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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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EAA AirVenture 2018 Has An Unusual Start
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No two repetitions of the the annual gathering of the aviation faithful at EAA AirVenture at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, are the same. But in attending the event for the 40th time, I can honestly say that all of them share clearly defined family traits. Until this year.What makes it feel really different I can’t exactly put my finger on, so forgive what is sure to be a wandering stream of consciousness puzzle piecing that is searching for a more focused picture. It was weird that no matter where I walked about on setup Sunday, aka AirVenture Day Zero, I didn’t see a lot of people.
Let’s start with the one above. That’s Row 331 in Homebuilt Camping at about 1300 on Sunday, Day Zero. Mother Nature is always a controlling factor, but I’ve never seen this area, and Homebuilt Showplane Parking, which parallels the flight line, so empty. Normally, there are lot more impatient pilots who see the bad weather forming and cut out of work to beat it to Oshkosh. But not this year.
Normally, even when the weather is bad, which it has been for the five preceding days, there’s always a throng of “civilians” (those not involved in setup, making the area defined by the exhibit hangars a dodge-em course for forklift drivers and others trying to get ready for the show.
Having spent two decades as an exhibitor, the civilians have always made setup complicated, but like many other aspects of Oshkosh, it was something you just had to deal with. This year EAA did something about it. The exhibit areas were a restricted area, unless you had one of these distinctive orange lanyards. (And the volunteers, who politely turned away the civilians who tried to enter the restricted area, did let me take a peak with my media pass.) Nice job, EAA! The exhibitors I talked to loved the new restrictions, and I didn’t hear any of the civilians griping that they could not wander among the grumbling beasts with the four little wheels and long steel tusks.I’m guessing that the exhibitors were less happy with the relative absence of civilian traffic on Monday, Day 1. Walking through the four exhibit hangars this afternoon, they weren’t exactly empty, but they were not filled with a lot of people. Maybe that’s because it seems EAA has again widened the rows that separate the facing lines of booths. And the occupants of those booths continues their transition from aviation-related companies to more consumer products like jewelry and vibrating massage recliners.
Perhaps more important, Mother Nature threw off her blanket of clouds on Sunday afternoon and almost within minutes airplanes recreated what was close to an aerial version of the settlers’ invasion of the Oklahoma’s Indian territory in 1889. Making my way north through Homebuilt Showplane Parking, I waded through a sea of airplanes to reach Row 331 in Homebuilt Camping. As you can see, a few people and their airplanes showed up in the past 24 hours. Hats off the the air traffic controllers who funneled them to the marshaling crew that got them safely to their campsites. After the disconcerting start, the comforting family traits of airplanes and friendly people have reasserted themselves. But what will tomorrow bring? — Scott Spangler, Editor -
Cody Parkovich, Enstrom Helicopter Production Test Pilot
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Just six months on the job as Enstrom Helicopter’s production test pilot, Cody Parkovich traces his position to the night he was bartending in Marinette, Wisconsin, just across the river from Menominee, Michigan. “That night I found out, when I was 23,” that Enstrom was a hometown company. “And I grew up here.”Just discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps and home from San Diego where he’d served as an F-18 mechanic, “I didn’t know that flying a helicopter was an occupation outside the military,” he said. His original plan was to “go to school and go back into the service, but I got the itch and started flight training in Duluth two weeks later.”
Then he moved around the country to build time and experience in a number of different helicopters, the Robinson R44, Bell 206, the A-Star 350 series, ” and I instructed in a new Guimbal Cabri G2,” he said.
After teaching, Parkovich flew commercial ops in Utah, flying aerial tours in Michigan’s mitten, some ag spraying, and some utility pipeline inspection around Louisville and railroad track surveying with LIDAR, so the Canadian National could measure the grade before they increased the cruising speed of their freight trains.
“This is the life of a professional helicopter pilot,” said Dennis Martin, Enstrom’s director of sales and marketing. “Airplane pilots fly airliners, Helicopter pilots do 25 different things.” In short, they have to be as versatile as the rotary-wing aircraft they fly.
When Parkovich started work at Enstrom two years ago, “I thought I was a halfway decent mechanic from working on fixed wings, and then I found out that helicopters were a whole other ball of worms.” Like most of Enstrom’s workforce of 150, Parkovich works in different areas that cross-complement his primary responsibilities.
“Because I still work on the floor as a mechanic, I know these ships like a doctor knows human anatomy. I’ve been hands-on with the rigging process.” As we talked, he was prepping a turbine-powered 480B, with a Garmin G1000 in the panel, for its final inspection, just across the aisle from the final assembly area. In front of it was the hangar door.Summarizing the purpose of a production test flight, Parkovich said it takes, on average, 5 hours to demonstrate that the helicopter meets all of its documented performance numbers and that all of its equipment, regardless of how it is equipped for the customer, works as its documentation proclaims.
More specifically, this involves flights at different centers of gravity, making sure it has the same cyclic throws and maneuverability. Accelerating to VNE — the never exceed speed—he checks for adverse vibration and retreating blade stalls.
He also flies to track and balance blades and helicopters, a process that reduces the whole-ship vibrations to the absolute minimum. All of the helicopter’s rotating pieces can produce vibration, but they start with the main rotor, which can vibrate on both the vertical and lateral planes.
New blades are balanced chord-wise, the added weights written on the tips, and span-wise. Those balances are refined by flying the blade set in a known ship, said Parkovich. Putting them on a new helicopter would introduce too many variables, such as tail rotor vibrations.This also saves start cycles on the Rolls-Royce turbines, said Martin. “They only get 3,000 cycles before they need hot-section maintenance, and when you’re making blade adjustments, you have to shut down, adjust, and restart. And if it takes 25 or 35 cycles, you don’t want to give that to a customer.”
Production flight test doesn’t involve a lot of test equipment, said Parkovich. His most important instrument? The seat of his pants. In another summary, his job is to “make sure very helicopter feels the same, flies the same way.” — Scott Spangler, Editor
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Enstrom Helicopter Blade Maker
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In the simplest terms, a helicopter’s rotor blade is a wing that generates lift by flying in a circle. But the similarity between a wing and rotor pretty much ends at the airfoil because the forces acting on each of them is vastly different. Imagine flying an aircraft that is constantly trying to shed its wings through the centrifugal force of normal operations. From building airplanes small and full-scale, I know how the skeleton of the wing deals with the forces of flight when fixed in one position. But when it comes to wings that fly in a circle, my understanding is destitute. Enstrom Helicopter Corporation, which for 60 years has been building piston and turbine helicopters in Menominee, Michigan, just up the coast from Green Bay, said they could fix that.
On the wall outside the Leland Burdue Training Center on the second floor of the Enstrom factory at the Menominee-Marinette Twin Country Airport (MNN) are two rotor blades. It’s clear that like the first propellers, the first rotor blades were carved out of wood by artisans of the drawknife and spoke shave. This long, wooden aerodynamic blade probably lifted one of Rudolf “Rudy” Enstrom’s prototype helicopters to a hover sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. “We’re really not sure,” said Dennis Martin, director of sales and marketing. “A family member found this in a barn [after Rudy passed on September 25, 2007], but we’re pretty sure it flew” on one of his early prototypes, which employed a two-bladed teetering rotor system.
Tool marks are visible beneath the worn black paint on the yellow-tipped wood blade. Beneath it is a seamless black-and-white striped metal blade. It is one of a trio that creates the fully articulated rotor system on the piston-powered F-28F and 280FX and the Rolls-Royce turbine-powered 480B. The rotor systems are essentially the same for all models, and together the main rotor systems have logged 4 million flight hours without a catastrophic failure.
Building Blades
The wood and metal blades have two things in common. Both are 16-feet long give or take, and artisans make both. Working what looks like an orbital sander loaded with a fine abrasive that seems to be polishing the metal is the leader of Enstrom’s blade shop, Ken Clark. Asked how many blades he’s built, Ken furrowed his brow for a second. “I’ve been here 32 years, more than half my life,” he said. Founded in 1959, Enstrom has been in business for 60 years, “So about half the number ever made.” That would be approximately 3,200 blades, with a birthrate of 12 per week.“I have a couple of guys who work with me, and we make the tail rotor blades, too,” Clark said. When called for, another couple of workers join the crew. With 150 total employees, most of Enstrom’s technicians are cross-trained in several departments, and the blade shop is one of the more demanding studios. “This is an art,” said Clark. “This is nothing anyone is going to teach you in school. To take a guy fresh, it’ll take about seven years to teach him everything.” His apprentices have been working with Clark for about two years, and like many of the skills Enstrom’s artisans employ, their education is on the job.
Given the forces involved, I expected a more complex design. But Enstrom blades are built around an extruded D spar leading edge. Two sheets of 2024 are bonded to the recesses on the top and bottom of the spar, and at the training edge. “There are no ribs, no honeycomb, they are hollow all the way through,” said Martin, but the blade’s interior is epoxy primed to prevent corrosion. There are some doublers at the blade’s root, where the grip that connects it to the hub is bonded in, added Clark. He’s never counted the steps involved in building a blade. “It doesn’t matter; it’s got to be done either way.” The most challenging part of the process is, however, setting the tip cap rivet. “You’re almost done with the blade, and one wrong hammer—and it’s scrap.”
All of Enstrom’s metal blades have been built in the same fixture, which holds the pieces in place, forms the fully symmetrical airfoil, which includes a 7-degree twist down near the tip, and electrically heats the bonding seams and the entire fixture, with a box that encases it once all the pieces are in place. It takes an hour to warm up, it spends an hour at the perfect adhesive bonding temperature, and it takes an hour to cool. The twist, Martin explained, comes into play during an autorotation, a helicopter’s engine-out glide. Air passing through the center of the rotor disk turns the blades, and the outer portion provides the lift.The relatively simple design blade wasn’t its only surprise. With so many rotating parts working in critical concert, their lifespan counts the hours of operation. Asked how long a rotor blade lives, Martin smiled: “97,500 hours. Effectively, they are on condition. There’s no calendar life, no hour life. They will last as long as they are maintained. The oldest calendar set that I’m aware of has been flying since 1973. The highest time I’m aware of is 22,000 hours. If you take care of the blades, keep them clean and corrosion free, they’ll last forever.”
Another question Martin often hears, he said, was about composite blades. He keeps his answer in a green, four-drawer file cabinet in the corner of the blade shop, in a drawer labeled “Broken Blades.” Halfway expecting some Harry Potter magic to produce a 16-foot blade, Martin instead pulled a deformed tail rotor blade out of the drawer. “This guy had a bad day,” he said. “But he still had something back there doing work for him. He put the helicopter back on the ground safely.” While the aluminum was bent and cracked, the bonding adhesive was unbroken. A composite blade would shatter and shred itself to an ineffective stump.Blade Matching
“Everyone thinks you just throw the pieces in the fixture, and it’s magic,” said Clark. “But there’s a lot you have to do to make sure it comes out right.” Quality control begins before the pieces get near the fixture. Enstrom helicopters have mechanical controls, so they are sensitive to blade balance. “If the blades have different weights, they will fly differently, so we weigh every spar and rout the inside of the D to equalize the weight. After we build them, we match them in sets of three,” said Martin.The birth certificate of every blade is the record of several hundred measurements and a profile of the entire blade. This data is fed to a spreadsheet that creates a chart for every set of blades. Call it a family born of a common fixture. “We keep this information forever,” said Martin, “If a customer needs a new blade or two, we look at that chart [for the family of blades delivered with his helicopter] and send replacements with matching numbers. Usually, they track very well. But if they don’t the customer sends them back and we send another one.”
Rotor blades are not the only components Enstrom builds from scratch. It’s easier to itemize the components it does not build: engines, avionics, and instruments. “We don’t have a foundry to cast parts like the main transmission housing and tail rotor gear boxes,” said Martin, “but we have four CNC vertical machines and three turning centers, so we do the final machining. We also have a CNC router for cutting metal, and CNC press brakes for bending it.” Because it is a critical component, Enstrom has two firms that precision grind the hollow main rotor masts to 5/10,000th of an inch. One is in Traverse City, Michigan, and the other (which made parts for the space shuttle) is in Green Way, Wisconsin. Without doing the math, Martin estimated that 99 percent of the Enstrom is made in America, and most of the handful of foreign vendors is Canadian.One of them extrudes the rotor blade D spar. “Spar thickness is critical to the blades’ performance, and we can tell when the company’s die starts wearing out because the blades fly differently on the helicopter,” said Martin. “So call them up and say that it’s time to refresh the die.” —Scott Spangler, Editor
