Bibles, playing cards, matches, cameras, glasses. Turning down another aisle between towering shelving units, “we have four aisles of pints and patches, and we’re reorganizing them; here are our NASA patches.” Not far away is the space collection. “We got it from the Jackson Space & Science Center in 2007, 2008. Most of our space collections is Skylab based, and it’s another collection we hope to ramp up and be able to tell a more present story.”
A couple of aisles down is the Zoo’s textile collections, a supersized closet organized by service—Marine, Navy, Coast Guard, Army, Air Corps, and Air Force—and conflict, World War I, World War II, Korea, and so on. Flags and banners are one of Kincaid’s favorite projects. “They were stored in tubes. After visiting other collections and learning more about how to preserve them, we took them out of the tubes, photographed them, researched them,” layered them in acid-free archival gauze, and wrapped them loosely around an acid-free cardboard tube. Pointing to the tag with a photo of the protected artifact, she said, “This is a Nazi banner that was draped outside a building.”A few aisles back, the shelves are open-faced hangars for intricate, detailed model aircraft standing alone or in the center of a diorama that depicts a past moment in time. Beyond that is the odds and ends aisle. In addition to “toys, commercial aviation items, the trench art collection, if anything comes off one of our airplanes, like the panel removed from the Corsair so guests could see the machine guns in the wings, those things come here so we can keep them nice and safe.”
Preserving artifacts and keeping them safe is a multifaceted challenge that is often expensive. Sometimes it’s a matter of deciding how to organize the artifacts, like all of the artwork, posters, and other graphics in the long lines of flat files recently donated by Western Michigan University. Pointing to a letter-sized acid-free archival document box on a shelf, Kincaid said it cost $15. “To have one made for oversized items can run more than $300. Two years ago, I attended a workshop to learn how to make boxes. Figuring out how to make a box for a big artifact has been a tremendous challenge, but making them exactly how I need them has saved us a ton of money.”Most of the artifacts on the shelves and on display were donated by individuals and families who gave the Air Zoo a piece of their personal history. “We have a lot of treasures here,” said Kincaid.
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