Profiles in Courage

In the midst of all of this rhetoric about the ills affecting the USA a shining star continues to beam brightly with the penetrating rays of duty, integrity and mission orientation.

Sheriff Joe Arpiao of Maricopa County, Arizona continues to redeem himself as a member of that ever shrinking club; “Patriotic Americans with common sense.”

If you don’t know whom Sheriff Arpiao well you have been missing some of the best press in the nation over the last decade. The good sheriff made a significant national name for himself when he started doing things like feeding bologna sandwiches to his inmates and issuing them pink underwear. When the inmates started to complain Sheriff Arpiao was ready for them; he’d had the new diet reviewed by a nutritionist to insure that it complied with requirements. Regarding the complaints about the underwear he offered, “If you don’t like in jail, don’t come back.”

In these, and many other efforts, he has demonstrated that he is a true servant of the people by demanding and maintaining the standards. The metrosexual (just what in the Sam hill is that anyway?!?) morons on the left and right coasts who suggest that Maricopa County is in “fly-over” country and irrelevant to the ‘greater’ dialogue would do very well to retain Sheriff Arpiao as the head of Homeland Security.

The latest triumph of reason over stupidity on the part of Arpiao is his recruitment of some 3000 (yes, that is thousand) members of the county posse. You see the sheriff doesn’t have the luxury of delving into hypotheticals couched in “position papers” generated in absurdly useless places like the Ivy League Schools of Government and Public Policy. No, Sheriff Arpiao has a major situation on his hands RIGHT NOW. His county is right at the front of the land invasion of the United States. Indeed, he probably understands the word “insurgency” as well or better than any other American.

As the chief lawman of the county he is sworn to protect and enforce the law. He doesn’t have time for muddle some appeals to pity like “We are just here to work, we are not breaking the law.” (A quote that I recently heard spewed from some nameless ‘Reconquista’ apologist). The fact is, and the sheriff understands this, that people who come over our borders illegally are either breaking the law or frankly intent on a violent act (invasion) of the United States. There is one exception and that is those individuals who are fleeing regimes that are frankly threatening to their lives, we call those people refugees and we call the process of them coming here ‘seeking asylum’. The problem is that Mexico is not one of those countries that we recognize as a nation from which people can come seeking asylum. Even if we did, the popular vote, as expressed above, by the ‘reconquistadors’ is that they are here not to escape persecution on the part of El Presidente; they are here for work, and that is not breaking the law.

Most sheriffs don’t have a lot of money to hire loads of deputies. Heaven knows that the INS with a federal budget cannot seem to do its job of stopping the hoards, what is a rural sheriff to do? When sheriffs can’t hire lots of people they can, in times of need, appoint private citizens as members of their “posse” to address situations when they simply need manpower to go after criminals. Understand, regardless of what you want to believe, people who enter the USA illegally, looking for work or not, are criminals. That’s truth. Have all your rallies or whatever, the bottom line is that every one of them is a criminal, PERIOD.

Sheriff Arpiao is going after criminals. Frankly a lot of them are more than just felons for entering the USA. A lot of them are criminals from Mexico, drug addicts, rapists and whatever else El Presidente can toss over the border. Arpiao is going after criminals just as his mandate tells him too. It would be really cool if the officials in Homeland Security would ruck up, arm up and head south. Unfortunately in the ‘enlightened’ halls of the pseudo-intelligencia of the East, actually doing your job and defending the borders of the USA causes such internal cognitive dissonance that… …”Mommy my head hurts please make it stop…”…

So we have to leave it to a sheriff in a relatively obscure little county down in the deep Southwestern United States to show us how we should do our duty. God Bless Sheriff Arpiao.

Let me point out a very simple fact. Our government has shut down on a couple of occasions. In fact, it shuts down every week. 2/7ths of the time, over a quarter of the time, our government is gone, out of touch, incommunicado. Every weekend, hundreds of thousands of local, state and federal employees head for the barn and yet life goes on. The 2% milk is still in the cooler at the local grocery and the ATMs still spit out cash if you put your pin in correctly. This is reality.

People have been talking and whining and crying that if we toss all of the illegals back over the border and enforce the laws, life as we know it and cheap tomatoes will cease to exist. That is complete balderdash. ROT. It is a philosophy propagated by individuals who either lack the balls to actually do something for their country and make a selfless decision or they are people who have a serious vested interest (read financial) in the continued use of illegal labor.

The United States of America is only going to fail if we destroy it from within. If we forget our laws and the importance of enforcing them, THEN and only then will we see the beginning of our end. It takes courage to say ‘no’, I know because as a parent I do it every day with the two little people I love more than anything in the world. I don’t cave into pressure because what they want to do isn’t hurting anyone and in fact it would make them “really happy”. If it is something that in the long term will not help them grow into healthy and moral adults, the answer is no. I cannot tell you how many useless adults I know that started out as indulged children whose parents tried to replace love and responsibility with indulgence. The result is not pretty and it certainly is not the essence of the greatest of American Heroes.

Neglecting out borders and giving a pass to those who are already here against the law, no matter how ‘happy’ it may be making them, is the equivalent of not being a responsible parent and caretaker of your blessings.

We can all give a big thanks to Sheriff Arpiao for having the strength to say “NO”.

Some guidance for election season

Can we clarify a few things?

And I know that this will be very difficult for many people to grasp because this is the season for obfuscation and muckraking. Yep, yes indeed, the TV commercials produced to get uninspired nitwits elected to office are filling the airways and if you pay attention to any of it, you will most likely find yourself steadily confused into a stupor most closely associated with the lobotomized.

So in an effort to cut through the crap and just lay it out like it is, I am going to tell you what the reality is.

1. Republicans have done a poor job at policing themselves. They have spent a considerable amount of time engaged in a lack of disclosure and a lack of frank dialogue, and in the end, it makes them look like dupes. Frankly like they have squandered the opportunity that was given to them by voters in 2004. Whether you like it or not, life was a lot better when Newt was running things. At least the man can articulate a concept and lay out a vision.

2. Democrats in the midst of having no salient compass other than the woefully tired and pathetic class warfare angle of the “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the solution is to tax the hell out of the wealthy…” have squandered their opportunity to raise the level of dialogue because frankly most of them are too chicken-you-know-what to ever leave the antiseptic confines of university campuses and actually pick up a weapon and do the dirty work of defending the Republic. Kennedy should be rolling in his grave over the joke that his party has become.

3. The slaves were freed by Lincoln, er um ahem, a Republican. Democrats were all too happy to see them continue to stay on the plantation. This is one of the principal reasons why I tend to lean toward the party of Lincoln.

4. Iraq is a very tough place.

5. Nitwits in charge, the sorts who have never left America other than on highly orchestrated junkets, read, “fact-finding tours”, have produced nothing in the way of solutions that are workable. No amount of ballyhooing can avoid the reality that none of the members of congress have said, “You know what? I am going to go volunteer for a month to embed myself with patrols and film everything I can and actually learn something about Iraq from the front.”

6. The military is and has been woefully ignorant of foreign cultures and has chosen to embrace a Tofflerian vision of technology as the panacea for all conflicts. They have chosen an easy and extraordinarily expensive approach that avoids the messy work of learning foreign languages and cultures. The people making these policy decisions have done this because they are woefully inept at understanding history, the nature of 4th generation warfare and how human beings work.

7. The HMMWV is perhaps the worst thing to ever enter the military.

8. It is incorrect to say that “We leave everything up to the commander on the ground.” and then go after washing one’s hands of everything that happens. Sorry, President Truman had a desktop sign that acknowledged his roll in the Unity of Command. A 5-Star lost his job because he failed to remember that little sign and upon whose desk it sat.

9. More troops would not have made a difference. That is like saying that more money would have saved the welfare system; aq familiar mantra of dispossessed and moronic liberals. We have spent more than any nation in history on welfare and we have the highest teen pregnancy rate in our history. These are tired and uninspired taunts raised by nitwits who think that a diploma from Georgetown makes them subject matter experts on everything. That said, an immediate installation of martial law and a shoot on sight curfew after the kinetics stopped, might have helped.

10. Putting a civilian in charge of Iraq, read CPA, was a very bad idea. Japan today owes a lot to the fact that a soldier ran the place after the war. A gringo, in a suit, in the middle of Baghdad, was not the authoritarian figure that Iraqi’s needed to see after the war. Any basic understanding of Middle Eastern culture would have made this clear. Oh and by the way, we should pass a law that says that any military officer who voices reservations about their command’s actions AFTER retirement, and cannot support that they held that position and conveyed it to higher command with an email or written memo trail created before they retired, will not receive any retirement benefits. The law should also say that any officer sanctioned for expressing internal written concerns over command’s policies will be compensated in retirement at a rate 1.5 times the standard rate, provided their reservations were made to their leadership and open for scrutiny. I for one am having a very difficult time reconciling my former division commander’s choice to criticize actions AFTER he retired. He was in charge of my life and if things were so damnably bad why didn’t stars get laid on the table to look out for us troops?

11. Saying I voted for the troops before I voted against them is a highly effective method of illustrating the profound lack of time that one has spent not being a soldier, not being outside of a comfort zone and not having any idea how foreign policy as the world’s sole superpower really works.

12. Lot’s of us qualified for purple hearts in the same manner that a certain Swift Boat veteran did for one of his and lots of us never claimed one. It would be a dishonor to all those kids in Walter Reed and Bethesda to do so, and again, it makes me glad that things went the way that they did.

13. Being the wife of a president is in no way a qualification for being the president. Certain people would be wise to remember that fact.

14. The United States needs to seriously look at the wasting of billions on contractors and realize that US Army cooks are a pretty good bargain. Contractors make sense if you plan on being someplace for 30 days or less. I ate out of an Army mess trailer and did just fine in Iraq. I shudder to think what my DFAC trips cost the US Taxpayers (including myself).

15. The United States needs to have a bottom up review of every weapon system and objectively determine what sucks and what works. Then toss the former and keep the latter. We also need to spend more than a few minutes in a bar in Maclean, VA, determining what soldiers ‘need’. The South Africans have 4 decades of countermine and IED warfare under their belt. What brain trust in acquisition failed to inquire of them just what kind of vehicle might be useful in a place like Iraq? What brain trust pushed the buying of HMMWVs instead of useful urban warfare vehicles? I cannot believe that 10 years AFTER the Soviets imploded that we still thought our wars would be fought in Fulda and procured based upon this notion. Rumsfield was right, “You go to war with the army you have…” Guess what? Rumsfield inherited his army from someone else and they had plenty of time to analyze and configure it for what we would face today. Let’s see, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo all happened under the previous watch and they bear a strikingly similar resemblance to Iraq. I guess blue dresses kept the serious business of configuring an order of battle for the future conflicts as a lower priority. You go to war with the Army you get, and if the people who give it to you are tactical and operational idiots, well, you do the math.

16. Politicians that can only criticize their opponents and avoid discussing ideas and the future of the nation need to be marginalized and encouraged to seek employment outside the government in the low level management positions for which they are obviously well-suited.

17. Politicians who have so much extra time on their hands that they can spend it emailing minors and discussing lewd sex acts, driving while intoxicated, verbally harassing a police officer, accepting free lunches and claiming ignorance of conflicts of interest or taking lavish trips to play golf in foreign countries need to be immediately identified and forced through overt shame into resignation.

18. It would behoove us all if every member of congress was barred from residence outside of their home state, forced to sleep on a military cot in their office while in session, forbidden from participating in any fund raising while congress is in session AND forbidden from the use of any personal funds for re-election AND subject to the exact same laws and penalties of the citizenry. I suspect that we might see more sobriety in the performance of government duties. As well, lobbyists should be banned from Washington, DC. Lobbyists should be forced to meet with congress members in the member’s district, in a public place, so that any discussion is open to observation by the public.

19. What part of “Mission Complete” was thought to be representative of operations in Iraq and what idiot put it on a banner on the superstructure of the Abe Lincoln? A lot of us in OIF II are wondering about that right now. Whoever it was needs to be publicly identified and fired immediately.

20. Finally, the healthiest way to approach the election is to turn off all televisions and simply Google both candidates and read what comes up. Pretty quickly you can get a good idea what you are getting into and frankly, no matter what the party, my recommendation is that you vote against the incumbent if they have served more 2 or more terms.

Just some thoughts after a long month of bad dreams.

Just something to brighten the day...

An elegant airplane from a more civilized age...

Doldrums...

As I write the Israelis are continuing their operations in Lebanon. The ‘peaceful and delightfully social-conscious’ members of Hezbollah are actively trying to get surface to air missile from Iraq, who in turn will have most likely procured said missiles from either China or Russia and all is moving merrily toward Armageddon…

Oh, come on! You can’t believe that. Armageddon is not coming soon, at least not until the Israelis finally decide that enough is enough and drop a nuke on the nutjobs running Syria and Iran, but that is not likely to happen because the Israelis, being westerners and attuned to western morality, are not Muslims and therefore they don’t see homicidal- suicide actions as valiant and noble deeds.

So relax.

I am writing this while I wait in a wholly, a disconcertingly wholly, empty terminal ‘D’ at KCLE, otherwise known as Cleveland Hopkins International. CLE is an airport that I have never been too and much like my former local airport, KPKB, it looks as though the airport management has succeeded in completely screwing up the place. You see terminal D is the only part of the airport that is both lit up (because the 18 foot ceilings and glass all around), it is also the only terminal that doesn’t stink of mildew and some other funk that I have long learned to associate with a third world country. Parkersburg is only in the same league because of its sister airport to the east, KCKB, Clarksburg.

This terminal should be bustling, as it is, jetways are serviced by EMB-135s and Beech 1900s. I myself flew in on a SAAB 340. But there should be some 737s in front of me and a few A321s thrown in for good measure. At KPKB, there should be an alternative to Continental Express, and there used to be.

Midwest, the commuter servicing US Air used to fly full Beech 1900s out of Parkersburg to KPIT several times a day. Then one day, poof! They were gone and some goofy white Swedish T-prop showed up. I should mention that the same goofy white T-prop flew out of PKB today only a third full. Somebody screwed up.

You see, Cleveland, City of Lights, City of Magic (COLCOM) (a thinly veiled reference to Gary Newman and his some of the same name; and a title that I always add every time I reference the same city on the shores of Lake Erie), Cleveland COLCOM is NOT the gateway hub that say Charlotte, Dulles or Atlanta, heck Cincinnati, is. Cleveland COLCOM, is, well, Cleveland, and frankly that says pretty much everything.

Now somebody, somebody, most a person who was from the same graduating class as the brain trusts that relegated the serious traffic to the dank and smelly A, B and C concourses here, while leaving the spacious and light-filled D concourse empty, save for silly little jungle jets and airplanes built in a country better known for socialism, buxom blue-eyed blondes and a really slick armored vehicle called a C-SU. The world is not right.

Back to CKB.

If you were to travel to Clarksburg (really the airport is in Bridgeport, but that is another aside) and look at that airport, you would see what airports should be; vital, busy, local engines of economic commerce. On the field at CKB resides Pratt and Witney, KCI aviation, the United States Army Fixed Wing Training Site, and a host of other concerns all producing a lot of jobs and work for the community. PKB, with its unobstructed approaches and strategic location on a plateau above the river valley, is, well, the largest empty ramp in the world. There is precisely one activity on the airfield of any significance and that is Mary’s Plane View Restaurant, which is an excellent place to eat.

Why is this?

Immediately, the answer is gross incompetence. Principally a failure to see an airport for what it is; open real estate that can be managed with a lithe mind into a vibrant economic exercise and value-added benefit for a community. Or, if one chooses to utilize a dullard as an airport manager, a blank piece of grass and asphalt just begging for real estate people to show up and turn it into a golf course community with homes starting at say $325,000.00. Less inspired ‘dirt’ people might choose strip mall or failing to utilize any creativity at all, a giant morass of tract homes…if you are really an idiot, you cut big “x”s into the runway at night and make a giant park for your wife. Only mayors of corrupt cities get that privilege so by the time you get there you have really crossed over to the dark side.

All of this starts with the person/persons placed in charge of the airport.

Now there are pressures on an airport manager. Communities of the modern age hate airports. They hate the noise. They fear that every airplane on approach is going to end up a pile of flaming wreckage in their living room, or worse, in the local elementary school yard. They have lost their sense of wonder at the magic of aviation because low cost carriers have turned the B737-7 into the most technologically advanced form of mass transit the world has ever seen. The B737 is just a bus to most people and frankly, a bus that takes them to their obliged business meetings in Sioux Falls, Crazy Aunt Millie’s in Philly every 10 years or to the dreaded 5 day Disney World nightmare when their children hit 5. So not only have people been desensitized to the magic of flight through low cost carriers, they have also been made even more annoyed by what that access opens up to them. I know I sound the cynic, but again, I am in an empty Concourse D.

The United States is unfortunately unable to remedy this problem. We are just a smidge too big. I have traveled this nation coast to coast on Amtrak. It takes about 56 hours. Well, I should qualify that; I have gone from Toledo to Sacramento and that is not quite coast to coast, but long enough. Long enough to understand that trains are not the answer. Even if we were to come up with something like the French TGV, it would still take something in excess of a day to go from NYC to San Francisco. The principal obstacle being the very un-French, but very American in a breathtaking sense, Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains. You can do the same trip in a silly little jungle jet in about 5 hours, and get this, it will cost LESS!

Nobody wants to take the train, because the trains smell like Concourses A and B at KCLE. People can take the smell for a couple of hours (as they must as they wait for their connecting flight) but not for 56 hours. That is a problem. You pay more, you smell more and in the end it costs you more time to get there. Trains are not the answer.

As I look around CLE I see a lot of excess capacity. Cleveland COLCOM is a city on a ventilator with serious heart failure. It now holds the distinction of having the highest unemployment rate in the entire state of Ohio; something over 30%. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame notwithstanding, this town is dying. It is dying because it was built on manufacturing and that is rapidly becoming a foreign concept to the people of the USA.

The USA is today a niche technology giant with a lot of services thrown in for support. Microsoft is a niche company in terms of manufacturing and even then, its products will be made in some sweatshop governed by Beijing and not in unused industrial space in Elyria, OH. Cleveland’s weather sucks. I mean that, there is just no better word. Frankly, Ohio’s weather sucks. If you are a car worker who has a high school education with little in the way of technology background, you will put up with weather that sucks because you have a good job at GM. When GM implodes, well you may not have many options. You technology savvy friends will have moved on to the Carolinas, which is where all Ohioans REALLY want to move too. That is why Raleigh-Durham has exploded in terms of growth; good weather, smart people, supportable industry.

The other reason why I know that Cleveland COLCOM is dying is the NASA hangar on the field at CLE.

Huh!?!

Yep, the NASA hangar.

The NASA hangar at CLE looks like a giant eyesore. The paint is faded, the hangar is a dump. The principal space agency of the US Government is maintaining a facility that looks like it should sit at Baikonur (Baikonur for those of you who are not aware, is the ramshackle ‘space city’ of the Russians. It is actually no longer in Russia so it makes it all the more poetic. Probably prophetic because at the rate Cleveland COLCOM is going, Canada, with its tar sands, might just try to buy Cleveland COLCOM and use it for storing oil field equipment). Cleveland COLCOM may someday no longer be part of the USA. When neither NASA nor the airport people at CLE feel it important enough to have a nice shiny hangar, it tells you something…and what it tells you is not good.

Parkersburg, for its part, just doesn’t build anything to get ugly. As you fly over PKB, you see space everywhere. Just sitting there, waiting for a maintenance base, long-term aircraft storage, simulator-training facilities…SOMETHING…other than grass to be mowed. It is so sad. Even sadder because last week at Oshkosh I got to fiddle with the disaster that Microsoft is called MSFS X. I pulled up KPKB and found my airplane sitting on an airport with taxiways to nowhere and incomplete runways. THIS at the debut of the software at the world’s largest general aviation air show/fly-in. Maybe Microsoft knows something about PKB that the rest of us only suspect?

So what is the solution?

I suppose we have to define which problem. I’ll save you the trouble and deal with one; incompetent airport managers. The simple issue is to fire them and find the youngest, most inspired airplane-loving freak kid that you can and tell them to dream big and make it work. PKB languishes because of a desire to live with the status quo. No flights, no noise, no complaints, no work, no marketing, no worries. Milquetoast existence for a manager that demonstrates that his or her top priority is to slip away with nothing but mediocrity in their path.

The strength of PKB, and CLE for that matter lies in what they do have. They have crappy weather. It is no secret that Ohio is the absolute best place in the nation to work on IFR ratings. An inspired manager would have Embry-Riddle based on the field to train their pilots. I have flown with a few E-R graduates and they didn’t do so well in Ohio weather. The Buckeye state should be selling itself as THE place to come if you want to be a proficient instrument pilot.

The second step is to focus on recurrency and maintenance. When you have a lot of empty real estate that does nothing except use gasoline to keep the lawn short, the answer is to find a way to get people on the field. After all, that is exactly what every airport-enemy, read “real estate” developer, wants to do. The idea is to make all that grass pay for itself. In the case of non-airport activities that means golf courses, condos or shopping malls. Airports can survive if they see the real estate in the same way. While it looks pretty to see all the grass, with the exception of those areas needed for regulation separation from active approaches and runways, every bit of the field needs to be occupied by paying folks.

The problem with this is that it takes an aggressive advocate to convince local leaders and business people that the field is the place where they want to be. This is not for the faint of heart. You can put a J3 up at 3000 feet. High enough that the engine will make less noise than a lawn mower on the ground and you will have the whiner that complains about the airport ‘noise’ and the treachery of these machines that could fall from the sky at any moment and kill innocent people. My personal opinion is that this group is both squeaky and small in number. Unfortunately these days it seems that they get the greatest ear. We need to change this and airport managers have to be willing to see the small number as the distractor from the greatest good.

So will it happen?

My feeling is that we are seeing the end of days for general aviation. Nobody save for a few people have a vision for the small airports of our country. The light sport aircraft movement is very interesting but in the absence of wonder on the part of young people, there is no motivation for increasing the numbers of pilots. The AOPA is concerned about this as well. People simply are not lining up to learn how to fly. Video games have a lot to do with this. People can experience much of flight by sitting at the computer. They miss out on the passion of the exercise and the feel of the wind and the sound of the air around you, but for many people, getting 80% of the experience is enough. Even if a kid gets past the video game and out to the airport, there are few flight schools left to bridge the distance between the fence and the sky.

A kid standing at an airport fence dreaming of flying will remain right there unless there is an instructor to lead him to the airplane. Some major things will have to change to reverse what has become the state of affairs in flight training. It is simply too expensive for most flight schools to remain in business.

The last impediment to flying among the masses is the discount airline. It is simply no longer novel for people to fly…well, at least ride…in an airplane. For $250.00 anybody can get a ticket to somewhere and experience a ride in an airplane. This is well within the means of most Americans. So you can’t find a school, you can sort of fly on a computer and if you really want to experience life in the clouds, $250.00 will do it for you.

Much has changed in 20 years.

Airports and aviation need to change. Not just for the sake of general aviation but for the sake of the survival of commercial aviation. The fact of the matter is that the military cannot supply the number of commercial pilots that our nation needs. The pilot pool is aging rapidly and very shortly, within a few years, there is going to be a dramatic shortage of qualified pilots in the United States. 40 years ago, between the military, local flight schools and the odd foreign pilot that arrived at our shores, we could train what we need. Not today. The development of light jet air taxis is a novel idea, but if there are few pilots to fly them, the new jets mean nothing.

Airports need to change as well. The nation needs to start seeing the local general aviation airport as an integral part of this nation’s security and safety. One need only look at the number of small airplanes that supported Hurricane Katrina Relief to see that small airplanes were integral to national disaster relief. Those little airplanes reside at the nation’s small airports. But those same airports need revenue streams to keep them alive.

Airport/airplane lovers around the nation need to communicate with their city councils and airport managers. We need to tell them that airports need to be financial powerhouses if they are to remain viable and economically attractive to communities. At some point, if a community’s job base has a large share at the local airport the whiners who complain of the noise will become marginalized be people who see the airport as a significant source of income.

The last item in this change is the need for a real concern about the state of terminals and how airports look. One of the gripes that I have about CLE is that here in the beautiful terminal D I have a full view of the less-than-beautiful terminal C and even bigger eyesores known as A and B. As capacity shrinks, airport management needs to look long term at really making the terminals look good. One of the prettiest terminals in the country is, get this, KHLG, or Wheeling, Ohio County, WV. The airport management has taken a terminal that looks like it is suited to the age of the DC-3 and turned it into one of the finest museums and tributes to commercial aviation that I have every seen. You walk into a terminal that is filled with things that people want to look at. It is worth the trip to Wheeling just to take a look.

There is a lot to be done if our commercial aviation system is to remain healthy and viable. The generation coming up will have a lot to do with what remains of general aviation in the next 20 to 40 years. This generation is going to have to become vocal at an early age if they are going to salvage anything that resembles what those of us who are older remember fondly as the time of wonder for general aviation.

Fly Safe

The 609 mile adventure

In an effort to rebalance my postings toward the aviation vein, I am going to return in a week with what I hope are four or five postings on the epic that is the Airventure, "Oshkosh" by any other name. I have a couple of Army days to put in here, but then, on Tuesday, the trailer will be hitched and off we will go for the next round in the annual pilgramage to the center of all things that fly.

So while I am gone, I ask any of you that read my postings, to forward my blog address as widely through the aviation world as possible. I will try to return the favor by bringing pictures and impressions that will be more than worth your time hitting the 'forward' button. In the meantime, have a great week and wish us all good luck as we treck to the land of cheese and the greatest aviation spectacle in the world.

FF

Standing up for the little guy

There once was a country, a little country, well not even a country, not really. More of a territory. The little land was owned and operated by a variety of interests, not the least of which was a king. The king was not particularly oppressive but that didn’t matter. The people of the land worked hard to create a place of prosperity and consistently other people, from other lands interfered and caused them grief.

Now, it should be noted that the people of the land were not the ones who were there first. In fact, long before they showed up, other people occupied the place and they also had homes and gardens and a way of life. But, as is often the case, there were problems.

The new people had come to the land trying to find a place to live freely and in peace. They had been brutalized and oppressed in their native lands and the opportunity to create a country where they could speak freely and live without fear was very powerful. So they arrived with dreams and ideas and hopes. And they built something great where little had existed before. Eventually, there were problems with the original people and there were wars and disputes, but eventually there developed a peace. Times had changed, life had changed and a new way was the path to be followed.

Nobody, in the end, complained or tried to change the fates of those involved.

I am not an apologist for the state of Israel, but the fact is that in a way very similar to the manner in which the United States came about, the Israelis arrived in a primitive land, fought their war of independence and built a nation. Nobody, save for some oddly ignorant wackos, is suggesting that we, the USA, revert back to the aboriginal method of living of the folks who were here before the Mayflower arrived. Heaven forbid! There would be no Bluetooth® enabled cell phones. What would we do?!?

Yet that is exactly what people have suggested that Israel do with regard to the Palestinians (I should note, the same people that think that it is perfectly cool to strap explosives to their daughters and make them human cruise missiles as in the photo above, nice eh? No prom for you, sis. Your fate is nested in heading for a shopping mall and wasting civilians on purpose). Well the Israelis tried it. They gave Gaza back and made it independent with a real international border. That’s what the rest of the world demanded. That is what the Arab world demanded. That is what everyone said would bring peace. Yassir Arafat said that giving land back would bring peace.

The Israelis, who actually live among the Palestinians, surrounded by people, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and an individual who has openly called for the total annihilation of Israel, had other ideas. But the rest of the world suggested that the Israelis were just ignorant of the ‘real’, peaceable, intentions of the Arabs towards them. The Israelis, the perpetual recipients of the chagrin of the world, relented and gave back Gaza.

In return they have been bombed and rocketed by the people of Gaza. They have endured the assaults and kidnapping of their soldiers who were not in Gaza, but in Israel.

Let’s consider:

What would we do if the Canadians demanded Maine back?
What would we do if the Mexican army crossed into Laredo, kidnapped Americans and threatened to execute them in Mexico?

How would we react if the people of Ecuador were developing nuclear weapons and stated clearly that they intended to use them as soon as possible on targets in the United States? ( In the case of Venezuela and Bolivia, this might be a real concern.)

How long would the people of Bremerton, Washington stand by if the people of Vancouver were launching Katyusha rockets into their neighborhoods?

I want you to look at this map, courtesy of masada2000.org (look at their site, they have terrific maps, they are a little militant though so be prepared), which shows how big Israel actual is compared to the USA.

We have to face the reality that Israel is not an expeditionary power trying to take over real estate from the rest of the world. Israel was created after a serious civil war, exactly like our Revolution, and since then the ONLY thing that the Israelis have done is try to live in security while the rest of the world continuously demands that they give back everything that they fought for. Why doesn’t France give back Gaul to the Italians? Why doesn’t Jordan create a Palestinian state?

You really cannot write about this without coming off like an apologist for Israel…but then again, why shouldn’t we look out for Israel? When you get right down to it, why is everyone against them? Who do people hate them? Why does the Arab world, including the president of Iran, a guy with a master’s degree (presumably enough education not to be ignorant), say that the Holocaust is a fabrication? Did 250,000 Americans die fighting Germany over the ‘fabrication’ of the execution of 6 million Jews?

If you want to know how bizarre and widely held this notion is check out this Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust

It is the first time that I have ever seen a topic locked because of vandalism. This is very real. People, supposedly educated people, actually believe that 6,000,000 people were NOT executed and burned or buried by the Nazis. They vandalize the Wikipedia entry and laud Adolph Hitler.

The fact is, the reality is, that a country smaller than my battalion area of operations in Iraq (9,000 square miles, against Israel’s 8,000 square miles), with 13 million people, is facing 1.5 BILLION Muslims that include 300 million Arabs that seem to think that they, the Israelis, are the aggressors, the bullies and need to be not controlled, but oh my goodness, de ja vu, exterminated, and their country erased from the planet. Those of us who fail to consider the historical irony of this should be ashamed of ourselves.

The best thing any of us can do is allow Israel to do what it needs to do for its own security and tell the 300 million Arabs that hate them, that they would be wise to start reading some real history books and pay particular attention to the years 1967 and 1973. That is, if those 300 million Arab anti-Zionists themselves want to stay around to read any more books, fictitious or otherwise.

As a nation, the United States can ill-afford to continue to allow racists and bigots (read anti-zionist Arabs) to continue to voice their hatred without some response. We prosecute people in this country for “hate crimes” and we vilify people for “hate speech”. Why are we so late in going to the defense of 13 million people whose only crime is fleeing to the only forsaken piece of ground they could find to escape their own genocide at the hands of Europeans, and now, after working for 60 odd years to create the only Western democracy in the Middle East, face nut-jobs like the presidents of Iran and Syria who want to finish what Himmler couldn’t? Why are we not just lambasting these Hezbollah apologists when they spout hate speech on our airwaves? Have we learned nothing since 9/11?

Islam has one goal; the subversion of the world for the sake of Allah. That mission means no Israel and ultimately no Christians or Hindus or Buddists or anyone other than quivering Muslims cow-towing to turban clad Mullahs who claim to be the purveyors of Allah’s will through Fatwas.

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

This quote is from the famous Christian, Nazi-resistor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He paid with his life for trying to do what was right.

Make no mistake. The events of our time are our nation’s test. What we do with respect toward Israel will determine what happens to us, the USA, for some time. If we fail to speak for the jews, and the Muslims annihilate them, their next target (I would argue that for some Muslims, the CURRENT target) will be Christians and let’s be clear, the largest population of Christians in the world is in the Americas. The idea of Katyusha rockets in Bremerton may not be too far from the mark, eh? This is no dark fantasy. Just ask the residents of Haifa.

Immature Birds

On March 19, 1989 the MV-22 Osprey had its first flight. That was some 7 years ago. Today, the compressor stall that forced one of two of these poor machines into an unscheduled landing in Iceland, was spun as “…very normal, not only within military aircraft, but in commercial aircraft,"

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=8c6a897f-5273-4d56-80ef-bbf42847ae02&

The MV-22 is perhaps the single worst example of how the MARINE corps lost its focus and bought a boondoggle instead of an operationally reliable machine. 7 years is a long time to bring something that is supposed to be the future MARINE over-the-horizon ‘force projector’ to the point where it can reliably fly “over-the-horizon”. Apparently it aint there yet. 7 years is more than enough time for something that costs the tax payer what the Osprey is costing us. I might point out that 7 years has been filled with deception and test data falsification

(reference this link among many http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b7d79a05c57.htm) a "two-star" being threatened with losing their job is NEVER a sign of a solid and honestly run program....

and a lot of time wasting instead of solid science to refine a technology that is not ready for prime time. For all the obsfuscation we might have had what we bought into by this time. Regardless, MV-22 isn’t anywhere close to being something that I would want to stake my life on in a combat environment.

Make no mistake, I think tilt-rotor is an amazing technology and most certainly one that needs to be examined and put forth for the future. Certainly is makes more sense for those odd 500 nm dashes in to the deep fight than say a CH-53 (and that is if the tail rotor or some other critical piece stays on the -53) but it would take the most neophyte and aviation-ignorant of people to agree that MV-22 is even remotely ready for prime time. If for no other reason, as an operational machine, when one goes in, for all practical purposes, everyone is gonna die.

The MH-47 is a proven airframe. No it doesn’t do the weird origami trick that seems to be a requirement (and also the bane of aircraft like the MV-22) of all MARINE rotary-wing aircraft, but it hauls as much at not much less speed, and most importantly, we are not forced to conduct continued test-flight programs with the thing while using live MARINES on board during operational missions.

The point here is this; we certainly need a kick in the door ability worldwide but lets get real, nobody is going to sneak up on any country today with an LHA and quickly launch a bunch of fold-up airplanes. NEWS FLASH!, Pretty much any time we sortie anywhere, they know we are coming. Our strength lies in being able to leverage the night and all weather navigation to use the elements to our advantage. This does not necessitate Rube Goldberg mechanical nightmares.

There is no question that for efficiency and speed the fixed wing will always trump the helicopter, but it is time to put the brakes on the Osprey. It is okay, we’ll get the Osprey eventually and it will be right and not kill MARINES or fail to get to the fight. We can afford to delay the operational deployment date of the machine for the sake of simplifying what is both ‘young’ and wayyyyy too complex for serious operational reliability. The cost of the Osprey is a lot, I mean enough of a lot that if we use them in any serious fashion, and we will, and when (not if) we lawn dart them in (recall the early UH-60s), and we will, we are going to be looking at some serious money and tragedy in terms of lost lives and pain. All the worse if in the accident investigations we continue to find that in our zeal to create this technological monstrosity we ignored the practical reality that simplicity and survivability tend to be directly related.

For this reason, not to mention the fact that the thing can’t seem to get across the Atlantic…which again begs the question, if you are planning to self-deploy why do you need the absurd complexity of folding it up like a paper crane?...without stopping for the engine change and I am sure vodka in the company of blue eyed platinum blondes basking in hot springs; we need to stop the program. We need to get it completely right before we go further. There are plenty of interim options and while the CH-46 death trap is trying to find its way in the history books, it is still operational and somewhat reliable.

The joint environment means that it is perfectly acceptable to get a company of Army CH-47s to help haul you if need be and heaven knows that after 35 years we have the Blackhawk reasonably worked out. It might not be the perfect ‘self-contained’ solution, but it will save lives and keep us out of the nightmare of a lot of accident investigations and solemn visits to mothers and wives back home.

Resurrecting Amanda

For those of you who care, for whatever reason, the VLOG Rocketboom died unceremoniously last week. At first we all thought it was just a holliday vacation but then, it bacame clear that Amanda Congdon, the wackiest newscasting face on the web, had a falling out and is now, no longer, gracing us with a week-daily blurb of the news.

I encourage everyone to go to www.rocketboom.com, see Amanda in action and then go to her website

http://amandaunboomed.blogspot.com/

and ask her to return to a new format with the old attitude. She is a lot of fun to watch and as campy as her show was, it was almost always safe for sensible and sensitive eyes and ears.

FF

MDHIs soggy cereal

Boo Hoo Hoo, MDHI cries over the loss of the contract for the new Army LUH to EADS.

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=51c49476-6dd3-461e-9c2d-86d983c84a0d&

The bigger question is not why did MDHI lose out to a European consortium. No, the bigger question is why are so many contracts being awarded to foreign manufacturers?

Currently, the Future Cargo Aircraft is a contest between Italians and Spaniards. The morons at Lockheed, once they realized what the FCA really meant, cobbled together some piece of garbage C-130 derivative that my four year old could have presented. Nothing new there. Nothing future focused at all; the lazy way out. The issue was the production run. Without a future support-contract-bloated, high numbers production run, American defense contractors lack the will, creativity and, likely, the ability to produce a viable product.

The President will be flying on an EH-101, oops VH-71 here in the USA, built by Augusta-Westland because Sikorsky and presumably MDHI and any other USA rotary-wing geniuses couldn’t get past the major intellectual roadblock of putting a simple design on paper that cost less and performed more.

And now the LUH is going to a European Consortium because MDHI couldn’t prove its worth. Forget all the ballyhooing from MDHI, the fact is that they lost. They lost because they produced an aircraft that couldn’t compete with the contract offered by EADS. NOTAR or not and in the end US Army money is going to a machine designed by folks that have seldom been able to fight and win their own wars.

What is next, our next attack helicopter will be a US built Hind-A derivative?

Here is the deal, like it or not. The USA defense complex is fixated on complexity for complexity’s sake. The big news today is how to take a $3 million dollar death trap called the Stryker M1126 (among other variants) and make it survivable against a $100 anti-armor grenade called the RPG-7. At $3 million plus a copy any savvy consumer would demand it come out of the box ready to take on an RPG. Sadly, though the RPG-7 has been around since the early 60s, in their zeal to come up with the most expensive and incapable troop transport possible, the procurement people apparently forgot to harden it against the single weapon system preferred by all of our enemy dismounted forces for the last 3 decades.

It is a crime. Stryker costs an absurd amount of money, cannot perform its stated mission and is still unsafe against rocket propelled grenades. And we bought it, hook line and sinker, because it was new, sophisticated and sexy. More than likely we bought it because it meant a lot of technician jobs to support its absurd technology suite.

This week the space shuttle was launched again and true to form, it shed pieces and parts etc. The space shuttle is perhaps, with the possible exceptions of the garbage-stuffed ISS, the most intense example of confusing a simple problem with inordinate layers of complexity. It is aged, spends a considerable amount of its energy lofting non-cargo related mass (wings, fins, landing gear, what-have-you) into orbit and has the nasty tendency of developing failure modes, many of which seem to be catastrophic, which end up costing our nation millions if not billions to clean up.

No different are the B-2, the F-22, the JSF and, indeed, the Stryker.

The F-15 remains the most capable fighter aircraft in the world. The next step in the evolution of the fighter is not F-22, it is UCAVs. That we will spend billions on F-22s so that another generation of young men can have jaunty patches and a swagger for the bar is insane. The future is unmanned in the arena of air to air and deep interdiction. Indeed the future for CAS is unmanned as well. And all we do is spend ridiculously large amounts of money to create a generation of weapons that in 5 years will be obsolete, but their programs and contractors will remain in place for a generation or more.

The LUH problem is understandable. Defense contracting today is less about providing the best equipment possible for troops and more about laying an enormous civilian support infrastructure out to support a bloated program that gets discarded at the tip of the spear by the end-users. If I were to detail just a couple of systems that I discarded out of hand in Iraq in favor of self-purchased civilian systems it would blow your mind.

The only reason I don’t discuss them is because they are in current use and to discuss their short-comings might help the enemy leverage an advantage. But make no mistake, the issues were huge and problematic enough that I boxed the stuff and used commercial stuff that was orders of magnitude more reliable and orders of magnitude cheaper as well.

It is a tragic shame that the system for building weapons systems is so laden with fluff, like how many civilian support jobs come with it, that not a single American manufacturer can come up with a robust, simple, survivable system to fill the role of LUH, FCA, Presidential transport, infantry carrier… …but that is where we are at.

I spoke with a young Major at a conference last year about the XM-8, the proposed Buck-Rogers assault rifle that looks good on Playstation 2 but just by holding it conveys a sense of this-thing-will-break-and-get-me-killed-if-I-take-it-to-war to any soldier who has actually carried a weapon in combat (myself included). I asked him why the Army felt the need to develop horizontal technology, that is, a system that shoots the same round as the M-4/M-16 we currently field. A new system with a new learning curve, a new set of failure modes and a plethora of other looks-good but it no better than the last model features, instead of really working on something revolutionary. The Major had no response and was eager to turn to another soldier and get away from me.

The issue with believing your own press is that it tosses out objectivity. That’s where we are today. MDI is crying because it cannot see what it needs to see; the LUH needs to be new, better, simpler, cheaper and capable if it is going to be what we use. Certainly congress would demand it and they would be the selectee if that is what they had offered.

Finally, in some areas of combat, what you have right now is as good as you will ever get. The B-52 is simply the best heavy bomber the world will ever produce. It carries a boat-load of bombs a long ways. That is what it is supposed to do and we got it right in the 1950s. Everything else, is just a waste of time.

An APC can only get so good. Arguably, the M-113, with some adjustments in armor and powerplant, is the best APC that you can get. The Twin Huey, UH-1N (and likely UH-1Y) is probably the best light utility helicopter in the world. It certainly beats the EADS garbage, but we got fixated on Blackhawks 30 years ago and now we are where we are.

When I was in Iraq, I watched as we burned $3000.00 an hour to run UH-60s for jobs for which a Cessna Caravan C-208 Super Cargo Master would have been perfectly suited. The -208 would have cost the Army about 1/10th of the acquisition as well as about 1/6th of the hourly operating cost. Just a couple of companies of -208s could perform much better and save millions in routine jobs over there. But the fixation on making the simple complex has driven us to where we are today.

Now as I reflect on these comments I notice a certain lack of coherent logic in the entire process. Just for summary, let’s analyze where we are today.

The US military is under budget constraints.

The US military knows the way the enemy fights.

The US military consistently tries to buy stuff that is overly-complex, confusing to operate, breaks easily and costs a lot of money (SINCGARS, BFT, etc)

The US military selects foreign manufacturers for some of its end items. (EADS v. MDHI)

US defense contractors submit cobbled up bids for new contracts based upon decades old technology that doesn’t really fill the bill (read 4 engined C-130s when a 2 engine transport is desired)

The US military fails to buy off-the-shelf when it should (C-208) and buys stuff it doesn’t need (MOLLE system backpacks)

A lot of civilians are needed to go to war to fix the stuff we buy because it breaks all the time. (You name it)

The US military wants to field new systems that do nothing but cost more than the systems that they are to replace with no greater capability. (Stryker v. M-113)

The US military fields weapon systems that will cost enormous amounts of money to support when better technology is available. (F-22 v. UCAV)

We must demand a return to sanity in the procurement and development process. Just because a digital display in the tank is nice to have, doesn’t mean that it is a must-have or even a good to have in war. Just because something works well on the PS2 doesn’t mean that it will hold up well in the sands of Iraq. My experience is that the simpler, the better. The more rugged and reliable, the better. The LUH is an example of the opposite of that; how to take a perfectly simple mission, make it so complicated that it takes a PhD in organizational logistics to figure it out and then bid it out to a bunch of morons who couldn’t win their own wars and domestic interests that can only afford to produce large batches of expensive stuff to stay in business.

It’s a heck of a way to run a military and it will be paid for, ultimately, with the blood of our youth. There has to be a better way.

Joy of Flying: Globemaster III

I have the rather fortunate position of not making a living from writing about flying and yet finding myself frequently able to do things in aviation that usually only happen for people who write for a living about flying. In fact, Joy of Flying really exists because I like to share the experiences that I have been fortunate enough to have with people without those people having to shell out a bunch of money to support magazines devoted to the 1% of all flyers who can afford the stuff that they advertise.

I find that all pretty ridiculous. In fact I find the most popular flying magazine out there really an exercise in demonstrating how a chosen few can gloat over jets flown and very expensive turbo-props owned while the most of us out here just dream of being able to put a few gallons into 50 year old designs once a month. Yet, much like magazines that focus on the sordid and chaotic lives of celebrities, people buy this stuff and read it voraciously. Frankly, I have focused my attentions on Kitplanes and EAAs Sport Aviation.

But once in a while I must admit that I have to share an experience that is pretty unique. I would add that it is not to gloat, but rather reflect on my sense of amazement over the experience. It is in that vein that I am writing this and giving it to you. Enjoy.

Our mission profile was pretty straightforward. It involved a departure from an airport in Northern Iraq, direct to Balad (otherwise known as LSA Anaconda) and on then to Baghdad International. Several interesting events would punctuate our trip.

I stepped into the cockpit and strapped into the seat behind the copilot’s. The familiarity of the big beautiful MD windows surrounded me. I once had the opportunity to be up front in a DC-10, in the days before the insanity, the days when an obviously big American kid could come up front and see the world from FL330. Having once been up front in a 747, I was amazed at the panorama that I looked upon from inside the big McDonnel Douglas machine. I decided right then and there that if I ever flew a heavy, my choice would be the biggest “three-holer”.

The quick release readily accepted the shoulder straps and once in and secure I pulled the levers and slid the seat over and in between the center console. The AC and Pilot were rapidly going through the checks and confirmations that accompany the starting and preparation of all big machines prior to their departures. The exception being that on this particular trip our destination had over half of its useable runway blown apart by mortar rounds and we were restricted to landing on just one side of the runway. I would tell you what the useable runway length was but I have no desire to delve into what might be classified, but even more so, I have no desire to assist the enemy in gathering data on what might be a limit to the MD, now Boeing’s, capabilities. If you have any specific interest in all of this you can easily go to

http://www.af.mil/factsheets/

and everything you want to know about the C-17 is right there courtesy of the Air Force.
I will just say that we were something in excess of 400,000 pounds and our available runway was more in the Class D range than Class B range.

The crew spoke to the loadmaster in the rear. Weights and numbers were passed on the intercom and the data was plugged into the FMS. The performance numbers were passed and the AC taxied the aircraft out to the active runway. I sat back and marveled at how benign Iraq was from the cockpit of a heavy jet. Aside from green flight suits, the cockpit looked like any other that one might find at LAX, BWI, DCA or a host of others, well the flight suits and the countermeasures controls located on the center console. This is indeed a war machine, no question.

I sat back wondering how long it would be before we pushed forward. The thought of a mortar, a lucky mortar, finding its way into us, full of fuel, did not excite me and I also knew that we had to not only escape the lucky mortar, but we had to make our way up and beyond the reach of any number of shoulder fired surface to air missiles. We were not out of the woods and nowhere near safe yet.

The power came forward and the world began to race past the picture window to my right. So benign and yet right over that berm is a world where people think mutilating soldiers and innocent civilians is a perfectly acceptable method for waging war. By the poll numbers, they seem to be right. Odd that every time some homicidal wack, butchers one of our guys, ‘our’ guys here seem to suggest that it is all our fault. They suggest that somehow our actions create psychosis.

Let’s get one thing straight; angry people just shoot other people and move on. Psychopaths butcher other human beings. We, the USA, might make angry people; psychopaths come out of the factory already like that. Anyone who has been there knows this.

We rotate and the fans behind us make their familiar cross between a vacuum cleaner and chainsaw howl that only a true fan of high bypass turbofans can really love. More than any afterburner, more than any turboprop, I love the sound of big fans on takeoff. I once purposely parked my sleep deprived family in an RV at Dover AFB RV park as close as I could to the runway just so that through the night I could hear those fans. Indeed, the next morning my wife was clearly not well rested while I slept like a baby. The C-5s lulled me through the night like the voices of angels.

We got to FL220 fine and configured for the approach into Balad. The crew ran over their computer and did what they had too to make it all work out. The descent was necessarily steep. I won’t say how steep but I can say that if you look up the GS at London City Airport, we exceeded that considerably.

Somewhere in the midst of this, as we identified the touchdown zone at Balad, the instructor riding behind me mentioned that Globemaster flying is ‘backside’ flying.

“Backside” flying is what caused me to fall in love with the C-17. All my life I have had a passion for Helios, Caribous, Maules, SuperCubs, you name it, if it tries to be a helicopter with a fixed wing, I love it, period. I fly and fly in a lot of helicopters but to me, simplicity in aviation is everything. If the thing can land short without the plethora or moving, spinning and turning parts of a helicopter, to me that is perfection.

The C-17 is indeed about flying the backside. Power is altitude and pitch is airspeed. The difference in this behemoth is that the crew has some computer generated HUD symbology that tells them exactly when to pull and push the power levers. They work on keeping the ‘pig’ on the ‘dance floor’. If you make the ‘pig’ stay on the ‘dance floor’ your airplane is going to go right where you want it to go. I wish that I had one of those in my airplane.

It was dark as we approached Balad and only the TDZ was illuminated; a reality of tactical landings. No lights till right before landing and they come off immediately afterward. Had we been flying with night vision, there would have been no visible lights. The crew worked the airplane as we descended very steeply toward the few lights in the sea of blackness below. Before I realized what was happening I felt the main gear contact and in short order the straps tightened as I was pushed forward by inertia as the reversers slowed us.

It has been two years since I left Balad on my way home. Not much has changed. A lot of space and a lot of Americans surrounded by mostly people whose biggest concern is ice cream on weekends. It is just those few psychos that like to lop off heads that really mess the entire picture up.

We sat at Balad for a few minutes. Long enough for the folks in back to get off-loaded whatever it was that was back there. While we waited the crew started inputting new data for the flight to Baghdad. I took the time to look around this marvel of modern technology. The cockpit was simple in design and with easily read instrumentation. I looked at the switches and other controls and realized how much effort had gone into building an airplane that required just two pilots to fly pretty much anywhere in the world.

The taxi out to the active runway was uneventful and in short order we were climbing out on our way to Baghdad.

It is easy to get somewhat complacent when things are going well. It is when things start to go badly that you suddenly realize how fast your mind can process information. Nobody was complacent but when the SAM warning went off there was a noticeable change in the level of alertness that only heightened when the missile slammed into the airplane.

Almost immediately the fire-warning handle illuminated on the effected engine and the flurry of activity just feet in front of me was something to behold. Checklists were completed and the crew began to earn their month’s pay. We continued to fly toward Baghdad. The Aircraft Commander made some decisions regarding weight and loads. Again I won’t discuss 'what' specifically because such things are best left in the hands of people who need to know and not in the hands of those who might like to know for bad purposes.

We orbited over Baghdad while we considered various controllability issues during the approach and with great care the crew got us lined up and on final. The C-17 flew like it was just another day. We touched down and saw the emergency vehicles on the ramp waiting for us. Mission complete we left the aircraft to the people who would oversee its repair.

All of this in a day!

Of course I was fortunate enough not to be in Iraq. Like I said, I left that country in 2004 and have been blessed not to have to return since. But being a flight surgeon I was afforded the opportunity to ride along with the crews in the sim so I could watch crew resource management. CRM is the reason why we have very safe commercial air travel. Properly resourcing people in the cockpit to maximize the human power present to deal with issues and emergencies in flight.

Given that most airplane accidents are due to human factors, watching and learning how to improve CRM is of particular interest to me. There is no better place to do this than an aircraft simulator, where, in a matter of three hours, you can fail just about anything that can be failed in the aircraft and specifically watch the crew as they work their emergency procedures, navigate and try to recover the aircraft safely.

I have had the opportunity to jump seat on many large aircraft. The earliest in terms of “airliners” was the Boeing 707 in the form of the KC-135. This airplane was decidedly ‘steam gauge’ with the only LED (note not LCD) display being in the form of the fuel totalizer on the center panel. Everything else was no more sophisticated than the IFR Cherokees that I have flown in the past.

After the -135 the next series of large aircraft that I jump seated on included the C-130 and C-5. These airplanes had on-board GPS and FMS but still retained their steam gauge primary instruments. Both aircraft utilized flight engineers to help with fuel and power management. The C-5 alone had 5 seats just for crewmembers in the front end. The C-130 retained a navigator and this was in 1998.

The 777 was the first airplane that I jump seated that had two crewmembers and glass. I flew in a 757 shortly thereafter and it had essentially the same avionics set up. EFIS displays, INS, FMC, GPS integrated into the avionics suite and an engine and power management system that entirely eliminated the engineer. I remember the engine start on the 777 being absurdly simple. As I recall the checklist had something like 5 items on it because that was the extent of any human interaction in the process. The computer monitored everything, including the shutdown, in the event of a ‘hot start’.

The C-17 goes beyond all of these aircraft. It is indeed a large leap ahead. Like the 777 and 757 it has but two crewmembers and a suite of computer driven avionics and systems that handle everything from bus switching to fuel management. But beyond those, now standard, capabilities the C-17 also includes a HUD and integral fly by wire systems that basically ‘pilot proof’ the airplane. The pilot can select flaps full at 250 knots but the aircraft will not allow that to happen until the airspeeds are within an acceptable range. The same goes for flight control manhandling. Remember, the -17 uses a stick to fly and many of the maneuvers used in combat flying a heavy airplane are more akin to a fighter than something that takes off at ½ a million pounds. Stalling this airplane at gross weight and low airspeed as it maneuvers after take-off would not take a lot of effort were it not for the computers that augment its flight envelope. The airplane, in other words, is smart enough to seek its own survival regardless of what the pilot wants to do with it.

So after 10 hours of watching others fly the machine, I was afforded a brief effort at flying the largest airplane that I have ever had my hands on. While the finishing crew headed for debrief I sat myself in the right seat and gazed out upon a 12,000 foot runway located in the Western United States. I selected a notch of flaps, taxied forward to straighten out and then applied brakes. The Boeing instructor started to speak several times but each time he cut off his own words as I apparently did whatever he wanted to tell me to do next.

Pushing the throttles forward and feeling the noise and vibration increase in the cockpit I released the brakes and kept one hand on the tiller and the other on the power levers. At 80 knots I moved my hand to the stick and waited for Vr. It came quickly and I over rotated about 3 degrees until I found the sweet spot in the trim. The C-17 unstuck and I retracted the gear and continued to climb.

My time in the front seat was on the instructor’s dime at the end of a long day so I satisfied my curiosity about the control response as I flew a standard pattern. The roll rate was 182-like, the control pressures were 182-like, in fact, everything about the C-17, aside from the HUD and three extra ‘go-levers’ is just like flying a 182. It is very heavy, but when you push the power levers, it responds.

On a 12 mile downwind I set the EPR at about 1.1 and asked the instructor if this was good. At flaps 0 he confirmed that it would work about right. Time being a factor I did not enter any landing weight or other data into the FMS so I lacked HUD symbology, but it was no matter, because I could see the threshold and the VASI as I turned a 5-mile final.

Flaps come in notches and I had pulled the first and second on the downwind. I dropped the gear on the base turn and confirmed three greens. Third notch of flaps as I turned final and lined up for the landing. The C-17 rolled a bit with a slight crosswind but crabbing with rudder held it lock-solid on the centerline. I was at this point flying by ‘feel’ the aircraft was configured, I was by myself and so no checklists were run, just the normal GUMPS (which in a jet really boils down to an FUSP, Flaps Undercarriage, Switches, Power check) check. I did satisfy my inner desire to reach up and switch on the lights.

I would love to tell you that my first landing in a large airplane was a greaser. It wasn’t.

Large airplanes don’t flare so much as they level off, perhaps pitch up slightly and allow the ground and the mains to impact one another. Unlike a Cub, the idea is to fly the airplane onto the runway. When I first learned to fly a Cub the idea was to stall the airplane fully a couple of inches above the runway and allow it to plop down without any energy left to pop back up when it made contact. I suspect that the stick threw me because as I crossed the threshold I retarded the power levers and selected flaps full. The airplane did what it was supposed to do; it kept flying and flying and flying, past the touchdown zone and another 1000 feet down the runway before it settled down and I was able to pull the reversers over the gate and stop.

Nothing broken but certainly a long way to go before I can handle a 4000 foot runway in the middle of the night.

What I marvel at is that there is some 500,000 pounds between the largest airplane that I have flown, the Beech 1900, and the C-17 and yet flying the Globemaster III was as easy as flying a King Air. In spite of the oddity of flying what amounts to a heavy airliner into a combat zone and landing on less space than most Citations require, my impression is that the United States has designed and built what amounts to the most advanced and capable air lifter in the world. Before my time in the box my feeling was that we had spent $250,000,000.00 a copy on a huge adventure in overkill. Now, I want a C-17 sticker on my car.

Our technology has allowed us to build a machine easily flown by 25 year-olds, into the worst of places in the world, while carrying incredible amounts of stuff. Sure the -17 has a relatively small range and it is not prettiest beast in the sky, but it can do what the military demands of it and it does it with aplomb. Its capabilities are unique in the world and I feel really privileged to have been a guest of the people who teach our young air warriors how to fly it to the limits of its very robust capability.

Thanks Boeing for having me as a guest.

And finally, because it was crystal clear that no photographs were to be taken of the simulator or facility I am forced to use photos sourced from the internet.

Fly safe.

A brief interlude to debunk what is inevitable

Last week two American soldiers, who were captured during an attack on their checkpoint, were recovered. Their bodies were found in a state described anaseptically as, "brutally tortured". The open-sourced read in on this, with a little effort on the web, is that both men had been beaten mercilessly, had their throats cut and then most likely had their faces mutilated to the point of being unrecognizeable. Thank goodness for DNA repositories, at least their families will have some closure.

The point of this is to address those who would suggest that it was our (read the USA's) fault that these men were treated the way that they were. There are any number of appologists out there, many of whom work in our congress, who think nothing of blaming the USA every time something heinous happens overseas and especially when anything goes wrong in Iraq. I suspect these mealy-mouthed morons are behind many of the security leaks in our government as well.

From one who knows to all who merely theorize and speculate let's get a couple of things straight;

1. Nothing that the USA does can justify any human being brutally torturing and executing another human being. We didn't justify our actions at Mi Lai because the Viet Cong had killed a bunch of US soldiers, so we ought not justify it in our enemies. If Haditha an Abu Ghraib have any merit, we still don't justify our actions toward other human beings when they are heinous, no matter what the provocation.

2. True warriors, when forced to kill people, do it with solemn sadness that their job forced them to take a life. They don't relish it, they live with the dreams for a lifetime and they certainly don't dance a jig on the heads of those who they kill.

3. Psychopathic nutjobs, cut people's throats, mutilate them and then call the videographers over to record it all for the web. Did I make that clear? The people that killed poor Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker are psychotic homicidal maniacs. Pure and simple. They are deranged murderers who get off on blood and lest we be too ignorant, they represent the face of a small but scary minority of militant Muslims who would love to do exactly the same thing to any American that they could get their hands on, period.

4. Wars are about bad stuff happening. The United States takes greater care in trying to limit collateral damage and killing of people in combat than any other nation that actually goes to war. Whimpish European nations that show up but run from fights don't count in this, you actually have to intend to fight if you are going to get credit for try not to hurt innocents.

Don't buy into anything that blames unarmed soldiers or kidnapped Israeli's for their own brutal torture and public executions. Honorable enemies would have disarmed them, held them and released them after a time or simply killed them with a single gunshot to the head. Proper exchange of the remains would at least indicate some sense of humanity and dignity for warriors.

These wacks are not warriors, they are pathetic little cowards who blow up civilians trying to find work, kill children when the situation suits them and who need to be hunted down and dispatched for the sake of the safety of all humanity. Any American who suggests otherwise needs to be considered for charges of treason or better yet, dropped off alone in South Baghdad or Baquba so that they can try their hand at peaceful negotiations so that we can all just "get along".

God bless the families of Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, may those boys find peace in eternal rest and God grant us American Warriors the skills to find their murderers and arrange for their quick exit from this earth.

FF

Finding Zarqawi and losing Scott.

This is a late Memorial Day entry, sorry but I needed to take some time to do it. This being Father's Day, and Scott being a father, this is just as well.

Some time about three years ago a serious nut job named Zarqawi made his way through the Middle East from his native homeland of Jordan and arrived in Iraq. Fancying himself some lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden and the ‘head’ of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi set out on a homicidal rampage which began in earnest with the very public beheading of an unfortunate fellow by the name of Nick Berg.

Now there has been much speculation about Mr. Berg. He was essentially wandering around Iraq without serious credentials and certainly not ‘on the firebase’ as it were; he was not a member of the US military. The fact that he died in Iraq was not surprising. Iraq is not a place that should be traveled lightly, especially if you are a single, unaccompanied Caucasian from the United States. To a degree much greater than one might experience in downtown Detroit after Midnight, you chances of not returning to whatever hotel you booked yourself into in the squalor that is Baghdad are very high. Mr. Berg found this out and the world sat in rapt horror as Mr. Zarqawi liberated Berg’s head from his body while Mr. Berg writhed in agony. It was so gruesome that when I watched this video, while in Eastern Iraq, I refused to allow my medics to see the video. Disturbing doesn’t even begin to approach the image burned into my mind.

In the old Soviet Union, the one that Aldrich Ames sold his country, and some 20 odd intelligence operatives, out too, the preferred high punishment was to take the accused into a room and make them kneel. Once on the floor the authorities would bring a high-powered pistol (something along the lines of a .357 or a .44 magnum with wad cutters) into the room, put it against the back of the accused’s head and pull the trigger. The purpose was to literally blow the face off the executed so as to render them unidentifiable to family. Then, to further the pain and suffering, the body would be tossed into an unmarked grave and the family would never be told where their loved one was buried. Imagine the torment of knowing that somewhere your child or brother lies faceless, in an unmarked grave, unrecognized by anyone and unattended by his family.

Move to Haditha.

I cannot comment on Haditha. I wasn’t there and I was not in the heads of the MARINES who stand accused of shooting civilians. That’s reality. Nobody really knows yet what happened there and so it is advisable for everyone to just take a big chill pill and wait for the courts to work it all out. What I can say is this, if you had asked me to take a gun and kill Mr. Zarqawi, I would have accepted the task and had no problem or remorse over doing so. He was not a warrior, he was not honorable, he was not even a foreign intelligence operative (at least they are working for a nation in the greater scheme of the conflict that defines the nature of the world and civilizations in contact). No, Mr. Zarqawi was a brutal, homicidal jihadi Muslim who was an equal opportunity murderer and because of this he needed to be put down, and hard. Any soldier in Iraq will tell you that nothing stirs the desire for vengeance more, than to see innocents and fellow warriors cut down by an unseen enemy who has no honor and no courage to face you, even if that means an enemy in an airplane or on a ship. At least they play by the rules of war.

We spent a lot of money and resources to find this man. He was murdering civilians at will and his rampage raised the ire of everyone over there. Consider that even the Jordanians, the people of Zarqawi’s homeland, are refusing to allow his body back into the country because it would taint their soil with evil. The efforts to find this man rival those of the hunt for Sadaam and perhaps only Bin Laden has garnered more efforts to locate.

Let’s divert briefly to the U.S.

I noticed that two weeks ago the FBI thought it necessary to tear apart a barn to find what would now be the thirty or so year old remains of Jimmy Hoffa. A barn in Michigan focused the attention of the FBI, the nation and some heavy equipment.

They spent several days tearing away at it for the purpose of finding the corpse of a man who was ostensibly killed by organized crime for some reason likely truly known only within the confines of the organization that executed him.

Americans, unlike most other nations in the world, just never seem to give up. We hunt for Sadaam, Bin Laden, Zarqawi, Hoffa...We turn the effort of locating them into small crusades. Doggedly we go after them because they are either evil people, victims of heinous crime or folks who are keeping the progress of righteousness from occurring. I would imagine that if the GAO every really measured the total dollars, in terms of man-hours, spent on these quests it would boggle the mind. We spend a lot of money to address evil and crime. It is our crusade.

A little over 15 years ago, an F-18 pilot launched on a mission over Iraq. He flew over the vast desert and performed his task and was headed home. Something happened. In the Gulf War, America suffered very little. We lost less than 200 troops and our POWs were returned to us…save one. One the way home, that particular F-18 was damaged and the pilot was forced to depart his airplane far from his base and in the middle of nowhere (there is a lot of nowhere in Iraq). We know this; his body was never found and the accident scene appears to indicate that he survived his unscheduled stop. What we don’t know is, where he is.

If CMDR Scott Speicher were still alive, he would be the longest serving POW in US history. As well he would be one of a very few servicemen who has been declared dead by his nation and then resurrected as an MIA. There is speculation that warriors from Korea and Vietnam may have served several generations as “guests” of the Soviets until, after outliving their usefulness, these Cold Warriors were executed or simply died, forgotten, save for their friends, families and fellow warriors. Where is Scott?

All of us in the military wear dog tags. It is pretty much just a symbol now though. My DNA, like millions of other warriors’, is stored safely in a Federal Repository. If I ever die and my dental records don’t prove useful, my family will get that undesired letter and the assurance that what is left of me, is me, and was confirmed by matching my DNA on file with that of my remains. Simply put, there will never again be an “Unknown” from American wars. Find a lock of hair and you will know. Find a single tooth, you will know. Find a bit of finger, an ear, a leg, a spleen and you will know who that warrior was and his family will be able to bury them with honor and their casket will have a proper flag over it, signaling to the world that the volunteer warrior held within is exactly who is recorded on the marble headstone it matches. The Iraqis returned someone’s remains to the U.S. but testing showed that it was not Scott.

Scott Speicher has no proper grave. He has no flag. He has no memorial. His family has no closure. This warrior, who went to work in his Hornet one day and retuned not to his unit, but to some godforsaken part of Iraq, has no way of telling us what happened.

It is time to find out what happened to Scott Speicher. It is time to close the horror of his war for him and his family. If we can tear down barns for victims of organized crime, if we can mobilize battalions for the sake of finding militant jihadiis, if we can move heaven and earth and offer millions to find a 6 foot tall Saudi, with renal failure, in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan, then by god we have no excuse, when we own the whole damn country, not to find out what happened on the day that Scott went to work in Iraq and didn’t come home. In this case, regardless of what you may or may not feel about Haditha or Abu Ghraib, we are justified in breaking some fingers. I have no reservation about doing that to the people who might be hiding Scott’s secret.

David Milch, the head writer of the HBO series “Deadwood” and the long since ended, Hill Street Blues, said that, “Soldiers in combat are not capable of suspending their understanding of the real world. It is that capability of suspending belief that is the precursor of art.” Or something along those lines. What he was getting at I think is that those of us who have been in war find it very difficult to come home and pretend. We have experienced a reality that goes far beyond whatever crap is being pawned onto the American people. Consider that big news here is Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie selling their child’s pictures to PEOPLE Magazine?!? And people actually care about this.

I spent time next to murderers in Iraq. Men who had killed innocent people in cold blood. I spent time next to men just a few clicks away that were intent on killing those murderers. Not pretend TV people, real people. Milch is right. I spend my days now watching Disney films because that is real fantasy that I can escape into. I can’t really tolerate watching Tom Cruise, pretend. I can no longer suspend my beliefs in reality, it is lost, the world has become all too real and for that reason the thought of a pilot, languishing in the godforsaken country of Iraq for 15 years without any word of where or how he is, is too much to accept. It is a national outrage and worth WHATEVER we need to do to find him and bring him home.

WE must find him and WE must demand that he be brought home, by whatever means necessary. There are those of us out here very willing to help make that happen.

Memorial Day

Being that Memorial Day occurred on a Sunday, it was to be expected that at church the pastor would single out the veterans. And that is exactly what happened. In an interesting turn I found myself being hugged by some fifteen or twenty people; so many that I actually lost count. Each one of them said a heartfelt thank you to me and then moved on for the rest of the line to have their turn.

It was touching to say the least.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon doing flight physicals and catching up on pending waivers for airman with far more problems than I currently have. Several of them expressed regret that I had to spend Memorial Day ‘working’.

I replied to each one that, 1. I enjoy doing FAA work and 2. EVERY day is Memorial Day for me. I mean that. I remember every day, something or someone from the Balkans or Iraq. For this reason the “DAY” is not particularly special to me. It is a holiday for non-veterans. I also told them that I had an entire nation of other Americans behind me and every other warrior over there, Americans who help equip, clothe and feed us better than any Army in history...and then I thanked them. They are not quite certain what to make of that.

If there is a tragedy in the Iraq War it is that there has never been a full synthesis between America's people and her warriors. Unless our nation is fully galvanized in its efforts in the arena of armed conflict, the certainty of victory is always precarious. Americans go to war best when America is fully understanding and appreciative of the essential importance of going to war. To that end I offer you the Powell Doctrine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_Doctrine

But enough of the whats-its about what I feel and think. This day is not about me, it is about others and with that I want to take a few lines to remember a few people:



CPT Chris Cash, 1/120th INF. Killed in Baquba, Iraq. I liked Chris a lot and he was a fine warrior. He died protecting the peace where he was patrolling.


SGT DeForest Talbert, 1/150th AR. Killed in Balad Ruz, Iraq. I spoke with “Dee” a few times and he struck me as a gentle and happy man. He was killed serving as security for people who were trying to rebuild part of Iraq.



1LT Ryan Hollin, who is still very much alive and thus I have not included his photo. He has a life to live... but Iraq is very personal to him because he left part of his body over there. He is a young man with a bright future and I have known him since he was a few weeks old.

These were and are men that I knew and know. I remember them every day because as a soldier who went through Iraq, like 97% of the rest, and didn’t get more than a few cuts and scratches during combat, these men are my heroes. Memorial day is every day for me.

But there is also more to Memorial Day for me as well.

It has to do with the WWDC. The World Wide Developer’s Conference. That is Apple ® Computer’s annual conference and it also seems to be the time when Steve Jobs tends to release upon the world whatever is next in the advancement of real useable technology. It was at a WWDC that iPod was first introduced and this year everyone is waiting for whatever it is that Mr. Jobs will show us. It will most likely be amazing.



The reason why this is important to me is because amidst the bickering over Congressional Offices being raided “Oh, the gall of that!” and an energy policy that seems to wax and wane and is never fully articulated, I am reminded as a man blessed with the skills and love of being a warrior for this great land that my efforts help protect the folks like Jobs and his crew. They consistently measure and adapt and create new and innovative things that make all of our lives run well.

Now you might think it is really a crass thing to link the memory of a hero like CPT Chris Cash to an iPod, and it sure would be if I was really comparing the value of Chris’ Life to some crap downloaded off of iTunes. But I am not.

Chris and the others gave for the sake of a great land and a great people. A land that develops innovative minds and folks who think beyond the box so far that the cube becomes a distant memory. It is this innovation that will deliver this nation from the chains of bondage that tie us to despot-controlled oil in the Middle East and it is this innovation that will work in favor of the persistence of the Constitution in spite of a government that doesn’t seem to be able to come up with an aggressive and salient long term policy for anything that we truly need.

Make no mistake, NOBODY, Republican or Democrat, seems to really have any handle on the reality of the future we face. We now have Mr. Gore desperately trying to recapture some sense of importance by making some drivel documentary on global warming. Pathetic. Hysteria, when he could be writing and promoting REAL policy.

We have Republican leadership parsing policy about the sanctity of Congressional offices after Congressman William Jefferson’s office was raided in conjunction with a whole lot of money he felt was better kept in his home freezer than the bank. If you don’t have anything to hide… Besides I think $90,000 stored in a freezer on a Congressman’s salary is pretty darn good probable cause.

Wouldn't it be nice if Congress lived under the same conditions that the citizenry must?

So as a warrior, who really cares about those three men, I reaffirm that my allegiance lies with that which I swore an oath too; the United States Constitution. It is worth protecting because under it’s aegis Americans who have some semblance of common sense and drive can still create and envision a better future for a stronger America. You would be fooling yourself if you think that Mr. Steve Jobs is not in that group. If his politics bother you, then I would offer you Steve Forbes or any number of other entrepreneurs who drive our nation toward the future.

That 'future' that might take us to a place where we no longer have to link our nation’s security to godforsaken places where fine men like DeForest Talbert die and kids like Ryan Hollin spill their blood. That is what I remember, and hope for, on Memorial Day.

God Bless my fellow warriors, God Bless my fellow Americans and for certain, God Bless America!

Joy of Flying: Advocates

Caring for pilots is not as easy as it seems.

It was once said to me “Medicine is the natural enemy of aviation”. That was a comment from an Army Warrant Officer and he wasn’t kidding. Pilots hate going to the doctor. The fact is that every pilot who is legally flying a powered airplane, with a couple of very infrequent exceptions and the newly emerging class of pilots known as “Sport Pilots”, will need to see a flight doctor at some point.

Now I referenced some exceptions. You might be interested to know that sailplane pilots do not have to see a physician. Nor do self-launching sailplane pilots. I have always found that interesting. It is entirely legal for a rated Sailplane pilot to buy a Grob 109B or a Stemme S-10 and just never turn the motor off. He could fly it from coast to coast and because it is considered a sailplane, that happens to self-launch, and not an Airplane Single engine Land, well let’s just say that before sport pilot this was the insurance in the bank for many pilots who considered the possibility of losing their medical.

Balloonists do not need to see doctors to fly. Now this perplexes me. Of all the flying machines in the world, balloons are the least controllable and if they can be controlled it is only by the hands of a seasoned and conscious aeronaut who understands winds and how to manipulate the burner to take advantage of where those winds might be. An aeronaut who is comatose at the bottom of the basket after a seizure isn’t going to do the hapless passengers who are rapidly approaching high-tension lines any good. Be that as it may, you can have all manner of otherwise disqualifying problems and still fly a big bag of gas. That, and a sailplane with a cruise speed of 140 knots at 10,000 feet, a service ceiling of 30,000 feet, retractable gear, feathering prop (folding in the Stemme) oh and did I mention a gross weight of 1874 pounds? Doesn’t quite match light sport aircraft does it?

This leads me to Sport Pilots. Sport pilots can become certified to fly aircraft with substantially less performance than a Stemme S-10 with just a driver’s license, unless of course they have previously held a medical and been rejected in which case they must first get wavered back to class III medical standards before reverting back to the ‘driver’s license’ self-certification of the sport pilot provision. In the Sport pilot case you are better off never having held a medical because should you ever fail your medical you have to get wavered before being legal to fly again under Sport Pilot. If you never had a medical in the first place, it is moot.

Now there are specific reasons why all of this is the way it is. As an aviation advocacy agency the FAA certainly had it in its interests to try and get more pilots in the air. Frankly there are a lot of old pilots who simply are done with their Barons and King Airs and just want to fly a Cub and don’t want the hassle of a medical exam. More on that later. And there is the reality that general aviation has dichotomized into two very distinct entities.

These two groups are easily described as; The I don’t care how much money it costs because I have more money than I will ever need and so all I need is a machine that turns gas into noise, preferably a lot of noise; AND, the rest of us. Well that is unfair; there is a third group, actually a sub group of “the rest of us”. They are the experimental pilots. Most of those cats, including myself, are the ones who are sick of the cost and antiquated nature of production airplanes and realize that the sanest method for us to take the air is to build it ourselves.

And all of this is really a sad turn of events because the days of cheap Cubs populating flight schools around the country are gone and not likely to return in the future. The real issue is not making a pilot’s license easier to get, it is creating a landscape where good airplanes don’t cost a lot to fly. But that is not the nature of business and there are a lot of people out there who have no problem plopping a bunch of dough on the table for new Cirrus, or $85,000 for what is essentially a new J-3.

Where am I going with this? Actually I am going back to medicals.

Unbeknownst to most pilots, every year, several times a year, many of those of us who are flight surgeons and Aero Medical Examiners treck off to one or more seminars on how to properly care for pilots. In fact, the picture you see below was taken just today in the meeting hall prior to a lecture by one of the chief heart doctors in this country. His talk was specifically oriented toward how we as flight docs can safely get pilots who are sick, well enough to be able to fly again. That is the essence of what we focus on; getting otherwise bad risks, better enough to be a risk worth betting on.



That is important to understand.

You might not realize it but there are several hundred-airline pilots flying right now who have had heart attacks. There are a few who have had brain tumors. In fact, unless we are talking about flat out psychosis or seizures there are likely pilots flying who have just about every conceivable medical condition. They fly because they have taken the time and their flight doctors have expended the effort to carefully document their problem, their treatment and how well that therapy has worked. If it has worked well and the pilot can function normally, they are likely to fly.

Hardly the enemy of aviation.

In any endeavor that is not easily understood, the likely human response is one of stereotyping. Medicine is no different. Medicine is an arcane profession. The internet notwithstanding, the information that physicians possess is something that lay people do not have access too unless they choose to spend the better part of their young productive years learning the art of medicine. Because of this there is considerable fear borne from not understanding just what flight doctors are up too.

Flight doctors, almost without exception, are very interested in seeing pilots fly. If a flight doc grounds every pilot, the flight doctor will soon find himself without any pilots to care for. A military flight surgeon has the added pressure of a commander who really prefers that his millions of dollars worth of aircraft actually do more than serve as easily accessible practice material for his ground maintenance personnel. More importantly, most flight doctors truly love aviation and do what they do for the simple reason that they know how much pilots love to fly.

I personally spend several hundred hours a year just working on waivers for pilots who have specific medical problems that need certain unique treatments to be safe. Safe is very important. Remember those pilots I mentioned that have had heart attacks? You would probably agree that keeping a close eye on them is probably a good idea if our desire is to prevent the commercial airliners that they are flying from smashing into the ground.

And this is where science, another arcane practice, comes into play.

Unlike many human endeavors (the use of a beer bong for example) when you are dealing with the heart of the person who drives all 870,000 pounds of a 747-400 it is preferable to exercise precision. The dedicated agency responsible for American pilots is called CAMI or the Civil Aero Medical Institute. It is located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and is part of the FAA. There are seven physicians who are the central core of CAMI. It is those seven, and really ultimately just one (because the others are his deputies), who have to take real science and apply it precisely to the guy who moves the stick on the 747. There is little room for error.

It would be appropriate at this time to interject some observations. Since I am now on my way home and I was not afforded the opportunity to fly Southwest (in spite of it costing the government less than this Delta ticket that I am using) I must tell you that Orlando, MCO, has a terrific airport in all respects save for one; Gate 60. Gate 60 is the closest thing to some third world hellhole that you can imagine. All of Delta’s partners flying those Jungle Jet Embraers seem to board through here. It is a low ceiling room filled wall to wall with people and unlike the E gates at PIT, there is no residual room. Flat out the only thing that differentiates this place from say the middle of Nigeria is the lack of smell. They have the smell under control.



The take home is this; Delta is dying. You can tell by the conditions that they force their pax through. Best pay a few extra bucks and fly Southwest. Trust me on this one.

Back to our 747 driver.

There are many pilots, including the editor of a popular flying magazine, that I have spoken too over the years, who think that the entire medical requirement is ridiculous. Their argument usually goes like this, “I self-certify every time that I fly, you see me for just one day and even then you are not perfect, so why am I forced to get this medical in the first place?”

I have another friend, a very wise one, who says this, “It is very foolish for a man to try and work outside of his trade.”

I suppose that when your job involves writing stories about airplanes that 99% of all pilots will never be able to afford and you have a constant parade of manufacturers installing the priciest equipment in your airplane just so you can play with it and write more stories read by people who will never be able to have the same toys, it is tempting to start believing that ‘You da man’ and as such, a re invincible.

Don’t work outside of your trade.

Here is what a medical is not: A medical is not an omniscient overview of all that is you. None of us have Superman vision. Heaven knows that I wish that I did have it. None of us can tell you the day you will have your MI; those of us who are smart leave that to God. A medical is not even a guarantee that you are healthy the day of the exam.

Here is what a medical is: A medical is an exercise in risk management. A medical is your opportunity to sit down with a skilled medical professional, preferably one who is also an experienced pilot, and evaluate the relative risk of you flying your airplane in a safe and healthy fashion for the period of your medical. Your AME or flight surgeon is a person who has crammed a boatload of data into their brain-housing group. When we see you, as we are freaking you out with the various, “hmmms, okays, whoas and uh-ohs” that come out of all of our mouths when we are examining a pilot, what is actually happening is a complex computational exercise that crunches what you report, what you say, what we find and what the regulations require into a risk management profile.

The end product is a medical certificate, but what that paper really is, is a statement of relative risk. It is an assertion by a person like me that says that I have examined all the variables and I feel based upon a lot of science and data that you are a good health risk to be flying for the next 6 months, 1-year or even 3 years. It is not a simple or amateur process and while certain detractors can launch their aircraft and pop on the autopilot and then sit back smugly making comments about the inadequacy of our work, I assure you that most of us take it very seriously.

I would mention Scott Crossfield. I do not intend nor portend to have any knowledge of why Crossfield is now dead. All I think I can say with assurance is that he flew a 210 into a level 6 cell and it ended up in pieces (Scott Crossfield, by the way, was one of my aviation heroes and has been for years, long before most people had heard his name for the first time in the various obituaries). But what is unique about Crossfield is his age. Scott was in his 80s, flying a 210 in weather. Chuck Yeager only recently gave up flying F-15s and still flies regularly. Now is it just me or do any of you wonder about the health of an 80 year old flying a Mach 2+ capable fighter plane?

“But wait!” You say, that’s Crossfield, Yeager and for equanimity let’s throw in Bob Hoover; they are the masters of the wing. They can fly by merely willing the airplane into the air. Oh, but were that true. The sad fact of reality is that the only unique thing about these three men is that they were blessed with very good genes and as a consequence long lives. Their aviation skill is unquestioned, but it is not in the god-realm. They just flew a great deal and learned a great deal. I am certain that BG Yeager could tell us all of many “great sticks” that died over France or in a smoking hole at Muroc. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The real issue is that all three men, and I theorize Crossfield, are at ages where most of their peers are dead or in nursing home with significant cognitive decline. I am forced to wonder whether or not Crossfield’s cognitive ability played any role in his judgments on the day of his death. That is an issue that all flight surgeons have to look at. I know that I do and as a circle back to my notion on risk management, I have told more than a handful of over 70 aviators that they ought to consider selling their Bonanzas and buying a good Champ or a Cub. Why? Because life moves a lot faster at 165 knots than it does at 60 knots and 70+ year-old minds don’t continue to work as fast as they did at 40. Risk management.

It is the same situation when I sit down and ask about a person’s heart history and their family history and their blood pressure and mentally calculate what the potential issues are that if left unchecked might lead to a pile of wreckage in the middle of a school yard with a corpse in the middle of all of it.

Witness British European Airways Flight 548 and Captain Stanley Keys. In this unfortunate accident a BEA Trident with Captain Keys in command crashed into a wooded area near an expressway. 118 people died. During autopsy it was found that Keys had evidence of a past heart attack as well as a presumed coronary artery aneurysm. While nobody knows exactly why the airplane crashed the forensic evidence weighs heavily on at least a partial incapacitation of Keys and in the environment of poor crew resource management and the departure stage of the flight the end result was catastrophic.

Ever wonder how many general aviation accidents are actually the result of the sole pilot experiencing a heart attack or seizure or perhaps a stroke? Read through the report below

http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief2.asp?ev_id=20040824X01278&ntsbno=ANC04LA093&akey=1

What is important to note are two things, well actually, three. The first is that this pilot never mentioned on his medical that he had diabetes. Why? Fear of losing his medical? Forgot? Perhaps he felt it was under control so he no longer had it (I see this all the time with people when asked if they have high blood pressure. They take medication, their blood pressure is normal, and so they no longer have high blood pressure). We will never know because he is dead. The second thing to note is that he has over 5000 mg per deciliter of glucose in his urine. I assure you that this is not an example of well-controlled diabetes. It certainly is not an example of “militant” control. In fact he has so much sugar in his urine that when I treat patients like this I like to say that they are, “Pissing cotton candy.” It is also noted that the pilot had several hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, episodes. Not good.

The third thing that warrants mention is that diabetes is waiverable condition for third class medical when treated according to the standards set forth by the FAA/CAMI. Did the pilot know this? Did he know it and just didn’t want to go through the hoops, thinking he could do it better himself? Did the pilot’s AME know this? I see many pilots who come to me because their AME frankly doesn’t know what he or she is doing and either denies a medical or tells the pilot that they cannot fly with a condition that is clearly waiverable with a little work.

The point here is this; what we do as flight surgeons is an exercise in risk management. We are after all the pilot’s advocates. I could show you many letters that I have written, all of which say something to the effect that “I recommend waivering this pilot for class “x” privileges”. I have never written a letter recommending permanent disqualification and like I have said, I have diabetic pilots, asthmatic pilots, brain tumor pilots, heart attack pilots and all of them currently hold valid, FAA bonafide, medicals. It is what I do.

So here is the rub. Only about 43% of all AMEs are pilots. Now it is the case that just because a doctor is a pilot doesn’t make him an aerospace medicine expert and just because he is not a pilot does not mean that they are not an expert. But in general it is a good idea to go to the best-prepared AME you can find. Remember, it is about risk management, for your sake. You wouldn’t purposely find the crappiest A & P to do your annual; I mean it’s your life right? Well regardless of your health problems you would be well served to find the most inquisitive and eager AME as well. They might just save your personal “airframe and powerplant” from catastrophic failure.

Reality is that with a little cooperation and patience I can get almost any pilot wavered. It sometimes takes a few months and sometimes it is frustrating for the pilot, but that is what I do. I do it because I love flying so much that I cannot imagine what it would be like to be told that I could no longer do it and so I want to make sure that I help those pilots who are facing that possibility get their privileges back. It is after all what THEY do and I am glad to help.




Fly safe.