 Question: Why did I get charged “last month dues?” I just joined the Club this month! Answer: The “last month dues” is for the last month that you are a member (some time in the very distant future, we hope!) This charge is similar to a landlord charging first and last month’s rent for an apartment. The Club does this to help offset the cost if you leave the Club with a balance on your account. The last month dues are refunded to you if you terminate your membership and pay your final balance in full.
Achievements
Solo
Private
100% Written
Instrument
Commercial Multi Engine
Instructor
Congratulations to all of you and to your wonderful instructors:
New Members
William Bencze
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by Dave Fry, General Manager
Once the proper Safety Attitude is in place (see last month’s article), we are in a position to assess the risks associated with a flight. We’ll start with an understanding of the nature of risk. Some of the concepts are subtle; none is difficult.
1. “Unwise,” “Unsafe” and “dangerous” are not the same. Some examples: Flying into (or even near) thunderstorms is dangerous. Flying into known icing conditions in a 172 or Archer is dangerous. Taking a 160 hp plane into and out of Tahoe on a summer day at full gross is dangerous – it may even be impossible! Selecting a power-off aim point that is close to the end of the numbers is unsafe. Restoring your night currency after six months by doing three full stop night landings solo is unwise, and may even be unsafe. Taxiing through a tiedown is unwise. Violating any FAR is unwise (some could even fit into the unsafe or dangerous categories). As working definitions, I view “dangerous” to mean that there is an inherent risk of injury or loss of life that can’t be overcome by increased pilot skill. “Unsafe” means a lesser risk involving injury but probably not loss of life, and those may be mitigated to some extent by pilot skill “Unwise” means risk of aircraft damage or destruction but low risk of injury or death; these are typically not skill related, but issues of judgment.
2. “Successful” and “safe” aren’t the same. Sure, you’ve done hundreds of approach to landing stall recoveries, and done all of them with less than 100 feet altitude loss. Does that make attempting one at 150 feet safe? Even if you’re successful, you’re “getting away with it” rather than being safe.
3. Safety choices are rarely binary. Sure, flying into that thunderstorm is dangerous, but what about flying a mile away? Two miles? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? When there are icing conditions at 9,000 can you still fly safely at eight thousand? Seven thousand?
4. Risk is time dependent. An afternoon takeoff from Tahoe has a different level of risk from that of a takeoff at dawn, which in turn is different from a midnight takeoff on an overcast night.
5. Risk is (sometimes) training/skill dependent. A CAT III approach qualified ATP may perform an instrument approach with less risk than a private pilot under the same conditions.
6. Risk is (sometimes) equipment dependent. A 737 enters known icing conditions with less risk than an Archer.
A portion of the risk assessment process was mentioned last month. To briefly review:
The DECIDE model relies upon situational awareness to alert a pilot of a change in some aspect of a flight (or ground operation). This change triggers the DECIDE process:
Detect – the fact that a change has occurred
Application of the DECIDE model needs to become an automatic and ongoing part of every pilot’s flight preparation and execution. Applying it after an accident or incident occurs may help another pilot, but it won’t get you out of the problem you may be facing.
This model and much more useful information is contained in the first chapter of the new FAA Instrument Flying Handbook. On the subject of human factors in aviation, there is more insight in this chapter than there is in most entire books.
August 1st will soon be upon us and fall and winter right behind that. Are your fall/winter flying skills up to date and will you be current for IFR flight?
Ever wanted to fly GPSs? We have five planes with KLN 89b or 94 GPSs, three planes with Garmin 430 GPS, and two planes with the Apollo GX 60 GPSs. We have two planes with the STEC programmable auto-pilots and several planes with the new King auto pilots.
The Club has several tailwheel planes that are begging for transition pilots wanting to get their 3 hours for the wings program, or who just want to try something different.
How about the new planes on the line? The Trinidad or the M20K (Turbo) Mooney? Or the new PA28-181s and the new Cessna 172SPs? Check out the revised Club trips on the web site. They might be your cup of tea.
West Valley has several new flight instructors. Maybe you should get to know them -- in the air.
All of the above opportunities are available to you as WVFC members. I hope one of them will entice you to come on down and try something new. Come in and meet the Chief Pilot or the Chief Executive Officer. They don’t bite and are at your disposal to direct you in your flying activities
It obviously hasn’t occurred to some of you that the planes at our club aren’t rental cars. Granted that many – in fact, most – of our pilots take good care of the planes, but there are enough incidents on a weekly basis to warrant concern.
So at the risk of being too obvious, I’m going to point out some of the things we’ve seen routinely, and some of the differences between rental cars and our airplanes.
These all are indications of attitude problems on the part of some of our pilots – they don’t care about the airplanes, they don’t care about the owners, and they don’t care about the other members of the club. Every one of these problems increases the cost of your flying by increasing the owner’s expenses. They also cause additional maintenance time that could be used to keep the fleet in better condition. When you see something wrong with a plane, squawk it! Let’s make the responsible party pay, rather than sharing the burden of their carelessness.
Some of the differences between rental cars and our planes:
They have trusted us as a club, and you individually, to care for their investments. You all know we need more planes, and the better we treat the current planes, the more likely we are to find owners willing to place additional planes on our line.
As a kind of postscript, I have begun placing new Air Crew style checklists into some of our planes. Failure to squawk a missing checklist will result in a $50 replacement fee. This and many of the other squawks we see are “safety of flight” issues.
To coin a phrase from AOPA Pilot, here is my Never Again story. Recently I flew to Castle. The flight went well. The weather was good. There were no planes arriving or leaving the airport. It had been some time since I had been to Castle and, when I had been there before, a truck had been on the taxiway to guide me to transient parking.
I radioed to see if anyone could direct me to transient parking, but no one was monitoring the frequency. In front of the tower building another plane was tied down. There weren’t any markings for transient parking. There weren’t any other planes around. I started taxiing toward the general area where the one plane was tied down.
I was looking at the left, toward what appeared to be the tiedown area and neglected to check my right side. Then I heard and felt a jolt, looked to my right, and saw that I had hit a post with my wingtip. Fortunately, it was just the wingtip and not the leading edge of the wing. But I had just made a mistake I had never made before, and had hoped I would never make.
There was a task that I did do correctly and wanted to bring to the readers’ attention. After I stopped the plane, I was distracted and annoyed with myself. When shutting the plane down, I made sure that I went through my checklist to be sure I did it fully and correctly. I didn’t want to compound the problem by being careless with the shutdown.
Actually, the pilot did another thing right, as well. The pilot called PAO to ask about airworthiness, rather than simply flying it back.
Ironically, I think I was lulled into carelessness because there were no other planes around. Had there been other planes, I would have been scanning where I was in relationship to the planes to ensure that there were no problems. Because there [were] no other planes around, I wasn’t scanning the way I should have been.
Lessons Learned
See the final point regarding the need for alertness. Also, as we all know, problems usually arise from what we’re not looking at.
I was taught not to fixate on one point or on one plane when flying. Equally important is the need to not focus on one point when on the ground. Circumstances change as I move and I need to respond quickly and appropriately.
I made sure to go through the shutdown checklist to ensure that everything was done properly.
Even when nothing seems like it can go wrong, it can. It is important to keep vigilant and alert even when, and maybe particularly when, everything seems perfectly fine.
IFR folks are well acquainted with this concept. How often have we just spent two or three minutes with all the needles centered, airspeed, altitude, and heading exactly where we want them, only to relax just the slightest bit and suddenly discover that everything has turned to crud, and we have no idea how it got that bad so quickly?
The long weekend trip would present new challenges and learning opportunities, and I had thus prepared extensively. But on this trip, I encountered challenges I did not expect or would have wished for, but I definitely learned from all of it and perhaps you can too.
This was my first long cross-country in awhile, my first exposure to LA’s Class B, first flight with a new handheld GPS. First landings at a number of airports: Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Brackett, Harris Ranch. I planned each leg meticulously, checked the weather assiduously, mentally thought through each phase of each flight in the journey. I pored over the LA terminal area chart to learn the peculiarities of LA’s Class Bravo. I spent an hour on ground discussing the trip with an instructor.
And I was pleased at how the preparation paid off. I had a great trip down the coast to Santa Monica with an overnight stay in Santa Barbara. On my second day, I took a flight around the LA Basin to tackle the new Class B, with pattern work at Brackett. On my third day I flew back up the coast a ways and crossed over to Harris Ranch. I was navigating the “old fashioned way” via dead reckoning and VORs, and double checking with the GPS from time to time.
When I landed at Harris Ranch at dusk to stop in for a bite, I was anticipating a good dinner and just one more leg to cap off a successful journey. I was pleased overall with my flying, my navigating, my communications with ATC. You can say that after concentrating so much on executing and learning, at this point a pit stop at Harris Ranch seemed like no big deal, and I let my guard down.
I taxied to the parking area (many of you are already familiar with it), and by the time I was picking out my parking spot, it was getting dark. I decided to park in the far corner, closest to the inn—I wanted to save myself the walk. There was a plane in the second to last spot, so I focused on giving that plenty of clearance as I swung the plane into the spot I had chosen. In the fading light, I had perceived a line of trees behind the apron, but as I swung the plane around, I didn’t pay enough attention to the closest tree, or its low hanging boughs.
I swung the right wingtip into one of these. I heard the thump, saw what had happened, and shut the engine off right away. “Oh @#$^%!”
I jumped out to inspect the damage. The tree bough struck the wingtip about 6” inboard, left a meaningful dent, about 3” wide and about 1” deep. All thoughts of a juicy steak dinner were now far from my mind.
My first question was whether the plane was still airworthy. I realized that my default plan should be to rent a car or arrange other transportation home. But after some careful deliberation, I was pretty certain that only the skin of the wingtip was affected, not structural ribs or spars. Nothing seemed out of line besides the wrinkled sheet metal.
A significant point here is that despite structural damage (which there could have been, and which the pilot had no way to judge), wrinkled skin on the leading edge of the wing can substantially affect the aerodynamics of a plane. Consider that even the wing frost on a winter morning can cause a 10% increase in stall speed, cutting the safety margin on takeoff and landing. In the case of a dent in only one wing, the stage is set for a stall of just one wing, i.e. spin entry. In the case of this damage, the MX folks had to bang the damage out in order to get a ferry permit so we could take the plane to get repaired.
I gave a very thorough preflight, broadcast my intentions, back-taxied down the runway, and had a normal runup. On the takeoff run I was prepared to abort at the sign of any abnormality. I stayed in the pattern, to get a feel for any change in flight characteristics, ready to land if anything seemed amiss. But everything seemed normal, so I struck out for home, following I-5 and its string of friendly airports, to Tracy, Livermore and finally home.
After landing I noted the damage in the squawk log, left a message on the club answering machine, and sent an email via CASSi to the other member who had the plane the next day. In the morning I called the club again, and sat back to deal with the consequences of this clearly avoidable mishap.
To Be Continued Next Month...
Risk assessment depends upon a good Aeronautical Decision Making model (ADM). The fundamentals of ADM include:
The FAA has, for some time, been focused on the DECIDE model as a systematic method in the context of the ADM process.
Estimate – the need to react to or counter the change
Choose – a desirable outcome for the flight or situation
Identify – actions to control the change successfully
Do – take the necessary actions
Evaluate – the effects of the action to react to or counter the initial change
The Chief’s Corner
by Don Styles, Chief Pilot
These Aren’t Rental Cars!
OK, so your passengers have done some of this– you’re still responsible.
The bottom line is that we have about 40 owners who, at considerable expense, have placed their planes on our line.
First Person Accident Report
Chief’s Note: As always, my comments are in italics. This accident involved an Archer at Castle.
Even if I feel that there is less need for alertness, I need to be as diligent in scanning my surroundings as when I’m maneuvering through the pattern or through a busy airspace.
First Person Accident Report #2
[Note the similarities between this and the previous report]
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