I can tell you that it is very true.
It took a long time to sell Miss Pretty Pretty. Frankly the airplane market is soft; at least the market for 40 year old Cessna 172s. It is a sad fact that Cessna built 30,000 and change. That makes it a buyers market and to make things worse, a population beholden of glass cockpits feels that anything that actually utilizes instruments powered by vacuum pressure or spinning wheels is suspect and better relegated to the same place that the English Longbow and siege engines went too.
In other words, old technology, even if it is essentially the same or better in terms of reliability, will not trump the new. My cell phone is an example. It doesn’t play the William Tell Overture when someone calls, it doesn’t take pictures and it cannot play an MP3 file. In fact the only thing it does is make phone calls. In this respect I am a veritable Luddite for owning it.
But in the ‘real’ world, the world that requires absolute performance and reliability, lest you say, die… …fluffy items that have extremely annoying and long ring tones mean little. I bought my 172 precisely because it is simple. It has three fuel sumps, gravity feed fuel system, fixed gear and with lots of flaps it can land in a football field’s length and assure the pilot of a survivable arrival where many aircraft cannot. There are no redundant electrical buses or the like; redundancy for years was in the form of my Garmin 295 and recently a back-up AI that I purchased in anticipation of not selling Miss Pretty Pretty.
It took the better part of a year and an asking price reduction of $8000.00 to get the airplane to a new buyer. The new buyer is a good guy; a fellow learning to fly. He will install a new Garmin GPS com and it will get him all the way through IFR training should he choose to do so. He recognized the value in a 40 year old, basic airplane and that is what I was hoping for in the end. I am quite happy that he bought it because it will now be flown frequently and looked after. In a decade I will search the N number and see what has become of her.
But there is more to all of this.
Glass is like the green-eyed blonde. Or perhaps you prefer redhead? It is seductive just by appearance. Some of you know about X-plane and my departure from MSFS to the exclusive use of X-plane as a simulator. Well the designer of X-plane has a new program called AvioApp. It is essentially the Avidyne Entegra system completely programmed to run on your computer and be driven by X-plane data. It is a great way to see the Entegra and how it works. I just wish that the designer had made it demo-functional enough to run with x-plane so you can see the interface. No matter, if you want to see Entegra, go to www.x-plane.com and down load the demo. It is worth it. It is one of the best situational awareness tools that I have ever used.
The only improvement that I can think of that might be worth it to pursue would be the integration of GPS derived terrain data on the ADI. That way you could have an almost “synthetic vision” system for the purpose of terrain awareness/avoidance. The system’s utility really came to light a couple of weeks after I started this Joy of Flying when I went to rent the Avidyne airplane again.
I arrived at the airport to find that the airplane was down for a 100-hour inspection. I was mildly bummed but I had come to fly and so the Cherokee-180 with the analogue gauges would do. The flight instructor who went with me as a safety pilot was curious as to my intentions and I told him that we were going to fly some instruments. I planned for an ILS to 28L at CMH, with a missed and vectors for the ILS 23L at LCK followed by a VOR approach into Fairfield Co., LHQ. We finished up with the NDB at UNI. I was under the instructor’s time crunch as he had class to get back too so we launched and kept it fire-walled all the way. Both ILS’s were flown at 120 KIAS for traffic flow. They were within commercial standard but not quite ATP. I have some work to do…
The problem came as we took vectors from Columbus approach for the VOR into LHQ. Something wasn’t right. I kept getting a FROM indication on the VOR. I checked and confirmed the VOR. But sure enough we were getting the FROM indicator.
Now in days of yore, I was all over enroute charts and would cross check my position as I flew by tuning VORs enroute. In MPP I always had the Garmin 295 tuned up and on Map mode. Positional awareness was not an issue. But today I had a simple King GPS without much of a map and I was on vectors. The controlled did what neither the instructor nor myself anticipated; he turned us INSIDE the inbound course from the VOR. Instead of crossing us at the VOR and allowing us to do the turn and get set up, I was inside, going too fast and before I knew it I was watching LHQ sail right underneath me when all along I thought I should be seeing a VOR somewhere.
Things only got worse with the NDB into UNI. I was poorly set up and not certain of my exact position… …actually I knew exactly where I was and I crossed the NDB perfectly but I neglected the procedure and simply turned inbound from the NDB and lost it from there. The procedure turn is there to allow a pilot to get situated and account for winds (which were present) prior to reaching the marker. Well, in haste and with lack of total situational awareness it was easy to muddle through it and fly a sloppy approach. The bottom line here is that we train to do exactly what I did which was bugger up everything and learn in the process.
I would have gotten nothing for my time and money had I flown all the approaches perfectly.
It also made me supremely aware of just how dependent I have become on GPS and technology in general. As a rule I fly with current charts; sectional, enroute and approach plates. I always have. But over time with reliable GPS, and no autopilot, it became an easier issue to use a hand to fly and a hand to punch buttons and not worry about paper and a pencil. The Garmin takes up just a little panel space, the charts take up a lot of space and it is hard to draw on them in flight. Without an autopilot you start to rely on memory and one-handed navigation. It is not optimal and may speak more for the reason to have an autopilot in single pilot IFR than it does for chart usage.
This was brought even further to home when I recently spoke to a friend who just successfully completed a major airline interview and was hired. In the evolution he was asked to consider a system failure in an airplane (the toilet pump failed and was pumping toilet fluid all over the main cabin) and how he would handle it. He had about 6 minutes to come up with a good plan. Of great importance was the fact that the primary electronics bay in the 737 he was flying sits right below the forward lav. Not good when blue juice is pouring all over your flight data computer and all the available airports around are low minimums.
His FIRST step in trouble-shooting the problem was to hand control of the aircraft over to his FO. Fly the airplane first. It was essential that he divest himself of flying the airplane so he could focus on fixing the problem. Thus it is with navigation, to properly navigate, you must at best stop flying the airplanes as well as you were prior to focusing on navigation. Hence the autopilot becomes a very valuable item in an environment where you need to rapidly find yourself.
This is a big reason why I didn’t fly a lot of IFR in MPP. I just never felt comfortable, especially after flying larger Turboprop twins, flying single pilot IFR without an autopilot. By the end of the relationship it had become apparent that I was not going to start using MPP to go to California and she wasn’t the Cub that I enjoyed flying locally for low and slow. The Cessna 172 is the equivalent of the Honda Civic. You don’t want to go far in it and it isn’t a Toyota Spider. You don’t climb into a 172 on Ohio Summer evenings and fly it doors open for the shear joy of it. The Skyhawk is a haul stuff, maybe yourself, but haul stuff in reasonably comfort and reliability on trips under 800 NM and certainly in reasonable weather.
I just didn’t and don’t do enough of that to justify having a 172. I realized that serious long distance flying has made the integration of modern GPS and avionics a necessity if you are going to do it as well as you can. The Entegra system made me understand that we really do live in a time when good pilots can really leverage technology to become very precise and skilled in their IFR flying. While I don’t plan on installing glass in the next little Cub I buy, I do plan on using that technology in the form of a rental when I want to go from here to Tampa.
Watching MPP taxi for the final time down the South ramp of PKB was an emotionally neutral thing for me. I was watching a 40-year-old machine head for someone else’s hangar. The reality is that nobody knows what is happening structurally to those airplanes. I find myself thinking about 40-year-old aluminum and fatigue and all those things that I never much considered when I was flying a 4130 chromoly Cub around.
The buyer got a great deal. In the end I parted with the airplane for a few thousand under wholesale simply because I knew that in a year what I save on hangars and property taxes would make up the difference. I can still rent an airplane when I need one and I know that it gets a 100 hour inspection when due and the machine is well maintained. I am pleased and the new owner is going to learn to fly and get the experience he needs.
The parting photo is one of my, er… …his, airplane departing. The constant in life is change and this is no different. It was MPP departure that got me into a glass airplane and likely her absence and the loss of access to an airplane whenever I want it will also force me to consider flying more. A paradox but truth nevertheless.
Fly Safe.
