Jetwhine

Aviation buzz and bold opinion

aviation safety

Dragonfly Vision & Hungry Midair Meetings

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Like many aviators I appreciate anything that flies whether it’s a manmade machine or product of natural selection. Among insect aeronauts the dragonfly is my favorite. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t envy its ability to rapidly fly from point to point (at speeds up to 30 mph!), make directional changes to the left, right, or reverse with the alacrity that would rip the wings off most machines, and then quick-stop into a motionless hover.

What I didn’t know, until I read  “Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly” in The New York Times on April 1, is that dragonflies are “brutal aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.” Even more amazing, they do it using a skill all pilots should have learned from their instructors early in training. I won’t bore you with the details of the research (my wife has already suffered for you), but the dragonfly’s mastery of this skill enables them to snatch midair meals with a success rate of 95 percent.

Research attributes this amazing kill ratio to the dragonflies brain, eyes, and wings. It has “an almost human capacity for selective attention, able to focus on a single” bug among a cloud of fluttering insects. Other researchers have identified “a kind of master circuit of 16 neurons that connects the dragonfly’s brain to its flight motor center in the thorax.” In other words, this fly-by-wire insect can “track a moving target, calculate a trajectory to intercept that target, and subtly adjust its path as needed.”

Obviously, this is a skill combat pilots must hone to survive. And understanding the key visual concept that contributes greatly to the success of fighter pilots and dragonflies alike will help civilian pilots achieve the opposite outcome—avoiding a midair meeting, which more often than not happens within 5 miles of an airport the participants are flying toward or have just left.

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See and Avoid: Airplanes and Partisan Politics

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Since the FAA issued the list of contract towers it will close to satisfy the self-inflicted sequester, I’ve been reading a lot of wailing and gnashing and incredulous screeds of how could they? Common to everything I’ve read so far is the pointy fingered whine of put-upon victims. Let’s get real here. We got what we voted for. All of us.

AIMOur elected officials—all of them—embody the ideological narcissism that has, over the past three decades, grown bitter in many of us and turned America’s future into a zero-sum game. If one side can’t win, it will do its upmost to guarantee that the other side will lose. We gave them power—we encouraged their behavior—every time we voted, every time we raised our fist in support or condemnation of candidates who promised to govern in our best interest but only answer to and serve those who finance their duplicitous endeavors.

Before air traffic controllers took to towers to help pilots make their way to and from airports safely, we all learned that as the pilot in command, we alone are ultimately responsible for the safety of our flight, to see and avoid other airplanes that could compromise this sacred responsibility, something we all too eagerly surrender to others, whether they be in an air traffic control tower or an elected office.

If we’re not happy with the world we have created with our votes and political support, only we can change it by seeing and avoiding those who have done our bidding and brought us to today’s place in history. Changing course, if that’s what we as a collective whole really want, will take time. We didn’t create this problem overnight, so we will not rectify the situation as quickly as we might like.

Time will tell if we have the gumption to summon and sustain the unified focus and the willingness to sacrifice in the name of compromise because we accept that in zero-sum situations, we all lose. In the meantime, let’s stay safe out there. As we should when flying to and from any airport when VFR, we should have our heads up and rotating, systematically searching our surroundings for traffic on an unfortunate trajectory. (This essential see & avoid maneuver should work as well when it comes to those who want to serve as our elected officials.)  And if it’s been awhile since you’ve flown to a nontowered airport, before you fly, add this to your preflight planning:  Aeronautical Information Manual, Section 3—Airport Operations. — Scott Spangler, Editor

A Future View of UAV Safety & Surveillance

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The 1.8 gigapixel looks at 20 square miles at once.

Comments on last week’s post on UAVs focused on safety and privacy, and rightly so. Most offered valid examples of why UAVs won’t work today, and I won’t argue because I agree. At the same time, I can see how UAVs will safely integrate with populated aircraft in the not too distant future. As for the privacy concerns, watch the video, and then we’ll talk.

The 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS sensor is impressive, isn’t it. Imagine, a 20-square-mile view with the ability to focus on objects as small as 6 inches in 65 different windows while not losing the larger view. Each UAV equipped with this system streams a million terabytes of data, equal to 5,000 hours of video, a day.

It sounds threatening and scary until you think about who’s going to watch it. Don’t give the government too much credit. It’s as disorganized and dysfunctional as any civilian operation. I’m sure the government workers at all levels only wish their technology was as cutting edge and capable of finding and displaying needle in the haystack aerial surveillance video in any multiple of the time it takes in the movies.

As for safely integrating UAVs into a sky filled with populated planes, remember one word: NextGen. Yes, I know, it is not yet fully operational and it has its problems, but like the antiquated ATC technology we now depend on, engineers will work all the bugs out NextGen.

If you dig into the NextGen systems that keep everyone from bumping into each other in positive control airspace, it’s easy to see that the only real difference between a populated plane and UAV is where the pilot sits, cockpit or cubicle. — Scott Spangler, Editor

Move Past LaHood … and the Sooner the Better

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LaHoodSometimes the best action is to take none, which is precisely the route I chose last week when many people were falling over themselves to tell outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood how much they appreciated his past four years on the job. No criticism on my part for their actions though. Industry groups do what they have to do to operate successfully in DC.

Me, I’m just glad LaHood is on the way out. LaHood was an Illinois Congressman before President Obama plucked him off the Hill in 2009 to watch over the transportation industry. His transportation experience at the time … service on the House transportation and infrastructure committee.

While LaHaood was awash in accolades last week for his consumer work, I’d suggest everyone take a deep breath and look at the record. The consumer protections of the Don’t leave passengers sitting all night on an airline ramp without food or water Bill actually evolved because of the lobbying efforts of one lady mostly — Kate Hanni of Flyers Rights.org, not Mr. LaHood. And to credit LaHood with a win because delays are down is beyond silly. Overall air traffic is down nearly 30% since 9/11 for starters. Then of course, the flyers rights bill convinced airlines it was easier to cancel flights when the weather threatened, also leading to less traffic. LaHood had nothing to do with any of that.

And let’s not forget his brilliant Future of Aviation Advisory Committee (FAAC) in 2010, designed to provide leadership and vision to the industry. Great PR for the Secretary, but tell me what the work of all those experts actually accomplished? Our president still thinks business airplanes are toys and should pay accordingly. Thanks for that Ray. And as to that recent FAA reversal of strategy on Boeing’s 787  — first the airplane was safe, but in need of a top to bottom certification review and then a week later the airplane was grounded because it wasn’t safe? Those moves didn’t come from FAA. They had LaHood’s fingerprints all over them.

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Aviation Safety: What Has Become of Us?

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Oh, the irony of progress.

In 2005, the FAA issued its first Safety Alert for Operators, “an information tool that alerts, educates, and makes recommendations to the aviation community [that] includes air carrier certificate holders, fractional ownership program managers, and 14 CFR Part 142 training centers.” There’s no irony in this, or the next paragraph:

“Each SAFO contains important safety information and may contain recommended actions. SAFO content should be especially valuable to air carriers in meeting their statutory duty to provide service with the highest possible degree of safety in the public interest. The information and recommendations in a SAFO are often time critical.”

Here’s the irony: SAFO 13002 (released last week) is dedicated to Manual Flight Operations. Why? I’ll let the FAA explain: “A recent analysis of flight operations data (including normal flight operations, incidents, and accidents) identified an increase in manual handling errors. The [FAA] believes maintaining and improving the knowledge and skills for manual flight operations is necessary for safe flight operations.”

In other words, the FAA is saying that failure of the flight management system and autopilot is now a critical in-flight emergency that demands special training and practice: flying an airplane by hand. Many are aghast at this recommendation, but they shouldn’t be. Technology has so infiltrated flight that “manual flight” is only the latest of a number of similar recommendations the FAA has made since it created SAFOs in 2005.

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