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STAFF MEMBER OF THE MONTH This month's star Staff member is Eric Jewell. Eric joined the font desk staff several months ago, and has been doing an awesome job. Eric manages to keep the planes turning while handling the hundreds of other tasks that pop up, and always with a smile. Eric's a pilot heading for his CFI, so balancing workload isn't a challenge. He's also used to "managing" a 3 year old daughter, so having 3 or 4 arms is a common requirement for him. Thanks for a great job!
For those of you following CFI Lisa Dyball's recent growing spurt. Maurice Jerry Dyball Cantin (working title) made his appearance on June 25 at exactly 4:20 pm. Little Jerry is 7 lbs. 5 oz., and 21" long. Mom and Baby are doing great, and eager to get back into the cockpit!
ACHIEVEMENTS
Solo
Private
Instrument
100% on IFR Written
CFI
Soaring Society of America Diamond Altitude Gain of 19,561' = 26,
175' Absolute Altitude:
Congratulations to all of you and to your wonderful instructors:
NEW MEMBERS
Joseph Dennis
And welcome to club staff new in the month of June... Dana Michaud in Accounting - Flight Log Processing; Brandie Harris in MX - MX Assistant; and Jonathan Galvez in MX - Mechanic.
MEMBER SURVEY RESULTS
Several months back, we undertook a demographic survey of the membership and came up with some very interesting results. Keep an eye out for those results posted to the West Valley website.
Join the monthly stuffing crew on July 3. Here's your chance to help out your club and enjoy good company and free food at the same time. The pizza will be hot at noon!
SUGGESTION BOX
Do you have a suggestion or a bit of feedback for the club? Send it to whatsup@wvfc.org.
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BABY UPDATE!
BILLING PIZZA PARTYby Mike Latzky, General Manager
Over the past few months, we've been working to expand the fleet and the diversity of aircraft, while (and it may sound like a contradiction) reducing the number of types of aircraft. The distinction here is between "one-of-a-kinds" and others of a related type. Suddenly, we're seeing a lot of new aircraft on our line and a lot of opportunities we haven't had for additional flying fun. Many of the planes below are either fresh on our line, or will be coming in the next 1-3 weeks. I wanted to make sure everyone knew of the many changes.
An example here is the addition of multi-engine training and trip aircraft to the line. We've now got a Duchess, based in San Carlos, which is probably the best known training twin. The Duchess gets 4 people moving at 155 knots in comfort. But multi-engine training would be a bit more hit and miss with only one aircraft. As luck would have it, we also have an Aztec. The Aztec represents a good cross between training and trip. With a 2,000 lb. useful load, 7 hours of fuel endurance, a 178 knot speed, and 6 seats, it can haul a lot for a long way.
The ability to now work on your multi rating is a great new addition to the Club. But the fun doesn't stop there. We've recently added some planes which provide some new experiences and greater reliability to go when you plan to. An example here is the addition of a second 180hp 172 - N1001M. With two available, your ability to make your planned trip increases, as does the sensibility of getting checked out (in this case, easy, since the 180hp version does NOT need a separate checkout). The addition of 739TW - a 2002 172SP brings a MultiFunction Display (MFD) to the flying environment, along with the KLN-94 color moving map GPS.
48FM is a 1998 Mooney 20J which we'll have in the next 2 weeks. Not only near-new, but fast and with good toys. This increases the value of getting checked out in the 20J AND the 231 (231EE). By flying 231EE, you'll maintain currency in 48FM (if you get checked out in the 20J as well as the 231). Again, more reliability in making a planned trip, or getting to dinner faster.
Another great example is the fact that we have 3 new Archer IIIs. The price points are all different, as are the avionics and flying experience. All 3 have advanced autopilots, air conditioning (try that on a hot summer day going out to the Central Valley - it worked great for me on a recent Club trip to Harris Ranch...) If you want the comfort of a new Archer III at the lowest price, 101LL will get you there in style. If you want to add the GPSS protocol, as well as a Sandel and a Stormscope, 945DB brings all that to the table. If you want the safety of a TCAD added in, 343MM is the one for you. Naturally, all 3 have the same flight characteristics.
We've also had a few engine "issues" in the past few months. Happily, all 3 are expected back in service before the end of July with either new, overhauled, or repaired engines. 96934, the 182, is getting a brand new engine. 828R will be back soon after piston work. And 1597H will be back after its engine work is completed. These represent diversity and different price points, weight carrying, and speed alternatives. We're glad to see these are on the road to recovery.
Sadly, the T210 is going away. But if you want a similar flight experience, complete with pressurization, the P210 represents a great price point combined with some advanced systems and comfort. Most people shy away from pressurization, but it's one of the more interesting additions you can make to your flying "repertoire."
And while we've had our Dakota go away, we already have its replacement about to go on line - 2240B. Same price and capability and soon to be up in San Carlos. The good news is that the window should maintain most people's currency in the Dakota.
Over the next few months, we're likely to see a few additions of similar types. More on this as they solidify, but just as we have many Warriors, Archers, 152s and 172 variants, we'll be looking to have more than 1 of a type or family. We'll also be increasing our ability to get that Commercial rating or other step up that you may be considering.
In the same vein, next month's newsletter will contain a roadmap from Josh Smith and I that will give a better view of what steps up and progressions are available in our fleet. As we continue to grow (probably over 60 aircraft in the next 2-3 months), we'll make sure to detail the advantages of each type and direction. Keep flying - and have fun!
The month of June supplied a couple of interesting taxi incidents to discuss. In fact, all of the aircraft-related damages in the 3 months that I have been Director of Flight Safety have been the result of taxi incursions, and all were avoidable.
In one case this month we had an individual try to pull a U-turn on a taxiway surrounded by hangers. In the most recent case, the pilot pulled the plane into a parking spot and clipped a wing on a blast fence at Castle. The first case resulted in minor damage to both the hanger and the aircraft. The second resulted in major damage to the aircraft, as the collision bent the entire wing.
It clearly states in the member regulations that club aircraft are not to be taxied on anything other than a taxiway. This goes further to include not taxiing into parking spots. When the planes are parked, they are to be shut down on the yellow line, 90 degrees to the parking spot, and pushed back into the parking spot by hand. This is not limited to San Carlos and Palo Alto, but includes all airfields.
These rules are in place to help protect the aircraft and the people that fly them. Had people followed the rules, most of the incidents of the past 3 months could have been avoided. A more conservative solution, such as shutting the plane down and pushing it by hand to safer ground would have eliminated the rest.
There has been an addition to the membership regs to include cases where you may find yourself head on with another aircraft or car traveling in the opposite direction on the same taxiway. In the case of two aircraft it is the responsibility of the arriving aircraft to shut down and push back. In the case of a car, if you cannot get guidance on both wingtips, then you are obligated to wait for the car to move, or shut down and manually pull the plane past the obstacle.
Please review the rules in the member regulations. If they are still not totally clear to you, take a moment to call on me, or on one of the WVFC CFIs, to review them.
Again, the one common thread in these incidents is that they were all avoidable. All were pilot error, and in each case the pilot regretted not taking more conservative action with the aircraft. Don't regret the mistake. Avoid it altogether by following the rules.
Stay Current, Stay Safe
One of the most important advances we're making at the Club is in our Maintenance area. Safety has always been the paramount concern. Often the focus on safety also meant late cancellations and other unhappy occurrences. At some point in your Club flying, if you've been with the Club for a few years, this bit you. No one's ever happy about a cancellation, and especially when it happens at the last minute. Sometimes it's due to a part not getting sent by a supplier, or outside work not getting returned to us. More often than not, it's happened because our hard-working crew, with the best of intentions, expected to get the work done, but for one reason or another, it didn't happen on time.
I want to let you know about the crew we have, and what we're doing to fix this issue. Most members don't take the time to stop by and introduce themselves to our maintenance crew. Having worked with everyone for 7 months now, on a day to day basis, I can tell you that they are all dedicated, talented, and care deeply for this Club - they treat those planes lovingly, as if they were their own. I'm proud of the work they do, and the way they conduct themselves. The last few sentences don't do justice to their dedication. Along the same lines, dedication and talent won't make you feel better when you find out the plane you reserved weeks ago for that trip you planned suddenly goes down.
In order to increase safety first, and uptime second, we've brought in a consultant. And not just any consultant, but one of our owner/members who owns 8 planes with the Club. Gary Waldeck has been involved with the Club now for over 10 years, and brings a wealth of experience to our MX operation from his days at Loral, managing their satellite program (a true rocket scientist!) Gary's working closely with the team to revise scheduling, process, workflow, and repair procedures. We're in the process of a total reorganization of our MX process and already seeing the benefits from this. We expect that this revamping effort will ensure that we bring planes in when we have the schedule set properly, and that we get them out in shorter amounts of time, with the same level of safety. You've probably seen the effects of this over the past few months, and hopefully noticed shorter squawk sheets, cleaner aircraft, and less placarded (inop) equipment. This is a serious effort, a permanent change, and perhaps the most important reconstruction of Club process ever.
Gary (Waldeck) has been working closely with the whole team. Maintaining a fleet of our size is a monumental effort, and deserves praise. There are many names you should know:
If you get the chance, please stop by and say hi - these folks work their tools off, often 6 days a week, keeping us safe and having fun. Please let them know how much you appreciate their efforts.
Years ago, as a member of various military flying clubs, I, along with all other club members, was required to attend a monthly Safety Seminar. In addition, whenever there was an accident, there would be a Safety Stand Down, in which for a period of X-Many days there would be no flying, and pilots would be required to attend safety meetings and lectures.
With the exception of the Safety Stand Down periods in which there was no flying, there appeared to be no real change in the accident rates, or the creativity of pilots in how accidents occurred, and what lead up to them. This has led me to believe that the approach to most safety related topics is a bit off base. Most such meetings and discussions focus on what a particular pilot did wrong and how it resulted in an accident/incident. The underlying assumption is that the pilot knew that he (or she) was doing something wrong, but proceeded anyway. Or, perhaps that the pilot should have known that he was doing something wrong. It's my belief that, uniformly, the person didn't know, or it simply never occurred to the pilot that there was any unusual risk in what was being done. Most accidents around the home occur the same way. No one really thinks, "I know this isn't safe, but I'm going to do it anyway."
Even worse, when something goes wrong, most of the time we hear that the pilot wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary. The startling (I hope) conclusion is that most of us are flying in an unsafe manner, don't know it (but should) and are getting away with it through a combination of skill and luck. Read that last sentence again -most of us are doing unsafe things, should know it (but don't) and are getting away with them.
When a pilot has trouble in a crosswind landing and gets a prop strike, it's a virtual certainty that what he did was no different from what he did on every other crosswind landing in the past year. Was he just unlucky this time? Yes, but ...
Luck isn't a satisfactory answer for safety. Spin the roulette wheel often enough and the ball WILL land on green.
Safety is the result of two major factors: one is attitude; the other is technique. Attitude will ensure we do the right things. Technique will ensure we do things right. Unfortunately, most of our flight training is focused on the latter, building skill, though an hour of sitting on the bench next to either the PAO or SQL runway will show that we're only marginally successful. Worse, skills tend to atrophy when we don't use them. Most of our instructors have remarked on the percentage of people they fly with who haven't practiced stalls, soft field takeoffs, emergency procedures, etc, since the last time they flew with an instructor. In many cases, it's been over a year. Skills actually deteriorate more quickly than that. If you haven't flown for a month, you're not at the top of your game. The good news is that your skill can come back quickly - this is the true value of a recurrency flight.
Attitude is actually more important than technique, since it can keep us out of situations that require skills we don't have. The basics of a positive flying attitude are:
See the February 2002 newsletter for Part 1 of this article.
Sorry for the delay getting to Part 2, but here it is. Last time, the discussion centered on how one learns about a new airplane, and why one goes to a required training course. To recap, with systems so complex that Section 7 of the POH may be well over 100 pages, not everything about a jet or turboprop plane is as intuitive as it is in a Cessna 172 or Archer. The approach recommended for learning a new plane (applicable to large and small planes alike) is to study how things work (Section 7, Systems), what will kill you or destroy the plane (Section 2, Limitations), and what to do when things don't work correctly (Section 3, Emergency Procedures. After that knowledge is in place, study Normal Procedures (Section 4), Performance (Section 5), and Weight and Balance (Section 6). Finally, wrap up the study with Handling, Servicing and Maintenance (Section 8), and the supplements. This, of course, is the objective of the West Valley Ground Review Form.
This article is about what actually happens during the training for a jet or turboprop plane. First the overview. At the two training courses I've been to (and they seem to be pretty typical) each day is divided as follows: 2 hours of class, 2 hours of simulator, one hour for lunch, 2 hours of class, 2 hours of simulator, go home sweating. It doesn't appear to make any difference whether the sim is a full motion one or not, it's still so very real, and you still put so much pressure on yourself that you burn cals and sweat buckets
Nearly all of the class material is systems-related, with the emphasis on three things - how things work when they are working correctly, the indicators of malfunctions, and the procedures when they aren't working right. That maps pretty nicely into my favorite way to learn a new plane - Chapter 7 followed by Chapters 2 and 3.
In the simulator, my instructor told me, "We're not here to teach you how to fly; you already know how to do that. We're going to teach you how to handle the systems and the emergencies unique to this plane."
Of course, you get a chance to prove that you really DO know how to fly, because you start with a takeoff that looks like the plane is on an icy surface with random gusty winds. After climbing (130 Kts, and about 2000 ft per minute) to altitude and discovering that level-off in a Pilatus is nothing like what happens in a C-172 (this thing wants to CLIMB!!) you get to do the fun stuff you do in a West Valley checkout. Steep turns, slow flight, approach to landing stall recoveries, takeoff and departure stall recoveries (dang, that nose is way up there!) and unusual attitude recoveries from positions in which the dirty side isn't down. Since this is all supposed to be a piece of cake (even if part of it is done inside simulated clouds), you graduate to even more interesting stuff. Like entering an instrument reference standard rate turn in cruise, holding the standard rate turn and the current altitude, lower the gear, then the flaps, reduce the power to slow-flight, then reversing the process back to a standard rate turn at cruise airspeed.
This all takes about half an hour. The remaining sim time is devoted to all kinds of systems failures. On the list are:
This training is interspersed with less traumatic stuff like teaching the power settings that work best for approaches, takeoffs and landings with various flaps settings, and some of the avionics. An NDB approach in a Pilatus is no more difficult than a VOR approach. An auto-pilot that actually works and flies a coupled approach to minimums is SO nice.
There were two of us in the 6-day class, and by the middle of the 5th day we had done everything in the syllabus, and our instructor had asked if there was anything else we would like to do. Since I would be doing some dual pilot operations, I asked if I could do a couple times around the pattern from the sim's right seat to get the feel and the perspective. So, at 800 feet, just as I started to turn left crosswind, the sadistic instructor (some folks would claim that's a redundant concept) failed the engine on me. Continuing the turn (since the takeoff brief called for a return to the runway after the crosswind turn was initiated), I dropped the nose to best glide. I verified that the Power Control Lever was at full power, pushed the Manual Override lever to max (nothing), pulled both full aft, and pulled the Condition lever to Cutoff (which also feathers the prop). Meanwhile, I called tower and reported the engine failure, declared an emergency, and said I was going to land downwind on the same runway. I reached up and flipped the Nonessential Bus to Override, and as I neared the gear-down glide path, dropped the gear handle. @#$%!, no gear! Grab the handle and pump like mad. The ground is coming up fast. Three greens, slam the flap lever to full, which stretches the flare from the two seconds it would have been to about ten seconds, followed by touchdown on the runway somewhere near the centerline.
Whereupon the instructor said, "Well, I guess you pass." Talk about going home drenched!
Next time, what they DON'T teach in sim school.
* July 5, 5:30 - 11:00 pm, Nevada County Airport. Dine and dance as Moonlight Swing Living History Big Band re-creates the sights and sounds of the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Band of WWII, surrounded by authentic military aircraft and vehicles. Info at www.nevadacountylife.com/airfest.
* July 6, All Day, Nevada County Airport. Wings Over the Gold Country, aircraft fly-bys and displays.
* July 7, 9:00am - 5:00pm. Cirrus Day @ WVFC-PAO. The Cirrus Design Trailer will be here with all kinds of cool demos, and information on one of the hottest planes in GA today. Info on both the SR20 and SR22 will be available and the team from Cirrus will be here to answer all of your questions. With the tax advantages available right now, putting a Cirrus on the line is a great way to have some big-time fun with GA!
* July 10 at PAO 7:00-8:30pm. The Complete Pre-Flight. An in-depth look at a thorough, hands-on preflight check.
* July 13, 10 am - 12:00 noon, WVFC-PAO. Cessna ownership seminar. West Valley and TradeWinds will be hosting a Cessna Ownership Seminar for those interested in a new Cessna for the West Valley Line. We'll have a new SkyLane (182) here on display, and lots of good information on how and what to buy, and how putting the plane on our line can be a big benefit to you. The latest tax law changes make it especially advantageous right now. Come on by, get all the info you need, and see what TradeWinds and West Valley can do for you
* July 13-14, Rush for Gold Air Rally and Treasure Hunt, SQL to Columbia Airport. $250 in prizes. Info at www.r4g.org.
* July 17 at SQL 7:00-8:30pm. Basic Cross-Country Flight Planning. A look at the process and procedures for making a good cross-country flight plan.
* July 23, 7pm, WVFC-PAO. WVFC BOARD MEETINGS for the remainder of 2002 will take place on July 23 and October 22. It's your club! Don't miss the chance to participate!
For information or questions about Safety Seminars, please email Francis Vo at francis_vo@yahoo.com.
THE SAFE ZONE
by Josh Smith, DFS
MAINTENANCE MOMENTUM
by Mike Latzky.
And most recently, Jonathan Galvez joined us last week as a mechanic - and we're expecting great contributions.
THE SAFETY SEMINAR FALLACY
by Dave Fry
More about each of the above topics in subsequent articles, next time - skill appraisal.
ANYONE CAN FLY A ...
Part 2, by Dave Fry.
Dang, that means you can't get the gear down unless you put the Nonessential Bus into Override. (BTW, why do they think the gear is "nonessential"?) Same thing at 5000 ft, and in the flight levels (oh, cool, you've just lost pressurization, too - where's that quick-donning mask?). It's then that you find that the mask fits your head like the face-hugging critter in Alien - you REALLY don't want your headphones or glasses under it, so the technique gets modified the next time.
Another aside, in various aircraft, I've had 6 of the above failures happen - the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail.
UPCOMING EVENTS
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Reproduction in whole or in part in any form without the express written permission
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