Simming at work and why

I figure that some of my comments regarding the use of a simulator as a minor method of escapism at work warrants some elaboration.

Bear with me, this all works into the mix.

Yesterday, now former, US Congressman Randy ‘Duke’ Cunningham resigned his post in the midst of an incredible scandal that had him immersed in a scheme of payola for favors given in the form of steering contracts to specific defense contractors. What makes this all the worse in scope is that Cunningham not only admits that he did it but that he had everything going for him before he lost his focus in life.

You see, Randy Cunningham happens to be a Vietnam War hero. He is a retired Naval Aviator and a MiG ace during the Vietnam War. There are not too many aces out of that conflict so he happens to be in pretty rare company. Given that he had this as one of his credentials as well as a commission in the United States Navy, you would think that Mr. Cunningham would have been able to live a productive an honorable life.

The life of a US Congressman is not bad. You make a good base salary, well, good if you plan on maintaining a home in your own district and not falling prey to high priced condos in the Watergate or Falls Church, and you have a remarkable and probably grossly overdone health plan and retirement. I suspect that the bottom line in this package is that Congress wanted to make sure that people who serve in congress would not have financial worry at the top of their list presumably so that they could legislate in an impartial fashion.

So add it up, military retirement, Congressional pension, salary, notable resume’ and respect as a war hero, the question remaining to be asked is “Why?”

For that answer you are going to have to ask Mr. Cunningham. I do not have the straight shot into his brain and only he knows what happened on the way to the slop trough, but whatever it was it is symbolic of a good many problems we are facing in the country today.

Figure this, I spent 5 years in college, 1 year in graduate school, four years in medical school, a year in internship and three years in residency to finally arrive at a place where I spend the bulk of my day taking care of people who utilize an emergency room for the ‘convenience’ that it offers. I kid you not; I am told several times a day that people come to my ER because it is convenient. They do not come because they have an emergency, often it is nasal congestion or the desire to find prescription narcotics, but it is always because of convenience.

While people like Mr. Cunningham are busy being wined and dined by folks who will end up selling the Army and other services things that not only do we not need but actually increase our risk on the battlefield our nation’s health care system is spending billions of dollars to support people who go to emergency rooms because it is convenient. That is why we cannot balance a budget and why we cannot seem to get a sensible and affordable health care system. The people who we trust to come up with workable solutions are too busy getting whatever payola they can get apparently because the relatively lavish salary afforded to them by the US taxpayer is insufficient for their basic needs. It is an abomination.

I have patients come in to my ER every day that are spending your money and mine in the form of Medicaid and Medicare who no longer feel the need to have a family doctor. The ER is too convenient and it is made all the more convenient by the fact that the system does nothing to monitor or police the utilization of the emergency rooms of the nation. I used to think that in Columbus there was a group of people who might actually monitor the number of times that a Medicaid recipient went to an emergency room. I figured that the same people might also compare that to the number of times that they visited their family doctor. Doom on me for assuming that a system that spends billions of taxpayer dollars would have such oversight. Doom on me because it doesn’t have anything of the sort.

With one card my bank can tell me exactly on what, when and where I withdraw cash and spend my money but the systems that spend 1/7th of our nation’s economic wealth have nothing of the sort and you know why? I hate to be a cynic but I had a very enlightening conversation with a former social worker about this. His quote to me was, “There is no drive to police the system because that would affect caseload and if you kicked people off the system you would require fewer case workers and therefore the social workers might get laid off.” Why doesn’t every person who is a ward of the taxpayer have a smart card so that somebody can track the metrics of their behavior?

My sister who works for the state of California, a state swimming in Red ink along with millions of undocumented workers, voted against the ‘absurd’ proposals of Governor Schwarzenegger. Proposals that would have allowed greater ease in the hiring and firing of state workers to allow for better tailoring of these workers to the needs of the state and its budget. Why? “I am not going to vote myself out of a job.”

In a word we are screwed. All of us. Why? Look at Star Wars Episodes I and II and notice the comments of Senator Palpatine about Bureaucrats and who runs the show. In my experience George Lucas is not a brilliant storyteller he is a great moviemaker but all of his themes are generic to what we now face. That is why he appears to be the great storyteller. He is telling us all exactly what we already know and we buy off on it as creativity.
Picture a job where you spend every day listening to people complain and most of them don’t do even the basics of helping themselves before they run off and spend a lot of other people’s money to get ‘help’. When I was a child my mother stored St. Joseph’s childrens aspirin by the bucket load. We didn’t go to the emergency room for anything short of potential loss of life or limb. Today, people on Medicaid arrive with card in hand ready to shoot the moon on the most expensive health care on the planet and yet many of them register with no assigned family doctor. The excuse is always the same, “I cannot get in to see a doctor.” Which might well be true since it is less than desirable to have a waiting room populated with people who smoke, seldom bathe and consider dental hygiene as an optional item in the personal maintenance department. No family doctor wants the rest of his patient’s offended by loud, vulgar and smelly people.

The irony is that entire programs like WIC and the like shower ‘freebies’ onto this population and yet not once during the course of the receipt of what many of us refer to tongue-in-cheek as the “magic kingdom card” are any of these recipients required to demonstrate even the remotest understanding of basic health care and personal hygiene. We educate basic MARINE corps recruits in far greater detail of how to care for oneself personally than we do people that we hand over subsidized absolute personal autonomy when by demonstration of needing public assistance they have shown that they cannot handle the same.

And this is what really upsets me about Mr. Cunningham and so many of his colleagues. We feed people ‘fish’ all the time with our massive social welfare system. We seldom teach people how to ‘fish’ for themselves. When was the last time you saw a public service announcement? Long time ago right? Well the reason for that is that in the late 1990s the federal government got out of the business of protecting its citizenry through the education of its citizenry. Education takes time and election cycles are short. The bang from the buck comes at throwing money at something in the short term, to afford re-election so that more money can be thrown.

It is killing our nation. It is killing my spirit. I find myself ruing the days I have to spend in the ER because I am constrained by the requirement that I ‘rule-out’ bad things. ‘Ruling-out’ costs a boatload of money. Some person who doesn’t hold a job and spends days on end sitting at home ‘worrying’ about life to the point where they get chest pain walks into my ER. I am required to make certain within a reasonable standard of care that they are not having a heart related problem. My ethics as a physician and Christian demand it, lawyers will skewer me on the day when I miss one and the system has no other viable alternative for keeping these people out of the ER. So countless times a year I spend a boatload of all of our money to cover the remote possibility of a problem and countless times a year I find nothing. Why?

Because it is other people’s money.

There is no fundamental impetus to change the system to work because there is no vested interest on the part of the policy makers to make a workable system. The bureaucrats don’t want to lose their jobs and unless they happen to succumb to some horrible illness and endure the nation’s absurd method of delivering care they have no reason to think that anything needs to be changed.

What changed me? I used to be the total free-market health care guy. The government can never fix the problem the way that the free market can. Then I found out that I was wrong. The change occurred when I spent a year on active duty and actually encountered Federal Health Care.

There are a couple of premises about federal health care that have to be employed for the system to work;

1. There is a control over what is given and how and when it is given. Now this smacks of rationing. Why? Because it is. The military has long recognized that everyone cannot have a full body CT scan every year just to get “checked out”. It has to take care of the most people it can for what money it is given. So it rations based upon what works for most people. Do some people fall through the cracks, yep, but the VAST majorities of people get quality care and do very well.

2. The people that it takes care of will be healthy. The military population is generally healthy. Why? Well first of all you have to take a physical fitness test every year. No questions. You have to do it so you work out year round. Second, if you use drugs you get thrown out. Third, families are encouraged and supported so that they are helped in terms of staying in tact. The military pours a lot of money into housing and funding programs to support families. It does so because a healthy family is a good thing. You do not get benefits in the military if you shack up. You have to be married to live together in military housing and get benefits. This leads to more stable and healthy people in general.

3. People will be affected by what they hear. The military through Armed Forces Network puts out a lot of public service announcements. These deal with all manner of topics from alcohol and driving to how to properly cook meat during the holidays. They are very ‘1950’s’ in their production and because of this they are humorous but the bottom line is that once you see one you remember it forever.

So the military has accepted rationing, demanded personal accountability and recognized the importance of educating its people as a part of the formula for controlling costs. Overall it is a very good system. It is everything that US civilian health care is not.

The reality is that the US civilian health care system is not a free market. A free market is a situation in which a person has a choice between a Honda and a Toyota or nothing at all. Medicine is a choice between life and death and so practically speaking it is not really a choice at all. There is nothing free-market-like in a person who is having chest pain. That is why a patient is not a customer. Customers have choices; people who have life threatening illness and are insured by someone else have no choices. They get what they get. The sooner we learn this the better we will be. Unfortunately, the vast majority of hospital administrators, who are not medical people, still look at health care like they look at the local mega-mart. Nobody in his or her right mind goes to a hospital to shop. There is nothing in a hospital that anyone really wants to buy. They end up there because they have no choice, really.

Now back to Medicaid. For all the frustration among those of us who do not have the luxury of shopping for our health care, you should be comforted to know that Medicaid recipients have none of that because of our taxpaying generosity. Are you angry because you are in a PPO, HMO or some other alphabet soup organization that determines where, when and too whom you will go? Well join Medicaid because there is nothing short of a few paltry attempts at managed care in that system. Yep, the people who have everyone else paying their bills can go anywhere they choose, at any time, including the emergency room because it is ‘convenient’. Now I don’t know about you but I am fighting mad at this system. I spend the better part of my free time trying to pay my taxes and do things the right way and I am forced to pay for an entire class of people who do nothing to tae care of themselves.

The only thing that prevents revolution while Mr. Cunningham et al. are busy doing everything for themselves and nothing for the nation is the fact that most US taxpayers assume that the program really works and that there are literally hidden hoards of people out their who cannot get health care without the bloated and mired bureaucratic messes known as Medicaid. Take it from me; the hidden hoards do not exist. They just do not. Anyone at any time can come to an ER regardless of ability to pay so the false argument of all these people out there without access to health care is just that, false. Everyone has access, but not everyone has someone else paying the bills. I know this because every day I work a good fourth of my patients have no pay source. Meaning that they will pay $5 a day, or not, till they die to pay for an ER visit that costs $400 to give them a decongestant for an earache.

Now oddly almost everyone I see smokes and has a cell phone, but they cannot afford the $50-75 for a physician office visit, but they can afford the ER visit? Come on! Do the math.

So in the end we are playing politics with something that is going to bankrupt us all. Say goodbye to private insurance in the next 10 years, or say hello to the kind I carry, a medical savings account with a $10,000 deductible. I pay $250.00 a month for that coverage with a prescription drug benefit because I can afford the doctor visit for my kids a couple times a year (I don’t burn up $150 a month in cigarettes at a pack a day) and if heaven forbid someone in my family gets cancer then I can cover their massive bills with $8 million benefit and make payments on the 10 grand.

So what is the solution? Pretty simple. Two part health coverage. One private and one public system. In the private system you pay for the coverage out of your pocket and in the public system you take the rationing and the realistic triage (in the army I didn’t put soldiers without fevers or evidence of infections on antibiotics, I sent them back to work) that will send people home who don’t try basics like a Tylenol first before coming to the hospital. Send them home BEFORE they rack up a bunch of money in charges that someone else (read we the taxpayers) will have to pay. We’ll pay taxes for the public system and you will wait your turn. The Congress will have to baseline budget it as well. They must fund it at a certain predictable level and not mess with it. No more Mc Medicine. In the private system you can have a new hip tomorrow but you bettered cough up the $50K today. That is the only solution and it should have come a long time ago; long before people got the idea in their head that health care is a right. Problem there, rights are things that require no other person to guarantee; they are granted by God or Natural Law and are not contingent on others, in fact they cannot be contingent upon other people or else they are not rights, they are privileges. Unless you happen to be a physician and even then state medical boards frown on self-prescribing, health care cannot ever be a right. (We can discuss the failure of the public education system, as exemplified by a people who cannot clearly define rights and privileges, at a later date ;) )

Because people believe that it is a right, they expect it for free and believe me, I spend the equivalent of a brand new Hummer H2 daily in my little ER so it is far from free. Thankfully I have a lot of friends who are doctors so when the day comes that I get sick and the system is collapsed, because people like Randy Cunningham were too busy worrying about other people’s yachts and selling their over-inflated luxury homes to be concerned with fixing health care in the country that they swore to look after, I will still have access.

The rest of America, if it doesn’t start taking an interest in the system, will be out of luck and out of time.

So it is because of this that I find some solace in having the sim run at work, the view over the Rockies, virtual though it may be, is still a far better horizon that the one that I see right now if I focus on my workplace.

9.5 million people 85 years old and older by 2010, and growing, in the United States. Do you have any idea how much money it takes to keep an 85 year-old heart attack victim alive? A LOT. Not that we shouldn’t but the current system will not be able to sustain that delivery for long.

Get involved and demand accountability and a common sense solution from your elected leaders. It is the best insurance you can find.

FF

Joy of Flying: Synthetic

It is an unusual thing for most people to see someone using a sim. The fact of the matter is that even in the day of X-Box 360s and all of the hype around High Def TVs and games I still meet a considerable number of people who marvel at the fact that I can somehow contain not only a very realistic appearing 737-700 in my PowerBook G4 but that there is an entire world that it flies in sitting securely mounted on my hard drive. Just last week there was program on the Croatian Dalmatian Coast on the television. Within a few minutes I had selected Dubrovnik as a starting point and was flying a simulated Antonov-24 up the coast toward Split. The folks at work were amazed that I could point out the specific mountain where former Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, was killed when his T-43 (military variant of the 737-200) slammed into terrain while trying an NDB approach into Dubrovnik. It is just that sort of macabre commentary that suddenly interests the non-flying public in simulations.

So most people have a happy curiosity when they see my PowerBook doing its thing on the desk I keep at work. Being that I am productive and there are no visible joysticks near the computer my addiction to watching airplanes is tolerated and most people assume that the airplane on the screen is part of unique and unusual screen saver. That notion ends when I switch to the cockpit view and start fiddling with the FMS and twisting the HDG knob on the autopilot panel. Suddenly they are thrust into the world of pilots and instead of consternation the revelation of things most often hidden behind the locked doors in front of them at the end of the aisle is replaced by a fascinated curiosity about flying and airplanes.

“Is that really an airplane cockpit?”

“What does that do?”

“Why are you doing that?”

“What are those things on the screen there?”

“Is that the sunrise?”

All of these questions and many more have been asked of me in my flights of fancy and efforts at distraction through the long 12 hour shifts that I keep in my day job. My coworkers asked the same this morning as a brilliantly painted Southwest 737-7 taxied out onto the active runway at KSMF (Sacramento International). I fiddled and entered and referenced and dialed and switched and in due time I scrolled down and pushed the power levers forward. Entering ‘b’ to toggle the brakes my staff watched as the landing lights illuminated the runway ahead and they stayed transfixed until I rotated and the view was of the myriad of stars that populated the heavens above Sacramento this morning.

“Are those really the way the stars are?” asked on of my colleagues.

“Yep, sure are, in fact, I am doing this in real time to it is actually what the stars look like in Sacramento at 0430 Pacific time. How about that?”

“Wow. So where are you flying too?”

“Miami.”

“Why Miami?”

“Because I don’t know the identifier of Manchester New Hampshire readily and besides, Manchester is too much like here with the snow and all. I need sun to raise my spirits.” I replied as I switched off lights and reversed the flap schedule. The dialed the vertical speed in the climb to 3500 feet per minute and monitored the auto-throttles as they worked their way back and forth.

After settling into the confidence that everything was nominal and the airplane was going to do its thing I switched to an external view and position the view from the rear of the aircraft so I could catch the view of the sunrise.

I have had the most fortunate opportunities to see sunrises from the cockpits of many different airplanes all over the world. There is really nothing other than the sort of low speed low level flying common to Cub pilots that I enjoy more than see the darkness of night transition into the amazing colors of a new day from the perspective of the cockpit of an airplane winging its way east. Unlike any other venue the brilliance of the sun never offends me and I bask in its warmth as I watch the world wake up from a position that relatively very few people ever get to enjoy. It is that experience in and of itself that makes my many thousands of dollars spent on rating and training worth every penny. It is a sense of beauty and the feeling of being in control of a machine so much larger than myself that compels me to remain a pilot. If I were to be told that I could fly but once more and I could make but one flight of my discretion, it would be to fly a King Air 200 from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City, departing LAX to the West and turning to the East just prior to sunrise so that I could see the sun come up over the mountains and experience the joy of watching the ocean transition to land. It is something that is far easier to feel than describe.

The little 737 made its way eastward for about an hour before the first hint of the morning sun became visible. The contrail streaming from the rear of the aircraft caught the attention of my earthbound friends and they stood transfixed as the sun came up and started its journey through the heavens; another day in progress.

It might be exceptionally difficult for most people to see the attraction of the brief moments of poetic visual experience in the midst of hours of ‘housekeeping’ that an airplane cockpit requires to be flown well. Unlike my civilian job in which there are constant and unpredictable demands placed upon me, often so many that I have to ask my staff for a specific pause so that I can adjust my thoughts and catch up to the demands facing me, in an airplane there is a predictable flow as you watch the GPS, listen to the radio traffic and anticipate the calls that are common to the air traffic control system. I know for instance that between 60 and 100NM out I am going to listen to ATIS if I do not have access to onboard METARs. I also know that with some predictable certainty that about 3 times my altitude in thousands expressed in nautical miles from the field is when I can start expecting a clearance to descend in preparation for the approach. The ultimate in predictability are the departure and arrival procedures. A listen in advance gives me a clear picture of the waypoints to enter into the FMS and I can allow the airplane to get me clear to the FAF if I desire.

Such a world is very comforting when one spends the better part of their lives in a people business where the behavior of your customers in anything but predictable. That is why I can find relative peace in snow or storms when other passengers are at their wits end. Using the rule of 3s, being offline and acting as my own ATC I “cleared” myself out of FL340 and set the altitude pre-select to 3000 feet just by ‘guestimating’ what I would need for a GS intercept into KMIA. The little 737 nosed over and began to descend at 1500 feet per minute. I switched to the enroute chart view and whipped up a solution to allow for a semi-realistic GS intercept. In the cockpit I switched the autopilot from slaving off of the FMC to NAV1 and then hit the HDG switch and rolled the selector to allow fro an arrival to the north of the field with vectors over the barrier islands and back into KMIA for an easterly arrival onto runway 27.

One of the most perplexing things to the layperson, not to mention the VFR only pilot, is the approach plate. I call them plates because that is what I grew up with and having been to Iraq and being of middle age, I kind of figure that I have not only earned the right to wear shorts and T-shirts all year long (even in the snow of Ohio) but also the right to call an approach chart a “plate” if I so desire. I flipped through the pages and used the departure procedures in reverse. I figure that it is odd enough that I carry a wall sized IFR planning chart of the USA as well as approach plates in my briefcase, to carry TERPs as well would surely cause people to question my sanity. Mind you have of my work space is covered with this stuff as I work so instead of seeing patient charts, nurses often see things like the Runway 9 ILS plate for KMIA. They no longer question because I get the work done and I think they like me better when I get a dose of the ‘wing’ in during our long 12-hour shifts.

“So what is happening now?” one of my nurses asks as I select APP on the autopilot and wait for the intercept to occur.

“Well I am waiting for the airplane to find the radio beam to the runway and presently we’ll see a turn.” My medical student is partial to watching thunderstorms so I had changed weather to allow her to indulge in her morbid passion of watching airplanes get tossed violently about as flashes akin to low yield nuclear weapons danced around the screen. Suddenly the sky cleared as I selected unlimited visibility and cleared the skies of weather. My nurse marveled at the view from the 5 o’clock position behind the 737 and as I had predicted it began its left turn to intercept the localizer.

“Are you doing that?”

“Nope. It is the autopilot. In a second you will see the airplane begin to descend as well as it tracks the radio beam down to the runway.”

“I have flown to Miami, is that how they do it every time?”

“Not always,” I replied, “sometimes, especially when the weather is like what you see here, the pilot will fly the approach by hand, or even avoid the radio beam altogether.” I switched back to the cockpit view, referencing the glare shield panel to make certain that everything was set for the GS intercept. I illustrated the flight director and briefly switched off the autopilot and “hand-flew” to off-center the command bars, “Now watch as I line everything up again.”

“Wow, that is really cool.”

“Sure is. Now you understand why even faking the experience calms me down.” I set everything back up to track the localizer and dialed the speed control back to 150 knots, flaps 20 set and waited for the marker. We both watched was the runway lights grew larger and as the familiar beeping of the OM came in I selected gear down and flaps 30. Speed control to 135.

I switched back to the external view and the nurse watched as the gear dropped from its wells and locked down. You can tell that people really enjoy this because of their facial expressions. The fact is that they are marveling at finally seeing something that they have only heard so many times in the past. It is something that as pilots we take for granted, reassurance no less, the odd noises and sounds that jackscrews, worm gears and hydraulic pumps make. To not hear them when we should makes us very nervous indeed. To the person stuffed into 14D, knees to chest and trying to make heads or tails out of the world compressed down to 11 by 8 inches or whatever tiny dimensions are the reality of the passenger windows in a commercial airliner, the clunk of the gear dropping accompanied by the sound of the air slamming into gear doors and wheels is not always a ‘happy sound’. When they are walked through the process and see flaps deploying and wheels dropping it suddenly puts it all into perspective.

2 miles out, I selected landing lights, armed the spoilers, auto brakes to 2 and waited for the threshold. We sailed down and at 1 mile flaps full came in and I switched to external view and 9 o’clock for the aircraft. At the threshold the power came back to idle 40%, autopilot off, I rotated to level pitch and finally 3 degrees up by eyeball from the outside. As the wheels touched down the spoilers came up and the airplane. I set the reversers and rapidly slowed the airplane to a ground taxi speed.


“Welcome to Miami.” I grinned and having other business to attend too my nurse shuffled off to get to it. I charted some stuff on a record and pulled the next patient out of the bin. Looking over the chart, while simultaneously running the stream of thought in that other part of my brain, the one that continuously thinks of sky, wings and power. The one that is the second ‘core’ of my CPU and far from detracting from my concentration at work, actually focuses it by giving me something other than the mess of American health care to think about for a break during the long days; that stream was already running its next process.

JFK, DCA, SMF, CMH… …The sun was setting over virtual Miami on the physician’s desk of an otherwise non-descript emergency room in the American Midwest. KDAL was where the 737 longed to be. That is where its home is so down to the FMS to enter KDAL and up to the fuel to fill it up. I quickly departed KMIA and set the autopilot to drive us home. Three patients later I returned to see the view of the sun low and the Gulf of Mexico below. The air remained smooth at FL300 and the Baby Boeing made landfall between New Orleans and Biloxi. As my time neared and my relief was set to arrive I had cleared out the patients from the ED and I had a few moments to read AOPA pilot and monitor the descent into KDAL. DFW visible in the distance the 737 arrived home in the dark surrounded by the sea of lights that all pilots relish (did I ever mention that as a medical student, on long days when I couldn’t fly, I would drive by the local airport and just key the lights on with my hand held transceiver, just so I could see them and ‘think’ about flying?) “Ate up” doesn’t begin to describe how I am about aviation.

I packed up PowerBook, charts and stethoscope. Cleaned my desk for my colleague and upon his arrival it looked as generic as every other physicians. No passion, no color, no sea of lights below. Just the inevitable prospect of the herds of people impending, tired of shopping and needing to be “checked out” after thanksgiving. Thank goodness I live in an age where I have not only the books of Bach, St. Expiry and Gann but I also have the ability to actually manipulate the virtual machines at my desk. It is better than Prozac. I don’t know how my predecessors made it through the day.

Fly Safe.

FF

Winning Wars

It has been about 20 years ago now that I had my conversation with uncle Bill. Uncle Bill is not really my uncle, he is one of those close family friends that is so close (perhaps within that circle of the 10 people in your life that you know will drive halfway across the United States to help you no matter what) that he ends up being adopted by you as part of the family at large. He and his wife are close friends of my mother and father and have remained so for over 2 decades.

The conversation started out in an inquisitive fashion on his part, “Todd, what do you plan on doing after college.”. I had of course plenty of answers to this question. I think a lot (too much some people might argue) and frankly a bachelor’s degree in Biology didn’t really satisfy my need for the sky. “Well,” I answered, “I would like to become a professional pilot.”. Uncle Bill considered this for a moment, looked me squarely in my ‘coke-bottle’ glasses and said, “Todd, how many 747s are there in the world?”. I was thrilled because I actually had a vague idea. “I suppose around 900.”. “Yep, and Todd how many pilots are there in the United States qualified to fly those airplanes?”.

Tougher question. See Uncle Bill had spent a lifetime flying for the State of California and he knew of such things and he had actually raised and fed a family on his ability to control rudder, aileron and elevator so I wanted to impress him. I took a stab, “About 50,000.”. He looked a bit surprised and then said, “Yep. And how many of those 50,000 people want to fly them?”. My mood was growing more somber, “All of them?”. “Uh huh. Are you getting what I am getting at?”. Suddenly I started to see that my future was not going to be easily found in flying for hire. Then he gave me the advice that more than anyone else before or since served to change my professional life.

“Todd, forget flying for a living, go to medical school and then buy an airplane. It will be the best thing you ever did.”

Now this might seem an unusual segue for what I am about to talk about but it really ties into everything very well. Because you see had I gone to work as a flight instructor and then a Fed Ex feeder pilot and then a regional pilot and likely by this time an FO or junior Captain working for Southwest or some other soon-to-be-bankrupt airline I would never have been able to experience the wide variety of things that I have in life or even aviation. It is true. It is because of my profession that I was able to have the interaction with the person that I am going to tell you about and it is what leads me to the topic of this blog.

I noticed first the “Dragon Lady” embossed onto his polo shirt. The pilot was a high time gentleman who had come to me to seek an airman medical exam. I asked him about it and he told me that he wore the shirt because he had been a U-2 pilot in the 1960s. For those of you who immediately think of a front-man named ‘Bono’ when you see U-2, this has nothing to do with that. The first U-2 was and is one of the most remarkable aircraft ever designed. Kelly Johnson at Lockheed basically stuck sailplane wings on an F-104 Starfighter and in the process created a remarkable reconnaissance platform that has continued to soldier on long after its cousin the SR-71 was mothballed. The U-2 is remarkable in that it goes to altitudes in excess of 70,000 feet, stays there upwards of 12 hours, takes on demand high resolution photographs and then comes home and lands. It is one of my favorite airplanes. So much do I like it that I keep a picture of its descendant, the TR-1, flying over the Sierra Nevada mountains of California,, in my office. I showed the gentleman this photo and the next two hours were filled with stories of the Cold War and Vietnam and forced landings and…well, you get the idea.

After all of this he paid me for my office visit and remarked that we should go down to my airstrip to see if it would support his Aeronca Champ.

We walked down to the field and we chatted. It seemed to come as somewhat of a shock to him that I was as high a ranking military officer as I am, but once he accepted that notion it opened up more of the inwardly held feelings that all veterans of wars have but seldom share outside of a close circle of fellow warriors. I allowed him to speak freely and he spoke of Vietnam and his experiences there. His final remark was something and resonated with me, “How did we lose that war?”.

How did we lose that war?

I thought for a moment, listening to the wind rustle the changing autumn leaves around me, “WE didn’t lose the war. Just like WE are not going to lose the current war. Our countrymen did.”.

His comment brought back a flood of memories from Iraq. Reading Stars and Stripes and wondering what war they were referring too and just what was my family seeing on TV back home because it sure wasn’t what I was seeing on the ground in Iraq. Iraq to me was like South Central Los Angeles; a place with families and stores and businesses and also a place to be respected because if you lost your situational awareness it could get you hurt. But Iraq was not to me like the chaotic disaster that is now such a cliché and worn out on the nightly news. I saw a lot of Iraq and I never saw what I see on the nightly news. What I saw mostly was a burgeoning democracy flavored with the Middle East and a people who were trying to figure it all out.

Now let’s consider this; 11 years. 11 years you might wonder is exactly how long it took for us, a western culture with centuries of philosophy and ideas emerging from the Greeks and Romans and other stable cultures of thought, to get from Declaration of Independence to Constitution. The Iraqi people have done that same journey in just over 2 years and all the time surrounded by radical Islamic nut-jobs who think blowing up women and children is part of Allah’s greater calling. I hate to tell you this, but such things ARE part of Allah’s greater calling.

See the big fat pink and purple polka-dotted elephant in the room is the fact that Islam if adhered to religiously is very specific that Allah is the one God, Mohammed is his prophet and anyone who disagrees with this should be coerced, subtly or violently into accepting such a ‘truth’. Those that don’t are best disposed of. There is no mercy in Islamic culture because it is absolute fatalism. Allah blessed whom he will and he curses whom he will. No rhyme or reason. This is why charity is such a fleeting thing in Arab countries. A rich Muslim sees a poor Muslim and the thought is, you (poor guy) are in your straights because Allah is mad at you. I shouldn’t get to close to you because then Allah won’t like me much either. Ever heard the statement Insh’Allah? It peppers every conversation you have with Arabs. It means “If Allah wills it.”. When they say this stuff it is held close to home. Muslims don’t think anything happens without the hand of Allah.

So some well educated in the ways of the Q’uran (Koran if you will) youth sees that a martyr for the sake of Allah, gets immediate access to paradise, he looks around at his plight and the absolute chaos of the middle east and he can be better understood when he straps 50 pounds of high explosive to himself and walks into a line of 200 Iraqis trying to join the police force. Better understood as to why he might think that is a good solution. We can run from it, try to change the perception, do whatever but those of us who have been there and seen it aint buying. Islam as practiced fundamentally is about a war between the forces of Allah and those of the rest of the world. They believe it and embrace it and live…and sometimes die…by it. It takes only a reading of the Q’uran and the Hadith to know that what I am telling you is true.

So I am really proud of these Iraqis and their progress toward self-governance and freedom. Notice as well that nobody protested the constitutional referendum even though the press would have you believe that every Su’uni in the place was against it. Nobody is crying unfair election, they have accepted it and are moving on. They also ratified a Constitution that expressly states that Iraq is a country under Islamic law. Try that here. Where is the ACLU right now, screaming and gnashing its teeth? Just the lone tumbleweeds I see blowing across the road. Nothing.

So all this American driven change is really a fiction. We showed up, we took out the lunatic that was the single biggest destabilizing element in the entire region and we have helped the Iraqis to start on a path toward a different future. All in just under 3 years. I remind you that we took 11 and we didn’t have suicide bomber and CNN trying to vilify everything that the USA does as anathema to good and decent behavior. We also had Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin at the helm.

So ‘WE’ as in the military and our leaders, are not losing this war. WE did the job we arrived to do and let me tell you having a few thousand US military members parked in a place where we can watch Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia is not a bad thing at all. I drive a small Honda and I turn off my lights but I am under no delusions. I use oil every day. It has been woven into the fabric of my everyday existence. The difference between me and my all-too-ready-to-criticize-but-not-too-ready-to-actually-do-something anti-war friends is that I don’t hide my head in the sand and pretend that I do not use oil. I prefer to discuss a future without it and hope and pray that elected leadership will aggressively pursue paths to divest ourselves from any dealings with anyone of these states on the basis of their only valuable resource. But in the meantime it is what we have so we have to deal with it unless we all want to burn cow dung to cook our dinner.

I chuckle when I see young college students in synthetic coats protesting outside an army recruiter’s office. So easy to make a fool of oneself.

I have walked in Khurdistan. I have been to Baq’uba and Baghdad. I spent at least 2 days a week talking with Iraqis and driving in their towns and seeing their lives. It wasn’t like I relished being their either, but in my life I did something other than spew whatever I had read on a blog or heard on TV. There are plenty of Non Governmental Organizations that need help. You don’t have to carry a gun to participate (although like in some parts of the USA it might be better if you do) you can be a complete pacifist and sign up to help the thousands of poor and illiterate Iraqi people who were made that way by a guy who felt that oil money was best spent on tanks and Uranium Yellow Cake. I had total respect for the NGO people over there even if they thought we were totally wrong for the invasion. They were not spewing, they were living in the now. I did my best to try and work with them so we could help Iraqis together.

WE would win this war by continuing the support of the emerging government, providing aggressive presence along the Iraqi borders to interdict young disenfranchised youths who want to drive cars full of explosives into crowds of Iraqis trying to go to work and waiting for the day when the Iraqis will say, and they will, okay, we can do with a 1000 less Americans this month…

It takes time, it takes patience and you cannot expect a McWar out of this. You cannot drive up to the border of Iraq, throw 100 billion dollars in, get a Constitution and a side-order of security to go; and then drive on into the next place of interest. You have to go in, clean house, get a good look at the place and then by person start rebuilding and changing a people to see the world as something different that the horror-freak show that it was under Saddam. You have to teach people who were not part of the “little-circle-of-trust” how to read. See Saddam understood history, an educated people is a population that is hard to control. So, just don’t educate them. Seen it first hand over and over again.

30 years they lived under the ruthless and indiscriminate despotism of Saddam and the Ba’athists. A person accepted that if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time a Ba’athist intelligence officer might just blow their brains out to make a point. Happened, I know a guy who was doing just that. But unless you go there and deal with it and unless you talk with families who lost members to the Saddam Inc. family of sadists you could easily be lulled into the idea that we did everything wrong. Why else would people blow themselves up? Well, life outside of the USA is almost always quite different from life inside the USA and the salient truth everyone needs to understand is ‘IT IS NOT ALL OUR FAULT’. Soldiers get this, why average Americans do not is beyond me.

We didn’t create Islam, Iraq or Oil. We built a nation and have tried to protect its interests and as much as we might like to think that our leadership has all the answers, well the truth is that it doesn’t. Accurately predicting human behavior in response to natural and manmade activity makes picking stocks look like child’ play. It aint that easy. So to criticize and cajole and Monday morning quarterback all of this really comes across to those of us who have been there and done that as so much self-serving rot.

WE didn’t lose Vietnam. I told my friend that I am not a policy guy so what I have to say means little to nothing in the greater scheme of things. I have my feelings as to why things went badly in Vietnam for us but since I wasn’t there and have only my readings and the opinions of fellow warriors I will not comment on it. I will say that if I was a policy guy, which I admit that I am not, but if I were, part of winning in Iraq would mean an immediate shut down and expulsion of all media short of print. I would make the entire nation of Iraq one big ‘information black hole’ and leave the sound bite 24 hour news people so in the dark that they would be experiencing post traumatic stress syndrome from lack of information. Until they can tell the good with all the bad and until they can get off the American ‘body-count’ kick I would say, “Nope, you are not coming in, period.”.

Then I would go out and I would find the finest and top graduates of the most prestigious University literary and English programs. NO JOURNALISM MAJORS ALLOWED. Journalism has nothing to do with telling a good story and everything to do with agenda. I would give these other writers substantial bonuses, like big money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to enter the military and then empower them with everything they need to tell stories. Tell stories of the people, the soldiers, the country, the government, life under Saddam and life in the Islamic world and that would be the only thing that would leave my information black hole. I would censor nothing short of specifics on operational security and names in the event that it could harm the principles of the story. In short I would force the balance of good and bad and I would make sure that it reflected the reality of Iraq and told the story of the lives of the people there. I guarantee that it would make the non-soldier really wonder what they had been getting fed for the last 3 years.

So why you might ask am I putting this in my blog? Well I am a veteran. I was there and like most others I am now a different person than I was before I left. I am a different person from my military peers who have never been in combat and I do not like talking about such things outside of the circles of those who understand me. But I also have a solemn duty to guard the truth without agenda. For you see I could really care less what happens in Iraq. I have no more concern for the country of Iraq than I do the country of China. I care for the people and their future, but governments come and go. My concern is for my country and my Constitution and how I can protect the two of them from threat. Because the reality is that Iraqi democracy will be very different from ours and you know what, that is just fine. As long as in the end the security interests of the United States are met and my countrymen are safer, then I am doing my job and all is good. What is problematic is that right now, in the midst of people who have the primary concern of toppling administrations and finding more power for themselves, the truth, the truth that will help protect and defend the Constitution that I risked my life to look after, is being sold out for personal agenda.

Personal agenda trumping truth that is the threat and that is why you, as American civilian citizens, may lose the war while WE as American soldiers will not. The key is demanding the truth, the ENTIRE truth and ignoring anyone who speaks for the sake of personal gain on any level. I would love to change the paradigm myself, but as I said before, I am not a policy guy…

More on flying later.

FF

Flying the Push-me-pull-you

I must admit that I am a high wing guy. I love high wing airplanes, always have. So if you look at my preferences you will find Cubs, Taylorcrafts, Dorniers and of course Cessnas.


I own a Cessna 172, one that I am trying to sell to a buyer interested in a 40 year old manual-flap equipped 172, but only because I live too far away now to fly it regularly and the airstrip next to my house is short enough to need a Maule or a Cub. Making a 172 into a STOL airplane is akin to making silk purses out of sow’s ears; tough at best. But if Cessna had ever made a STOL airplane like the Helio-courier, you can bet that I would have dropped money down right now on one. I just love Cessna airplanes.

I like them so much that I have made it a personal goal to fly every Cessna currently made, and a few no longer in production. The Cessna singles are pretty easy as everyone has one or knows someone with one. Of the recent Cessna singles, only one, the 207, has eluded my hands. I have flown every one from the 150 right up into the 208. Some of you will mention the earlier 140s and 195s but I will defend myself and qualify that I want to fly airplanes built from 1960 on.

Twins are harder to come by.

I have flown the 421, the 414 and the Conquest I. The Conquest is my favorite of the lot. The 310 has not materialized nor have machines like the Crusader and the jets might never happen. In addition, for the longest time there remained a twin that I drooled over but just never seemed to be available. That twin, the 337 or Skymaster has long held my fascination as a machine that would lend itself to a lot of fun and interesting flying. I even considered buying one myself but was rapidly discouraged from that because of the fact that there is no possibility of operating one of them out of my airstrip.

I thought that I would never get the chance to fly the thing and then a month ago, a friend called me and asked me to go for a ride.

My friend looked long and hard to find the right Skymaster. After some serious traveling and searching he finally found the 337 that worked for him and plunked down the money. Shortly thereafter, although I don’t think it was ominous of anything in particular, he developed a landing gear failure in the same airplane and nearly belly-landed the beauty back at home base. Aside from that speed bump in the process of acquisition, the airplane has been a great addition to his life. He is a business owner and uses it to go all over the Eastern USA. He was quick to let me know that none other than Anchorman Hugh Downs had once flown his Skymaster. He got the deal that he was looking for when he bout his 337.

After doing a flight physical for my friend on a perfectly clear Ohio day I met him at the airport where he was completing his preflight. The 337 is nothing if it is not unusual. Twin booms and a connecting elevator along with the vortex generators and aft mounted engine suggest to the casual observer that perhaps the engineers were still suffering from a bit of the hangover induced from a night of heavy drinking. For the pilot however, all of this stuff really makes a great deal of sense. The twin booms add considerable structural strength to the overall airframe while creating a place to put the engine and creating a barrier to people who might be tempted to walk behind the airplane while it is running. All of the scoops and VGs are there to smooth airflow and increase cooling to that rear fan. It is not an uncommon practice for 337 owners to taxi on the front engine and start the rear just prior to departure in order to keep the temps down and minimize overheating of the rear engine.

In our case we started both as per the checklist and kept the power settings to something reasonable while the oil loosened up and found its way to the moving parts.

After completing the walk around my friend opened the door, allowed my son to climb in the back and then to my surprise he offered me the left seat. I do a lot of flying with friends; far more in fact than I do of my own airplane. I do a lot of the flying when I fly with friends but my view is most often from the right. I am very used to adjusting to the parallax incurred by scanning across the panel. To be allowed the left seat in someone else’s airplane is nothing less than a privilege and truly an honor. I offered the proper “Are you sure?” and I certainly didn’t wait to ask again.

There is a very cool thing about the left seat. It is, I assure you even cooler the bigger the airplane you are in. For the aviator it is a not just a physical position, it is a persona and a role that we all aspire too and we are all intimately familiar with from over a century of manned flight. The left seat is everything. If you are not sitting there you are really a passenger because it is from that seat that decisions are made and consequences felt most closely.

I looked over the panel and noticed the conspicuous lack of a place for an ignition key. Bigger airplanes have keys for the door, it is assumed that if you have any business starting the thing you will know how to do it and will not want to be bothered by twisting keys like a common automobile driver (note to self, next airplane, just install a start switch.). It is a noticeable difference and a reminder that I am once again in a “systems airplane” and ought to treat it as such.

The engines came to life without difficulty and a felt the dual throttles in my hand as I adjusted the manifold pressure and made sure that the props were full forward. The power of the airplane is such that taxing even at a low idle requires the use of occasional brakes to keep the speed to something approximating a brisk walk. For my part there was no hurry because at the end of the ride I would once again find myself in the world of the single fan for a long time and I really relish the feeling of multiple throttles in my palm.

The taxi, run-up and departure checklists were completed and after the obligatory blessing from the tower I did what I have always known to do but have never actually done in a 337; I advanced the right for ‘rear’ throttle and waited for the roar to increase confirming that my rear fan was healthy, at halfway through my advance I began to push the left for ‘forward’ throttle forward and released the brakes. Throughout the entire process my friend remained silent and allowed me my space, something that I am most grateful for because the flight became not so much a trip but a session of therapy. At the numbers a crosscheck confirmed everything in the green and I awaited 65knots to rotate.

The Skymaster unstuck quickly and once I saw the end of the runway disappear beneath the nose and the VSI in the positive I called out “Positive rate, gear up” and flicked the gear lever. The 337 accelerated a noticeable 5 knots and the flaps were retracted in the climb as we passed 500 feet AGL.

By this time I was fully in my element and I began the right turn out to a heading that would take us up to Cambridge, OH. Leveling off at 3000 feet I was amazed at how much the Skymaster flies like all big Cessna’s, like a 182. The glass arcs back just like the 208 and the 177 and you can easily look back and over the wing to clear turns. It is this feature of the Cessna family that makes me certain that should I ever see the $1.5 million dollars, I would own a Caravan. It is the finest airplane in the world for a single pilot who needs to get places with utility.

We did some local area orientation and I pointed out to my friend a few of the local private grass strips so that in the event that he ever needed to get down he would know he had places to go before he got to PKB. Once this was done we headed for Cambridge and enjoyed the morning.

I read a lot of comments in various aviation forums from people who wonder how to bring big airplanes down. I do not brag when I say this, but for whatever reason and at the hands of pilots far more advanced and experienced than I, I have never had this concern. It has been for as long as I can remember and intuitive thing the nature of landing an airplane. I have always seen it terms of energy and by the grace of God I was given the ability to see 10 minutes ahead and know about power reduction and descent planning.

So it was without fanfare that I asked what approach flaps and gear operating speeds were and I was obliged with an answer. We entered about a 2 mile 45 for the left downwind 4 Cambridge and by this time I had 18 inches of manifold pressure coinciding with approach flap speed and down they went. As soon as flaps were set the gear came down and I waited on downwind for the speed to decay and the green lights of gear down to confirm what I was seeing in the wing-mounted mirrors. I turned base and added flaps and finally turned and settled into a 3 mile final.

Final flaps and props forward all the way. Lights on, just as if we had flown over the marker and down the Skymaster came. She needed a little power reduction and some forward trim of all things to stay settled but as the Brits say, “Bob’s your uncle.” She came down and flared beautifully, stall horn blaring as we settled onto the mains. Full aft yoke to fly the nose down and we were there. Man I love that airplane.

After some chatting with the locals and a few softdrinks we repeated the process and flew home. Again I was privileged by a friend who remarked that it was fun to have someone else do all the flying while he sat and watched. For my part I offered to shoot some air-to-air photos for him of his airplane because it was the least that I could do after both flying his airplane and having my offer to help with fuel refused. I am very fortunate to have such generous people in my sphere of influence. No worried there at all.

My son and I drove home, fix firmly in heart and mind. A dose of something bigger that I will likely never do regularly but nevertheless adds a considerable amount of joy to my life as a pilot; flying bigger machines and doing it reasonably well. I consoled myself with the knowledge that while my life seems determined to keep me in the realm of small airplanes and grass fields I nevertheless get just enough of multiple throttles to satisfy myself that in fact, I can do the job and really enjoy myself while doing so.

So that is the 337 and another unique entry into my logbook. Another day in the life of a man enthralled by the wing…

Fly Safe.

FF

Joy of Flying: Economics

Now it is clear that flying and things of the wing are passionate pursuits of mine. Indeed they fill much of my day in the form of thoughts and aspirations; already today in the office I have considered my new electric attitude indicator, wondered about the sale of MPP and read almost all of the latest FLYING magazine and I am still interested in what the evening will hold. Aviation is just as much a part of me as my liver is and so it is something that I take for granted. My wife doesn’t even bat an eye when I suggest that my shop needs a windsock above it or that I “need” NEXRAD weather capability in my airplane. Indeed if she were to walk in one day and see the hundreds of models and prints and other airplane associated things boxed up she would likely call the ambulance for something would most certainly be wrong with me.

But flying is not all about the wing. It has been said that the wing is what keeps an airplane flying but what gets it off the ground in the first place is money. More than anything aviation is about money. You can have the nicest Lancair IVP in the world but lacking money (and in its case, a lot of it) it will sit right where it stands gathering dust and refuse from things that do not require money to fly, merely the seed to keep their wings flapping.

You blow a radial engine up, you will write a very large check. You waste the turbocharger in your T210, you will need the equivalent of the downpayment on a very nice home to fix it. You decide that flying localizer approaches is passe’ and you would prefer the RNAV world with lots of color and moving maps, consider your Honda Civic and you will have equivalent value to what that pretty color TV in your panel will cost you. Fly to Hilton Head from PKB in a 172 for lunch, you will spend every bit of $200.00 on those burgers.

Money and economics determine everything. You can buy a nice Aztec for a relatively small amount of dough but if you want to fly it and insure that if you barf an engine and end up in a residential neighborhood on top of someone’s new Ford Excursion that someone will cover the cost of that misadventure, you are going to shell out a LOT of money for fuel and insurance. It is incredible how much stuff costs.

Now consider the 5000 NM trip that my wife and I just took to Hawaii; specifically Oahu. James Michener wrote an epic by the name of “Hawaii” and in it he described the perilous journey of some 6 months that it took to sail a brig from Boston to the same islands. My wife and I got there in a total of 12 hours, 2 of which were part of the layovers.

In 10 hours we covered 5000 NM and then just a week later we did it again in reverse. We did it for about $1000.00 or roughly $0.10/NM which is actually better than what I get in terms of mileage in my Honda. I just downloaded information from expedia.com about a fictional trip from Columbus, OH to Guam. For $1254.00 you can do a round trip. That is amazing considering that some 10 years ago the same trip cost $3000.00. So in real terms, the trip has not just gotten better by 1/3rd, adjusted for inflation the trip has dropped to about ¼ of its cost in just 10 years. If you don’t think that is remarkable, especially when gasoline prices have risen by well over 50% in one year, then I doubt that there is anything that would impress you.

But…

There is a downside to all of this. One of the reasons for the dramatic drop in costs in travel stems from reduction in overhead and increases in efficiency. My wife and I watched the events unfold around a JetBlue A320 which was suffering from a certain malady of its nosewheel, one that has been experienced by other A320s we were to find out, and we were doing so in front of the TV outside the Baskin and Robbins on Hickam Air Force Base. My wife seemed very concerned about this whole deal until I got a good look at the airplane circling. Mains down, nosewheel down, I suspected that the problem was a gear locking problem or a failure of the gear to retract. I looked at my wife and said, “This will be a non-event.”

She looked at me as if I was intoxicated. “How can this be a “non-event”?

“Gear problems are well understood and expected failure modes, I am certain that there is a checklist for whatevcr it is and nobody is foaming the runway so I am pretty certain that the gear is locked. This will be just fine.”

Her concern was understandable from the fact that she was about to board a 757 for a 5 hour flight across the Pacific to Los Angeles. When I remarked that the 757 was perhaps the safest airliner we could be on for the trip, she sort of rolled her eyes and we continued on to the store to finish shopping for…

…food…

You see the airlines no longer serve you food.

Where do you go to learn how to fly?

The reason why a JetBlue A320 landing and in the process machining away half of its nosegear rim on a runway at LAX is a non-event is because insurance companies have demanded that air travel become the safest means of transportation on the planet. They do this by expecting their pilots to maintain a skill level that is impeccable. There are modeled and anticipated failure modes for everything. They certified the GE-90 engine for the 777, an engine that allows for several hours of single engine ETOPS in the event of failure, by shooting frozen birds through the thing while it was running. They don’t break and if by shear odds, the kind that Las Vegas casino owners would kill for, one does fail the odds of the second one dying before landfall is made makes the entire process of calculating odds a waste of time.

There was considerable hand wringing last year when a 747 Captain elected to continue flying to his destination after he lost power in one of his four engines. An understanding of the nature of certification would have settled all of that and assured people that proceeding on was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. There was no danger to anyone on board and the Captain probably saved the company many tens of thousands of dollars in fuel costs and the passengers hours or days of inconvenience by getting them to their destination on the first try.

Such events are an example of two things becoming very prominent in commercial air travel; extreme reliability of machinery and pilots who are cut out of a very rigid and well defined mold. People got upset because an experienced Captain made a calculated and reasonable decision based upon experience and probability. People were upset because he actually used some judgment. There is no room for any deviation of skills or actions in aviation. One of the results of this is that airline travel has become another form of public transportation. It is just a bus by any other name.

This is exemplified by the growing number of portly airline pilots that I see in airports. When I was a kid, the only airline pilots were the ones who looked like they had just traded their F101 Voodoo for a 727. They all looked like military pilots. Their eyes were steely and their physiques and demeanors bespoke of men ready to do “battle” with the air. Today I find myself glancing back as I see some guy who reminds me of Ralph Cunningham towing his roll-aboard and map case down the jetway; four stripes on his cuffs. The image is even better when I see the same fellow munching on a Big Mac as he walks. Happens all the time today.

Part of me rejoices in all this change because I will think nothing of buying two roundtrip tickets to Sacramento next January for my son and I to visit my sister and her family. I will spend less on those tickets than I will make in a week of work. Fly across the United States and back for less than a week’s wages. There is nothing short of amazing about that notion. But part of me is saddened because as airliners become buses that anyone and everyone can, and does, afford and use, the age of elegance that marked the flying boats and the Super Constellations is all but dead. There is nothing elegant about airline travel today. There is nothing sacred about being a passenger as we rudely found out when we deplaned in Chicago to stretch our legs between LA and Columbus and came back to find that the American Flight Attendants had felt so pressured to do a 45 minute turn that they ‘tossed’ all of our food without considering their manifest and who was continuing on. The fact is that they just don’t care.

My wife and I are not rude people or demanding. We left a Burberry Shopping bag in our seats, obviously filled with recently purchased food and without a pause the FA’s tossed it out with the trash.

I responded to this by telling the senior FA that 1. They have a manifest and they should have checked it for passengers continuing on since it is a security issue and 2. 45 minutes is a lifetime at Southwest. They would be well advised to pick up something from them because if they couldn’t turn a Super 80 in 45 minutes, Chapter 11 was soon too follow. Our $20.00 reimbursement was tossed unceremoniously into my wife’s lap. For my part I resisted the temptation to tell the Captain to submit his resume to Southwest because of the Chapter 11 thing. I now wish I had because I doubt that he has any idea what is happening in the rear. He’ll join the ranks of unemployed pilots stuttering through their Air Inc Job search trying to figure out where all the good times have gone.

Arrival at my home was met with a phone call on my wife’s part to AA’s customer service rep, not because of the food, that was long forgotten, but because all of our luggage arrived with slices in it. It looked just as if someone had taken a box knife to the luggage and sliced 1-2 inch slices into it. The disembodied voice at AA asked why we had not presented that to the people in Columbus. We just traveled 12 hours and I had to work the next day and adjust to 6 time zones, we thought customer service was there so we could go home and call and make our claim. Nope. Sorry. No help to be found.

I have stated before that under 1000 NM I will always drive if I have any choice in the matter. The simple math in all of that is that I can do 1000 NM by car in a long day of driving and at the end of the trip I have a car to use and none of the hassle that the airlines dish out. Over 1000 NM it gets to be a bit difficult and certainly a problem logistically because you just cannot safely do that in a day. For that kind of trip I will still face the indignity of getting onboard an airliner.

It is also worth noting that I am not restricted from carrying a knife or pair of scissors in my car. I did not mention that some 1300 NM out over the Pacific enroute to Honolulu I was asked to assist a passenger in distress? While starting an IV line on the passenger, now patient, in the back of the 757 I found myself with only a single syringe from the “medical kit” on board and no scissors to cut tape. Try treating a heart attack patient with one syringe. Fortunately for the patient it was a much simpler problem, but as I rigged a solution in the night over the ocean I found it ironic that the first Flight Attendants were in fact Registered Nurses and today they are at best uncertain of how to care for the most basic of problems. Crossing oceans without a pair of scissors or even a dose of morphine for pain. Add to this a passenger who thought nothing of getting on an over the ocean flight with a known medical problem that had every likelihood of deteriorating enroute and you have the perfect illustration as to why the bus is the best descriptor of modern commercial travel. There is nothing unique about crossing oceans today.

Captain, update that resume. Herb, et al, get those 737s ETOPs certified.

In my practice I care for several airline captains. Stories of people urinating in the aisles are not unknown, stories of people slobbering drunk raiding the liquor on the beverage cart are not unknown and I even know one pilot who is close personal friends with another captain who happened to be piloting an airplane in which a passenger was able to bring a pig, yes swine, barnyard animal, pig, on board as a human assistant animal. Public transportation in all respects, now if buses would just serve booze. Go to Central America and chickens and pigs are not uncommon on a bus.

Do I want my wife exposed to this stuff again? Will I be willing to pay an additional $50 -$100 to avoid American Airlines? YOU BET.

First class passengers, the largely business oriented group that are in some miniscule part funded by my stock holdings in their companies, still enjoy first class and are treated well accordingly, meals and hot towels abound. Ironically those of us who are actually paying for our tickets and not using a business travel account are treated to the absurdities already documented. Nobody cares because they know that those of us in the back by and large are riding American not because we want to ride American but because by some Byzantine and alchemical twist of fates the AA flight from Columbus to Honolulu on the 14th returning the 21st of September was priced cheaper than any other going the same way. FA’s see us as just another group of penny-pinching bargain shoppers deserving of worse service than we might get at a WalMart. I am no kidding, you get better service today at a WalMart than you do with most major airlines.

Southwest walk up fares are pricier than most airlines and they do not fly to Hawaii, but they remain committed to keeping passengers feeling good about Southwest. It works.

Now back to the disjointed question above; Where do you go to fly?

This payoff of cheap flying has come not in small part because insurance companies have demanded such exacting standard in flying and made it so safe that people feel safe enough to get on the planes to go places. This has driven up demand, increased services and driven down costs. The economics are much like that with home computers. The first personal computer I ever saw was a basic Texas Instruments scientific calculator programmed by small plastic strips that sold for $200.00 in 1977. That calculator did less than the $15.00 scientific that I can buy at WalMart. (There it is again, I wonder if WalMart will play into this later?) More people more airplanes more companies more competition. How to stay competitive?

Curiously, the airlines have not read “Nuts” or they happen to employ such imbeciles as CEOs, that they cannot seem to figure out the system. The system so well described by Mr. Kelleher. Amazingly while Southwest keeps gaining market share the airlines are being forced into a Southwest mold as they speed toward Chapter 11. Lest you think I am being too harsh on others consider that I own US Air, United and AirTran stock, I myself have failed to purchase Southwest stock.

If you are wondering, Yes, if I were the CEO of American, I could do a better job.

Insurance companies have made it such that almost anyone can afford to buy a light twin, say an Apache, but you will not be able to fly it with coverage for the odd engine failure over downtown Detroit because the insurance company will make keeping your insurance in force so expensive through mandated re-currency training you will not risk leaving the ground. It is the same phenomenon with flight schools. Our last flight school locally just closed and re-opened as a flying club because the insurance cost so much that it was economically unviable to stay open.

Think LSA will change the complexion of flying in the United States? When a new “Cub” costs $80,000.00 the hull insurance alone will make it cost prohibitive to own one. Insurance companies already demand frequent simulator training to insure a twin pilot, how long before the same is required of the 210 pilot and how long after that will a 172 pilot need an appointment at SimCom just to keep his insurance? That is something that LSA manufacturers need to understand. Unless they can lower the insurance premiums on their airplanes through reduction of the cost of the airplane they will not sell enough of them to make the concept of LSAs available to the masses, which I might point out was the entire reason behind creating LSAs in the first place.

Is an aviation community solely made up of Airline pilots and very wealthy bored people who can afford to travel to Florida to find a flying school really the aviation community that we want in the United States? Mind you, I can afford to fly. I will continue to afford to fly, but I am really worried that the future of flying in the USA will be only people who learned to fly to get a job and the odd group of us ducks who want to build our own airplanes. This is not the group of people got us to the moon and who created wonder in the form of actually flying to pancakes on a Saturday morning. In my mind this country needs to be filled with people who learn to fly a Piper Cub at their local airport. That is what motivated me. I spent almost every day of my childhood in Redding, California looking over the fence of St Joseph elementary school at the ramp of Benton Airpark and dreaming about what flying would actually be like.

When we demand flying become so common that everyone can afford it, ultimately we make flying so expensive that nobody will be able to do it. Does that make sense? In the process we lose the magic of actually controlling the machine as it lifts off of the grass on a crisp fall morning. We might get a ticket from Cincinnati to Phoenix for a day’s pay, but we will never be able to enjoy the experience of traveling from Cincinnati to Columbus for a hamburger because the cost of actually doing that will actually be more than the trip to Arizona.

There is no wonder in a bus.

Fly Safe,

FF

Dirty Little Secrets

It happens not infrequently to me. I get a call from a pilot wanting to renew his medical and I always end up asking the question, "Before you come out, are there any medications or medical problems that I need to know about and do you wear contact lenses?".

There is occassionally a heavy pause at the other end of the line and then the, "Er, uh, well, I take drug 'x' for this and that but I only take it when I need too...".

Let's get something straightened out right now; Bad news NEVER gets better with time.

The fact is that if you are taking unreported medications, your medical is null and void right now. You might not remember this but when you filled out your forms on the last medical you were also promising to report any changes in your health and avoid flying after treatments until you are cleared by your AME. The minute you start therapy for a new condition, that little white piece of paper that you worry so much about is good only for starting a small fire. Really.

A medical is not a get out of jail free card for the time period that it is issued for, it is a place marker in time saying to the FAA that on the date you had your exam, your health was in compliance with the standards seen as necessary for the conduct of safe flight. As long as nothing changes, the marker is valid, but if it changes the first thing you ought to do is pick up the phone or email your flight doc.

Just today I had a conversation with an airman who admitted, sheepishly, that he was taking drug 'x'. He started talking really fast and I had to slow him down and tell him that taking the drug was a non-issue, I was certain that I could get it waivered or verbally approved by tomorrow when he gets his exam, the bigger issue was the witholding of that information.

People only withold information when they think that disclosure might cost them dearly. Well let me tell you what will cost you more; crashing your airplane or running into another airplane during taxi, getting a mandatory drug test, failing it and then watching helplessly as the insurance company denies coverage and the FAA enforces its action on you as they recently did in California.

http://www.oig.dot.gov/StreamFile?file=/data/pdfdocs/opsafepilot.pdf

Sobering eh?

Likely in most of these cases, all that the pilots needed to do was tell the truth and the end of the story would have been a short delay while waiver was obtained and then the pilot would have been in compliance and no error would have occurred.

In nearly a decade of being an aviation medical specialist I have only seen a couple of pilots who did not get medicals AND all of them were due to the fact that the pilots did not submit the requested medical information for the FAA. Had they submitted I am certain that they would have been issued waivers.

So if you are facing the possibility of having to report something that you are not comfortable with, I encourage you to start by examining the above website. Then email me and I will help you through the process if your AME is unfamiliar with it of getting your waiver request put together for the Civil Aeromedical Institute. It takes a bit of work up front but in the end the clear conscience and valid insurance coverage is worth it.

FF

Why the Flying Fox

It is not a matter of vanity that I refer to myself, operations, et al, as 'Flying Fox'. The middle english word for "fox" is in fact 'tod'. Well if you do the basic analysis it becomes pretty reasonable that I am a 'flying tod' but lacking the panache' of 'fox' I chose the latter. My brother got the looks and I got the brains so I take what I can get.

Now I would make note that in contemporary english, the sort that we fought a revolution to avoid, the word 'tod' actually refers to a clump of sod. That doesn't really enthuse me and I only bring it up because I know that there are those out there who would actually Google 'tod' to see if i am telling the truth. Just make certain that you know it is Middle and not Contemporary english that we are discussing here.

Lastly if you recall the melancholy animated cartoon by the name of The Fox and the Hound (we actually have a well worn video of that here at the homestead) you will make note that the fox's name is in fact, Tod. So as far as the etymology goes I think we have covered it.

Now I began Flying Fox Services as just that, a service. I have a good day job, actually a couple of them, so I run FFS because I enjoy it, it provides a service and frankly, I just like things that fly, machines and people. I wanted to be an airline pilot but my eyesight and a very insightful family friend correctly steered me away from the predictable uncertainty of a life flying jets and the 'cattle' in the back. I cannot be more grateful that my desire to drive 747s was brainwashed out of me because lets face it, flying airliners is tough work. My buddy at Comair about had a nervous breakdown over the strike and I felt for him every time he called to talk about how messed up his airline had become. Not good.

But pilots, be they ATPs, students or that odd category known as military aviators, need advocates. They need people to help them pay attention to the critical system known as the Mark 1 Mod 0 Human Body because you can have all the checklists and emergency procedures (EPs) in the world to troubleshoot your Airbasher 9000 but it is all for naught if you happen to completely occlude that Left Anterior Descending Artery with a caffeine-nicotine-lack-of-exercise-induced blood clot while you are inside the marker on an ILS to minimums. Seriously. Happens a lot more than you think.

So Flying Fox is first and foremost about educating pilots about their health and debunking this absurd notion that pilots need to contract people fo hundreds of dollars to 'negotiate' a medical from the folks at Oklahoma City. I know a few of those guys and IF they had any spare time away from the 400,000 some odd medicals that they process every year, they definitely would not spend it trying to figure out ways to screw pilots out of medicals. They would be out playing golf or spending time with their kids or flying. The idea of OK City as a place to hamper pilots is a huge myth propogated by overpaid and oversupplied editors of popular flying magazines and pilots who are probably trying to hide stuff that they really ought to get checked out.

Believe me, I know pilots, I know how they think.

As well Flying Fox exists to promote aviation safety and enthusiasm for flying. I see perhaps 100 new flying students a year and we spend a considerable amount of time just talking about how cool it is that something like physics can cause a piece of aluminum to levitate off the ground. We talk sailplanes and jets and 172s and Cubs and SpaceShipOne, because, well as a child of the 60s, my world was Niel Armstong and Scott Crossfield and frankly, those guys rock!. I want to see the wonder in young people's hearts and minds that I felt as a child when an Apollo Capsule linked up with a Soyuz capsule 300 some miles above my childhood head in Norther Idaho. Reds and us shaking hands, IN SPACE! Wow!

I frnakly think it is a crime of the highest order that we eliminate our largest cities from GA activity because some commercial airliners were hijacked. We all well know that the White House is Cessna 150 proof. It is not a theory, it has been tested, so why are we worried about allowing people into College Park. Hey I did Iraq, I know what it is like to be scared of bombs, let's grow up, this is the United States. If Mohamed the militant islamo-fascist wants to detonate a dirty bomb over DC, well the fix for that is not a big red circle on a map, the fix for that is making sure Mohamed has no access to the 182 in the first place.

I know this because I know the late Alfred Schultz. What a great guy. Alfred had two air to air kills that he told me about at Sun and Fun one year. He got them in his Piper L-4 (Cub) during World War II by baiting a couple of Messerschmidts to follow him into the dirt. He pulled, they pushed, he won, they lost. Well, just think about 2 kg of plutonium, 250 pounds of high explosives, nap of the earth flight...come on, I am not going to complete the math problem here and I guarantee you that if Mohammed can figure out how to rig a Nokia cell phone to a couple of 155mm rounds (and he can because I have seen them) he can figure out the formula as well.

So we need some wonder and sanity and we need local flying programs to get kids excited about the uniquely American liberty of being able to fly an airplane regardless of social class or access to extremely expensive avionics.

Flying Fox also exists to be a resource for charity flying when needed. I encourage all of you to look into http://www.volunteerpilots.org/ because Small Planes Save Lives and the VPA is just the coolest group of people in the world with a great brunch every year up at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport.

Lastly Flying Fox does some proprietary things on the side and if I have to explain what I mean by 'proprietary' then you probably don't really need to know what I mean by proprietary. Suffice it to say that ultimately it is for the benefit and future of the United States of America, the greatest nation in the history of the world. As a veteran, I feel proud to tell you that I have earned the right to make that claim.

So that is it in a nutshell. I am going to develop this blog and hopefully it will bring amusement, education and interest to everyone.

I would also mention that for several years now I have written an ad hoc column called the Joy of Flying, which I posted regularly at a great website called www.flightsim.com I am now moving that here and it will appear under the title Joy of Flying.

As well, I am an avid user of the flight simulator software known as x-plane. It is really a super program that is constantly under development and has an active user group and great modeling. I have been an owner since version 5.0 and it gets substantially better every time it is upgraded. Updates within versions are always free and the lead designer is always an email away. Austin Meyer is a great American because he has taken an idea, his liberty within the free market, listened to his users and made something work.

Spread the word around about my blog and I will respond and develop it as I see the trends and requests develop from readers.

Fly Safe

FF

This is the initial entry to the Flying Fox Hangar. Future updates will be posted as they come to mind and information related to flying and all things aviation will be added as interesting items present themselves.