THE COMMUNITY OF FLYING
by Josh Smith, General Manager

Happy twenty - ten to all of us. Two thousand and ten or Twenty ten, that is the question. Being more of a traditionalist, I am going with the twenty - ten to describe the year. Being a big fan of 70's sci-fi, I still believe we should have landed on Mars, have a community on the moon and be driving around in hover cars. I guess flying around in small planes will have to do!

Final reminder, if you would like to save some cash in 2010, you can pre-pay your dues, and get a month free! Please contact accounting for more information.

I would like to congratulate Carrie Ferguson on winning the Pratt & Whitney Training Scholarship and the Southwest Airlines Maintenance Training Scholarship. This award is well deserved. For those of you that do not know, Carrie does a lot of work behind the scenes in MX that largely goes unnoticed, Software updates, SB and AD research, GPS configurations, MX paperwork, warranty items, scheduling and auditing. Conrgrats Carrie!

You may remember from last months article we sadly lost Christine Kelly, our Operations Manager. We have found a great replacement in Ashley Porath. For those of you who do not know Ashley, she has been with the club for a little over 3 years. Ashley began working at the front desk at both E16 and KPAO, and most recently as the assistant to the Chief Pilots office. In order to cut down on some overhead, and due to a drop in activity, we are combining Ashley's and much of Christines old job. In order to keep this from being too overwhelming, we are also moving some other tasks to other departments. If all goes well, this should help reduce overhead expenses quite a bit.

I am very excited to announce that we have added a Beech Turbo A36 to the line-up. This is a really sweet aircraft. Equiped with a Garmin 530, weeping wings, A/P, fuel totalizer, tip tanks, and the list goes on. It is set-up to be a really great X-country bird. Personally I can tell you it is a really sweet ride. Very quiet, smooth and easy to handle. I think people will really enjoy taking it on long cross country flights.

As we look forward to 2010, we begin this process by doing our annual budgeting. First let me say our primary goal is to do as much as we can to control costs as we are predicting a slow growth or recovery year at best. As we all know, and many have personally felt the effect of the recession, the club is no different. We have certainly seen a significant drop in flying activity and membership, adding up to a considerable drop in revenue. Our theme for next year will be, again, to draw up a very conservative budget and look at opportunities to lower overhead expenditures to keep our costs to the membership as flat as we can.

I can assure all of the members that the board is working very hard to assure that the club is moving in the correct direction.

Additionally we are looking at a lot of different ways to continue to maintain, and where possible, increase membership benefits to continue to excel WVFC as a leader in General Aviation. One of the ideas we are considering is making the Deductible Waiver more of an 'opt out' feature, rather than its current state of 'opt in'. At the same time, we would expand the benefits of this product to include such things as flat spotted tires, dead batteries, the occasional vomit, etc.., If you would like to offer feedback on this, please E mail me directly at jsmith@wvfc.org.

My interest is, and always will be, to do the best for West Valley Flying Club and its Membership.

Thanks and again, lets shake off 2009 and have a great 2010.

Josh Smith, GM WVFC

FROM THE DESK OF THE CHIEF - SAFETY IS NO ACCIDENT
WVFC Chief Pilot chief pilot@wvfc.org

Happy New Year to all WVFC members.  I hope that this will be a safe and enjoyable flying year for all of you.

I wanted to use this month’s space to discuss some of the programs and projects that we plan to focus on for 2010.  As many of you know, the focus for 2009 was a combination of simplification of processes and a move away from paper forms to an all-electronic system.  We largely completed the task we set for ourselves.  We’ve improved efficiency, reliability, traceability, and are saving a bunch of trees along the way.   Other steps last year included simplifying things like the checkout and currency matrix and redefining the phase check process.  A new generation of make- and model-specific Ground Review forms replaced the old generic forms.  These will be more relevant to a member checking out in a specific model.

For 2010, I would like to focus on a few areas that members have been grumbling about for almost as long as I can remember (and I’ve been at the club for almost 18 years).  I plan to put together some working groups that include both CFIs and members-at-large to get together to crack some of these hard nuts.  This is essentially a request to any of you out there to participate in the process of redefining some of the key components of what it means to fly at West Valley.  There are 4 main areas that I would like to brief you on.

Working Group 1 (WG1) – Non-WVFC flight time

This is one of the biggest pet peeves of members over the years.  “How come we can’t allow or use non-WVFC flight time to maintain currency or check out in a particular plane?”  A good example of this are members who own their own plane outside of WVFC, fly a lot but want to fly a WVFC plane when their own plane goes in for an annual.  Oops, they can’t because WVFC doesn’t enable this.  On occasion, the club has made exceptions and dealt with copies of logbook entries to “override” the systems.  I think what we need is a well-defined process that enables this scenario and does it in the most efficient, most-electronic format possible.  Interested?  Then let me know and sign up for WG1. We’ll likely meet once a month for an hour or so until we have a workable solution (or at least think we do).

Working Group 2 (WG2) – Currency

Ok, pet peeve number 2 for many members.  Some percentage of the members would love to fly more makes and models but can’t and won’t because it’s too burdensome to maintain 60- or 90-day currency in a load of different types.  What we need to look at is some kind of policy or program where regular fliers -- we need to define regular -- get special dispensation on currency so that they can fly more makes and models and yet still be safe in all the different platforms.  If this concept interests you and you have a little time to get involved then let me know and sign up for WG2.  By all means, sign up for more than one WG!

Working Group 3 (WG3) – New member checkouts

So, this one is a bit trickier.  Why?  Well, there’s a fine line here between doing a more thorough job checking out a new member and making it burdensome to the point of driving potential new members away.  What’s driving this thought process?  When a new member comes to WVFC (and most flying clubs for that matter), the checkout process often includes one or more flights making sure that the member knows how to fly the plane to basically private pilot standards, i.e. air work and some take-offs and landings.  In my opinion, there are key ingredients missing from the standard checkout.  We generally don’t spend enough time examining the new member in terms of judgment, risk management, decision making, and overall flying character.  These are all hard concepts to measure so it’s easy to gloss over them or outright ignore them.  We need to take a closer look.  If you’ve got ideas then please volunteer for WG3.

Working Group 4 (WG4) – Mountain checkouts

This is another fairly controversial one.  The vast majority of our mountain checkouts at WVFC are a trip to Truckee, Tahoe, and the neighboring airports.  It’s good stuff, especially if that’s what you plan to do: visit the Sierras.  But I’m not convinced that it really prepares a member for trips east of the Sierras into some of the most dangerous mountain flying in the country, such as Aspen, CO.  We’ve had fly-out groups take trips to the high mountains and that really is the ultimate mountain checkout, but that’s probably not practical for a normal mountain checkout.  We also introduced a low mountain checkout a couple of years back for the Columbia-type trips.  While a fine concept, the number of members utilizing it are few, so it’s not obvious we’re really focusing on what members want or need.  If you’re interested in this particular area, then please volunteer for WG4.

I do want to stress that all of these ideas are just that: ideas.  There’s no planned outcome or timetable yet established, but there is a commitment to make some important changes to move the club into a more member-friendly space where we can still be safe and yet be more flexible.

Safe flying in 2010 and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you around the club.

AS THE WRENCH TURNS
by your friendly maintenance department, maintenance@wvfc.org

We wanted to address a couple of issues we are seeing.

Please, if you feel an aircraft is "flying out of rig", turning when it should not, not able to hold straight and level, please note this in the condition report with the symptoms. Please do not take it upon yourself to bend any of the trim tabs on the aircraft. There can be several reasons a plane is not flying true, and it is best that we look at it to assure the correct adjustments are made.

We are seeing a lot of scratches on windshields. This is a combination of Head sets on the dash, rosen visors pushed forward into the windshield, etc... Remember the windshield in an aircraft is plastic and scratches very easily and scratches are very hard to see through.

Finally we would like to thank everyone that is helping us continue to work through squawk issues as they arrise. I know these issues can be confusing, time consuming and disappointing if your flight is cancelled, and or shortened. We will do our best to follow-up and work through items as they arrise, your patience is always appreciated.

Have fun and be safe!

Your friendly MX department.

In most sports, holding results in a penalty, whether it’s yardage or a free throw.  In flying, the difference is that the party initiating the holding isn’t the one being penalized.  The non-offending party (you) is parked over DARTS intersection in moderate turbulence in the clouds, and ATC (the one guilty of holding, and unfortunately also the referee) has advised that you’re going to be there for “at least” 45 minutes.

Oh, goody!  Or some such expletive.

Remember when you were going through your instrument rating, and everyone you talked to said that the only time you’d do a hold was if you were flying with an evil instructor?  They also probably pointed out that “evil instructor” was unnecessarily redundant.

Even if you haven’t had the pleasure of being parked somewhere in holding, it does happen, and there are two times it’s most likely.  There are some specific things you need to do if cleared (HOT DOG, they’ve given me permission!) to hold and very little you can do to avoid it.

Congestion is the most frequent reason for holding and it comes in two varieties.  The first is obvious: when there is an AOPA convention at Long Beach and KLGB is IFR, there’s a 100 percent chance that you’re going to end up holding somewhere.  At the other extreme, you may (if you’re lucky) be flying an airplane that’s faster than the one in front of you and ATC will park you somewhere while slow poke leisurely finishes the approach.

The second variety of congestion is the one that happens when you’re flying to an airport near a big one, especially if your approach (or the miss) interferes with the one into the BIG airport.  Guess which one gets priority: the airport with the planes that burn only Jet A.  So if you’re trying to get into Santa Monica and LAX is landing to the east, you lose.

The other common reason for holding is more common east of the Mississippi – but then, so is the bad weather that necessitates instrument flight and holding.  Sometimes, the original clearance before takeoff contains a hold.  There’s nothing quite like entering a hold within five minutes of takeoff, before you really get up to speed mentally for holding.  Of course, it just gets better if you can do it in actual IFR conditions.

And guess what: most holds like this aren’t published, so you have no picture to plan on following.  To make matters more fun, ATC loves to prep for the local auctioneers contest when giving holding instructions.  But the instructions, no matter how fast they come at you, always have the keys to following them.  The first part of the instruction provides the clue to the entry. The second names the holding fix.  Everything after that gives additional detail.

Without going into gory details about how to enter and fly holding patterns, let me leave it that the first part of the instruction (e.g., “Hold northeast of …) gives you the outbound course (in general), and the second (… Manteca …).  Within a few degrees, that defines the holding pattern, and turning in the specified direction by the shortest method will come close to the prescribed entry.

So, now you’re in holding.  What, if anything, can you do to ease the workload?  Sometimes, you can get ATC to give you delay vectors, but often, if they’re busy enough to pack you into a hold, they don’t have enough time to muck with delay vectors.  A more likely one (and my personal favorite) is based on what is the most labor intensive part.  That, of course, is that you no sooner get established inbound or outbound than you have to turn again.  So, instead, ask for 5 nautical mile (or larger) legs.  You get to cut out all the fun math you otherwise have to do to figure out how long you need to fly outbound in order to have a one minute inbound leg.  An additional advantage is that you get to fly straight for a longer period, so you can more easily do some of those planning things essential to situational awareness.

And remember, if holding is bad, it’s nothing compared to off side, backfield in motion, or illegal procedure.

CLEAR RADIO COMMUNICATIONS
by Niladri Roy, WVFC Pilot

ATC: Cessna NXYZ Number 2, cleared to land Runway 25L
NXYZ: Number 2, cleared to land, NXYZ
ATC: NXYZ Number 2, cleared to land Runway 25L
NXYZ: Number 2, cleared to land, Runway 25L, NXYZ

The above exchange took place between Livermore ATC in California and me, during my early days of flight training. My home airport is Palo Alto, California, which has a single strip of concrete: Runways 31 and 13. Naturally, when issuing a landing clearance, all that ATC would say was ‘NXYZ [Number n], cleared to land’, since there was only one active runway at any time. When I started to venture out of Palo Alto to nearby Livermore, however, the situation was quite different. Livermore has two parallel runways, 7R/25L and 7L/25R, and it was necessary to acknowledge not only the landing clearance, but also the runway that the clearance had been issued for. As is evident from my exchange with Livermore ATC, I had omitted the designated runway in my first acknowledgment.

It’s not that I was not aware that I was required to acknowledge the runway I was cleared for. It simply had been too much of habit at Palo Alto to just acknowledge ‘[Number n], cleared to land, NXYZ’.

This got me thinking about the necessity of cultivating a habit of clarity in communication with ATC. Nowadays, even at Palo Alto, I always mention the runway number, even though it isn’t strictly necessary. Examples include:

ATC: Cessna NXYZ, pull up and hold short
NXYZ: Hold short, Runway 31, NXYZ

ATC: Cessna NXYZ, Position and hold
NXYZ: Position and hold, Runway 31, NXYZ

ATC: Cessna NXYZ, Runway 31, cleared for takeoff.
NXYZ: Rolling, Runway 31, NXYZ

ATC: Cessna NXYZ [Number n], cleared to land
NXYZ: [Number n], cleared to land, Runway 31, NXYZ

Sure, as a pilot, one needs to maintain situational awareness (and that includes knowing if there is one runway or multiple) and needs to be crisp and clear in communication with ATC without using up any more of the frequency than is necessary.  But, I find that cultivating the habit of mentioning the runway number in the above exchanges, even when the designated runway is obvious, helps me in getting it engrained in my system. That way, I never forget to mention the number at airports where it is, indeed, necessary to mention it. It takes very little extra time and effort and makes for a safer pilot. One need only consider a non-towered airport with multiple -- and, to keep things interesting, intersecting runways, where multiple pilots may choose the same or different runway at will, whatever their reason may be, at the same time -- to see the benefits of developing a habit of clarity.

Non-towered airports can benefit from clarity in pilot communication over the CTAF beyond just calling out runway numbers. How often has one heard ‘Smallville traffic, NXYZ, is turning base for Runway NN, Smallville’ and wondered, “Gee, it sure would be nice to know if the pilot meant left or right base” and whether it was a Citabria which is a lot slower than one’s Cessna, or a Bonanza that is chewing up the air fast enough to be on one’s tail before one could say Evasive Maneuvers.

Sure, there are published traffic patterns for non-towered airports, but if, like me, you have, while on right base, seen a Piper Cub come streaking in for a straight-in approach at Half Moon Bay, CA (where straight-in approaches are specifically prohibited), you sure would be grateful for small mercies in communications.

Here are my other rules-of-thumb on the clarity in communications theme that I have developed for myself for non-towered airports:

1. On the ground, I never say I am “taking the active”. My preferred transmission is to always include the runway number
2. In the pattern I never say “… is on downwind for Runway NN”. It’s always “…left [or right] downwind for Runway NN”
3. If I am turning final behind another aircraft, it’s never “… is on final for Runway NN” It’s always “… is on final for Runway NN behind the [Cessna, Piper, Citabria, etc.]”. Not only is it good for the peace of mind of the pilot ahead of me: chances are, knowing that there is an aircraft behind, the plane will not dally on the runway but will expedite an exit.
4. Finally, I never give only my call sign. It’s always preceded with “Cessna [or Skyhawk]…” The other person looking out for you cannot read your tail number from wherever they are, but have a better chance of finding you (and not confusing you with someone else) if they know what they are looking for.  Additionally, it is useful for them to know whether you are a slower or faster aircraft than they are so they can adjust their pattern accordingly, or if an impending emergency is suspected, get out of the way.

Practicing clarity in radio communications, even at the expense of sometimes stating the obvious, develops habits that can contribute to increased flight safety, in the air and on the ground.

[ Archived copy of this and other articles available at http://freepilotinfo.blogspot.com ]

All pilots know that an airplane’s center of gravity is found by performing a (literally) weighted average of the weights of the airplane and its contents.  The result is a distance (the “CG arm”) from an arbitrary datum, often the tip of the spinner or the firewall. A graph in the pilot’s operating handbook shows acceptable weight and
center-of-gravity combinations.  But, while it’s easy to understand the meaning of the total weight of an airplane, what are we to make of a CG arm, say “16.5 inches aft of the firewall”?  Where is the center of gravity in plain English?

Luckily, there is an easy answer to this question.  One can tell roughly where the CG is just by looking!  The center of gravity in almost any airplane is located aft of the leading edge of the wing by about 10% to 30% of the distance from the leading edge to the trailing edge.

(In “engineer-talk” the center of gravity lies between about 10% and 30% of the mean aerodynamic chord (MAC).  The chord of the wing of a Cessna 172 is 5 feet 4 inches at the wing root and 3 feet 9 inches at the wing tip.  The MAC is somewhere between these two distances.)

Airplanes are made stable in pitch by loading them such that the CG is forward of the center of lift of the wing.  This leads to a nose down force that is balanced by a nose up (i.e. tail down) force generated by the horizontal stabilizer and elevator.

Notice that this has nothing to do with where the wheels are!  For an airplane to fly properly, the CG must lie in a relatively narrow range of distances aft of the leading edge of the wing.  It doesn’t make any difference if the landing gear is tricycle, tailwheel, skis or floats!

If an airplane is loaded such that its CG is forward of acceptable limits it will feel nose heavy and may not rotate properly on takeoff.  Conversely, if it is loaded with CG too far aft, longitudinal stability will be reduced and stall recovery may become more difficult.

The Board has been busy and focusing on a broad front of initiatives. We are wrestling with many new initiatives with the goal of defining a new standard in personal ethics, club structure and overall operations excellence.  In the process, the Board has heard a number of member comments and has taken wide action to address these residual issues.  Progress is steady and regular and, in time, all will be addressed.  Recently, we adopted rules addressing a financial Audit Policy and placed limits on the number of airplanes that employees and members may place on our line.

In addition, a number of new initiatives will see the light of day during the January 20th Board meeting.  These include the latest Phase Check Policy, where a number of changes have been made to the proposed new procedure, the Grievance Policy and the Squawk Process.

Other Board activities include additional effort on the Conflict of Interest Policy, changes to the By-Laws, Election process, Squawk Policy and Board Communications.

There is one area in which we would like additional regular member participation.  Our By-Law Sub-Committee now has membership from Owners, CFIs and the Board. We also need two additional regular members.  If you have the time to support several weekday-evening meetings in the next few months, I invite you to call or write to either me or John Felleman to express your desire to participate.

We are addressing several other issues as well.  This list includes:
.           New Membership Currency Requirements
.           New initiative to put documents on the web for membership access
.           Design and roll-out of a new web-site
.           A more robust IT system with new features

There is still a lot to do.  But, we're getting it done.  Over the next several months, I expect an improved structure and process for the club and one that is designed to promote transparency and equality for all members.

Many of our issues are complex. There are often no easy answers and it will be important to consider the full impacts of our decisions on the club's operation before we adopt them. Some issues are easier to settle than others. I would describe our process as 'Deliberative'. But, rest assured we will address the existing smoldering issues and devise policies and procedures to fairly resolve them.

Blue skies ...

Gary