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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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The Aesthetics of Collision Avoidance
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When it came time for Dennis Hutchinson to paint the Davis DA-2 he’d restored, he picked red and white with gold and blue accents, “because I like them and think they go well together.”Aesthetics had little do with how he arranged those colors on the airframe. Collision avoidance was top of mind: “As small as the Davis is, I wanted it to be as visible as possible in flight, to pop out of the background, not blend in,” said Hutchinson, who’s based at the Indianapolis Regional Airport (MQJ) in Greenfield, Indiana.
Starting in gliders, Hutchinson has been a pilot for half a century. When Leeon Davis flew his prototype DA-2, with its 19-foot-3 wingspan and 17-foot-10 fuselage, in 1966, Hutchinson was two years away from soloing a glider, at age 14, after his 13th flight. He got his private at 15, before he was eligible for a driver’s license.
“Most sailplanes are painted white, to protect their composite structures,” he said. “What I’d observed from an early age was that sailplanes with even a small amount of darker, contrasting paint on the nose and wingtips were much easier to spot in flight that those with an all white finish.”That’s why the tips of the Davis’s constant-chord wing and V-tail are red, because they contrast with the white inboard sections. The upper fuselage is white because it stands out against the darker earth when viewed from above, just as the red on the lower fuselage does against the sky when seen from below.
Going beyond this aesthetic contribution to collision avoidance, Hutchinson installed an AeroLED package of position/navigation/strobe lights on the wingtips and tail cone. “They are interconnected and flash simultaneously, to great effect.”
The landing and taxi lights are mounted in each wing, and they are capable of wig-wag mode. “They are not interconnected with the strobes, so they flash at a different rate,” he said. “Since all the lights are LEDs, the power they draw is minimal, and I highly value the extra visibility.”Hutchinson said the combination of his collision avoidance paint scheme and lights is working, because when he arrives at a new airport, right after asking what kind of plane he’s flying (His initial answer? “It’s a freeze-dried Bonanza.”) pilots “tell me that the plane is lit up like a Christmas tree.” — Scott Spangler, Editor
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Bruce McCandless, the Astronaut in the Iconic Photo
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Bruce McCandless, the Astronaut In the Iconic Photo, by Micah Engber
Listen to the episode or read it below
When you think about the first space walk maybe you think about Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov who in March 1965 was the first man to ever leave the relative safety of a space capsule. Maybe it’s Ed White you think of, who in June 1965 opened the hatch of Gemini 4 and was the first American to walk in space.
The name Gene Cernan may come to mind. He flew Gemini 9A in June of 1966 and spent over two hours on an EVA. That EVA almost killed him due to our lack of understanding of the physical exertion it took to work in space, and the cooling system in his space suit not being able to keep up with it.
Then there’s Buzz Aldrin, sure, the second man on the moon, but actually the first man to successfully conduct a mission while on a space walk. In November 1966, on Gemini 12, the final Gemini mission, Buzz Aldrin conducted 3 EVAs that totaled more than five hours in space. Buzz Aldrin was the man that really taught us how to work in space.
EVAs seem rather common place today. Even though they’re always incredibly dangerous, always a challenge, and always very closely monitored both from on board the space craft and from the ground; the general public doesn’t think of EVA’s as anything special. In some ways that’s sad. It’s also sad that we also don’t think of the man that paved the way for the modern spacewalk, probably don’t know his name, and certainly don’t have any idea that he passed away on December 21 of 2017.
In February 1984, at the age of 39, Bruce McCandless was the first person to ever truly walk in space, and by truly, I mean untethered. You see, those four space walks I mentioned before, while all incredible feats of both courage and science, all had one thing in common, those men were tethered to their spacecraft, connected by an umbilical cord. Although in an emergency, none of them could be safely pulled back into their spacecraft by the tether, they couldn’t just go floating off in space. On the other hand, in February 1984, Bruce McCandless flew in space, no strings attached; he piloted himself in what we called the MMU, the Manned Maneuvering Unit. (more…)
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Science Fiction and Our Believable World
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It has been decades since I’ve read any science fiction. Roaming the dusty shelves of my memory’s recall, the last such cover I cracked was called, I think, The Way Station. Like the other tomes I’d read in the genre, it described a fantastic future implausible for the time.The protagonist was named Enoch something or other, and an alien chose him to become the ageless caretaker of a backwoods cabin that was a way station for interplanetary travel in the vein of Beam-Me-Up, Scotty. It existed in prosaic world that could have been my home, had my suburb been more rural and wooded. (Ha! Wikipedia suggests that I’m holding dementia at bay. Clifford D. Simak published Way Station in 1963.)
After Christmas, looking for way to spend my gift card at Half-Price Books, I came across The Martian by Andy Weir. With none of the nonfiction titles of the shelves capturing my attention, I thought, why not? I really enjoyed the movie (so much that we bought the Blu-Ray), which starred Matt Damon. It was worth $7 to find out how closely the movie kept to the book.
The screenwriter did an excellent job of distilling Weir’s 369 pages into a 141-minute movie. The angel’s share was the more in-depth explanation of the science the planet’s sole inhabitant, Mark Watney, employed to survive. There were a few other points, like the rover’s emergency pop-up tents, whose excision really didn’t hurt the movie but really added to the book’s reality.In both mediums, what really got my attention was the reversal of believability. All of the science, aerospace, or otherwise that described the Ares missions to Mars and the science that made possible Watney’s survival was available and possible today. Like Right Now! The movie suggests this, and the books more in-depth examinations make this indisputably clear.
The book never really touched on the underlying fantastic unbelievable circumstances that made the five-part Ares mission to Mars possible, and the movie added just a few lines of dialogue that hinted at it, when the program manager urged the NASA administrator to seek Congressional funding for a sixth mission to Mars.
The idea that our leaders would maintain their attention span for the time it took to plan and execute the Ares exploration of Mars is the fiction. Following this tangent I searched my mind for the last big thing America built that wasn’t promoted by some sort of conflict, like global war or conquest of space and the moon. The Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam were the first things that came to mind, and they were both public works projects with the ulterior motive of putting people back to work during the depression.Another question I could not answer was when was the last time this nation had an approved federal budget in place before the next fiscal year started on October 1. I’m sure it has happened at least once since we declared our independence, but I can’t remember such an event in my lifetime, and I doubt I will see it in whatever time is left to me.
And given the increasing shortness of our national attention span and tolerance of ideas contrary to the one we hold to be “true,” it seems unlikely that this nation will ever again plan, build, and accomplish something big that’ not connected to the military. Pondering this sad reversal of achievable possibilities, one thing seems clear. I must read more science fiction. — Scott Spangler, Editor
