Civil war breaks out

It seems that GA has gone to war with itself. The issue is the IMCR and the work done on an accessible instrument rating by the FCL.008 committee.

Whatever the facts, and it is a complicated area, the personal attacks do none of us any good at all.

Grrrrrr

AOPA thread on Flyer
IMCR thread on PPRuNe
FCL.008 terms of reference

Winter woes

The C182 has been at Hentsridge for a while now. I took it over there before my last trip to the US for the AOPA Summit.

I think it's finished, all bar the paperwork. When that's done I'll have an aeroplane with repaired seats and repaired vortex generators.

That's the good news, the bad is that once it's back it'll be parked in the open for the winter. This will be its third winter outside and the paint has suffered. In fact it has suffered so much that a respray will be necessary soon, certainly in the next 12 months...

The joy of air travel

Two of us had a meeting in Germany yesterday. Things are pretty busy at work so we flew there and back in a day with BA from Heathrow. I parked the car in the long-term car park at 9 in the morning and picked it up twelve hours later. Add the travel time to that and you find that in order to attend a one-and-a-half-hour meeting we had to drive, walk, wait and get a bus for fourteen-and-a-half hours; not a great ratio.

GA would have been more efficient, a lot more fun and we would undoubtedly have enabled a couple of meetings with clients on the way out or on the way back. So why didn't we, of all people, fly ourselves? Mainly because the infrastructure just makes it so hard (in this context the word 'hard' is interchangeable with 'expensive').

The only airfields with approaches and lights that are open late enough are either bloody expensive (Bristol), too far away to be practical (Southend) or just unavailable except in emergency (Lyneham).

At least T5 is a pleasant experience as far as airport terminals go.

Thumbs up FAA

Following the mid air in Nw York that claimed eight lives, the FAA has issued new rule for the Hudson corridor. I can imagine many aviation authorities simply banning GA from the area, imposing positive control at all altitudes or mandating TCAS or similar. I'm glad to say that with the help of the GA community, the FAA (not an Authority but an Administration, an important distinction) has issued new rules that retains airpace access for all users. See here for more.

BFR time

I did a BFR (Biennial Flight Review) just before leaving the US. For anyone not familiar with FAA regs, it's necessary to complete a BFR with a flight instructor every two years (hence the biennial bit).

The FAA stipulates that a BFR should consist of an hour of ground instruction and an hour's flight. I met Chris, my instructor, and we sat down and talked through some FAA rules and regulations with the structure provided by some questions...

- What do you need to fly in Class B/C/D airspace
- Point to some Class D on the chart
- What does it mean by *L next to an airfield
- What are the visibility requirements below 10,000' for Class B
- What documents do you need to carry
etc.

It's fairly basic stuff and the questions are typical of every BFR I've done, but as I only fly in the US a couple of times a year, it's a useful refresher. If you're hiring from the instructor's employer, it's also a good opportunity to get briefed on any local procedures. I've not yet finished one of these hours thinking that it was a waste of time.

The ground portion over, we moved to the aeroplane via a weather check from www.aviationweather.gov - Chris had already done a NOTAM check. We flew a fairly recent but somewhat tired and dirty C172SP - the one with THIRTEEN fuel drains - there was a bit of a blustery crosswind, but before long we were climbing away and towards the practice area where we did some slow flight, flew some stalls and did some steep turns. It was pretty bumpy below 1,500' but smoothed out above.

After the manoeuvres, we set course for Lakeland where we did a couple of touch-and-goes before returning to Peter O'Knight for a full stop, after which Chris signed the BFR in my logbook and said goodbye. The cost, for an hour of aeroplane rental and two hours of instructor time, was $250.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the flying was the differences that we all get used to. The weather was overcast at something like 10,000' with visibility of at least six statute miles. It seemed like a standard UK day, but Chris thought it was pretty hazy. He went on to encourage caution for the approach to Peter O'Knight's shorter runway, which at 2,600' is, in his opinion, short.

It would be easy to be a little smug and think that they're spoiled with (usually) decent weather and long runways, but perhaps the bigger learning point is just how quickly we can get used to our own type of flying. I learned at Gloucester but mainly fly from a strip these days, yet a while ago after visiting Gloucester I still managed to start up and request taxi having completely forgotten to book out or pay a landing fee.

Taking the temperature

AOPA's Summit has just closed and it is time to take stock. Trade shows often reflect the health of an industry, so I consider Summit as a thermometer temporarily inserted into the backside of GA. The prognosis is that the patient is in need of some regenerative oxygen, and perhaps even a heart transplant.

Unsurprisingly exhibitor and visitor numbers at Summit were down, and GAMA's Q3 shipment figures (which show aeroplanes shipped, not necessarily sold) showed a decline of 58% for piston aircraft.

It may sound everything in Tampa is doom and gloom, but that would not be true. The vast majority of people involved in GA are passionate about flying, and many of the companies involved are running lean of peak, just waiting for things to start to recover, which according to most won't be before 2011 at the earliest.

Single-engine jet poison?

The three main contenders in the race to certificate, build and sell a single-engine jet were exhibiting at Tampa and selling positions. Two of the jets, the Cirrus Vision SF50 and the PiperJet, flew in, while Diamond had a fuselage mock-up only.

Piper and Cirrus both have one jet flying, while Diamond has three, including two production-conforming machines.

Both Piper and Cirrus have recently announced a slowdown in their projects. Given the devastation currently being visited on the aviation industry, all three manufacturers must be finding the pill of certification expense hard to swallow. The question is, will the 'pill' eventually provide years of good health, or will it cause a fatal overdose?