I saw the videos of the raging firestorm engulfing the A-350 on a runway before I heard any of the audio on Tuesday,  so I assumed the accident had occurred here in America. From the pictures alone, the loss of life should have been mind-numbing. Considering how many close calls we had last year at major airports in the US, my assumptions were justifiable, some 19 serious near collisions. A serious near collision is about as close as two aircraft can come without metal scraping metal.

Once I pumped up the sound on our widescreen though, I learned the accident had happened on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. A Japan Airlines A-350 and a Japanese Coast Guard Dash-8 regional aircraft had collided during the early evening hours. I watched the growing orange glow of the Airbus sliding to a stop after the collision and wondered how anyone could have survived.

Miraculously though, all 379 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus escaped with only a few minor injuries reported. The crew of the Dash 8, which apparently was sitting on the runway in the path of the Airbus, did not fare as well. The aircraft was destroyed claiming the lives of five crewmembers. Only the Dash 8’s captain survived and is listed in critical condition with severe burns.

The A-350 is certified to be capable of an emergency evacuation in less than 90 seconds. Although it took some 18 minutes to evacuate the A-350 that night, the initial and recurrent training of the eight flight attendants aboard the Japanese airliner is most likely the reason everyone escaped with their lives. This accident would have made for a nightmare of a training scenario for any crew during recurrent because the inferno outside blocked five of the eight emergency exits. That number eventually dwindled to just two.

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Each year for as long as I can remember, Sporty’s Pilot Shop has sent its annual crystal airplane ornament with the Christmas card it sends to members of the aviation media. We hung our growing collection of them each year until our boys moved on and out to start their own families, and our downsized tree wasn’t robust enough to sustain them. Instead of creating a Charlie Brown Christmas tree of airplane ornaments, we passed along the ornaments to friends and family who look up when they hear an airplane above them.

But we still hang with honored appreciation the annual ornament, in 2023 an Aeronca Champ. “Produced in large volumes in the late 1940s, the simple high wing design with fabric-covered wings was used primarily for training,” reads the card that describes each year’s airplane. “The Champ was one of the few taildragger airplanes that could be flown solo from the front seat, which greatly improved the visibility for the pilot in command. With Aeronca’s Cincinnati roots, the Champ is a favorite for many of the Sporty’s flight crew.”

Beholding the Champ’s etched outlines recalled some of my most cherished flight time and the teachers, Paul King and John Coplantz, who really taught me how to fly in December 1996, two decades after passing my private pilot practical test at Eagle Aviation in Long Beach, California. Seeking an endorsement, I was enrolled in the 15-hour tailwheel transition course at Stick and Rudder Aviation’s “Academy of Flight and Taildragmanship” in Watsonville, California.

Their three-ship training fleet consisted of a Champ, its military sibling, the L-16, and a clip-wing L-4, a Piper J-3 Cub drafted for liaison service during World War II. Battery-powered intercoms and handheld transceivers were the only things electric in all three airplanes, so how to safely hand-prop their 85-horse Continental engines was an early lesson. If you are a 1940-sized human, yes, you can solo the Champ from the front seat, but as an oversize mid-century monster, I barely fit in the cushionless back seat. My futile attempts at gracefully folding myself into the Champ always drew a flightline audience.

My first six flights were in the Champ, and its lessons served me well on every flight since in which I’ve been the sole manipulator of an airplane’s controls because it calibrated the seat of my pants. In flight, the Champ handled quite like the Cessna 172 in which I learned to fly at Eagle Aviation. And then Paul asked me to make a no-rudder turn to the left. Easing the stick over, the right wing fell back a good three feet and my hip moved smartly to the left as the Champ made a slipping left turn. So, this was adverse yaw.

Paul encouraged me to experiment, so I played with the rudder and concentrated on the seat of my pants. My butt became the turn-and-bank’s ball. With deft rudder inputs I could put it where I wanted — centered, half a cheek out, or full displacement. Cool. This is but one of the many lasting lessons I learned at Stick and Rudder, all of them clear, concise, and often unique, like the bicycle wheel with a screwdriver axel that taught gyroscopic precession. Before spinning the wheel, Paul asked me to hold my “fuselage” (arm) in a nose-high, three-point attitude. When I raised the tail, the prop twisted my wrist to the left. After another spin, the prop forced my fuselage to the right when I lowered the tail to a three-point attitude.

Sadly, Stick and Rudder in Watsonville is no more, but it lives on in those who continue to appreciate the lessons it taught. And at this time of year, it seems only right that we make time to appreciate all the gifts of life and learning, and the people who gave them. Thank you. Scott Spangler—Editor

Given the traffic seen on my daily stroll around town, except for the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh late summer interlude, the sky over Omro seems to be a no-fly zone. When the wind is right, I’ll see a regional jet whining its way north to Appleton International, and there’s the occasional business jet or turboprop on its way to Wittman Field, roughly 10 miles to the east. But when I hear a piston engine, I stop and look. If I’m lucky, like I was last week, it is a Cessna 172 from the Fox Valley Tech program out practicing maneuvers and other essential stick and rudder skills. On this day the lesson was clearly stalls and slow flight.

Rooted at a standstill in the middle of the sidewalk, I watched and heard the pilot work though the roster of approach and departure loss of lift attitudes, and after each of them, the Cessna recovered smoothly with no wah-wah of uncertain power changes. The Cessna demonstrated the same sure smoothness as it eased into slow flight, extended full flaps, and then slowly retracted them with little or no apparent loss of altitude. With the lesson apparently over, the Cessna and I turned east for our respective homes.

As the Cessna diminished to a muter pinpoint, I wondered if the pilot enjoyed the rewards of the practice of dynamic flight, the skillful manipulation of the flight controls and go-lever to achieve the desired three-dimensional goal. I hope so. Never a hundred-dollar hamburger guy, my most rewarding flights focused on perfecting the fundamental flight skills. And to challenge myself, I would combine a series of maneuvers and aim for predetermined goals with a plus-or-minus nothing deviation from the appropriate altitude or speed.

One of my favorite combinations was appending the slow flight flap exercise to the end of a chandelle. A climbing 180-degree turn introduced during my education for a commercial pilot certificate, it requires precision control that is more challenging than it at first seems. You enter the maneuver at a predetermined heading and airspeed. Rolling into a turn (left or right) starts the maneuver, gently banking to—and maintain—30°.

At the same time, you smoothy apply full power and increase pitch to control airspeed, with the goal being just shy of the critical angle of attack. I relied on the tenor range of the Cessna’s stall warning. The bass note told me I was getting close, and the soprano stridently told me I’d gone too far. Halfway through the 180° heading change (a predetermined plus-or-minus goal calculated on my entry heading) the challenge changes, from holding a constant bank while increasing pitch to maintaining the stall warning’s tenor pitch while gradually rolling out of the bank that exactly opposite of my entry heading.

Because I was already at the critical angle of attack at full power, slowly adding full Cessna barndoors without stalling really challenged the seat of my pants and visual scan, and it was a good way to practice recovering from stalls, as well. Success depends on smooth and precise inputs. More importantly (to me, at least), it was fun, as striving to be better usually is. Scott Spangler, Editor

The most fascinating nugget of news in the announcement of the FAA’s issuance of special airworthiness certificate to Pathfinder 1, LTA’s prototype 21^st century rigid airship, is the authorization to fly it in Class D airspace defined by California’s Moffett Federal Field (NUQ) and Palo Alto Airport (PAO), which is next door, so to speak. The nugget was nestled in LTA’s certificate application. The airship’s experimental flight test program would establish its flight envelope through “substantial indoor and outdoor ground testing.”

I emphasized indoor because rigid airships are not small flying machines. Pathfinder is 124.5 meters of carbon-fiber-polymer tubes connected by titanium hubs. You need some pretty good indoor space to fly something 136 feet long. Fortunately, LTA Research, founded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, has options. And in acquiring them, he has saved significant parts of American lighter than air history and national historic landmarks that continue to make contributions to aviation, and would be nearly impossible to replace or recreate.

Moffett Field is south of San Francisco, established in 1931 as the Navy’s West Coast rigid airship facility. (Lakehurst, New Jersey, served America’s sunrise coast.) It is home to three airship hangars. The Navy built Hangar 1 in 1933 for the USS Macon, ARS-5. In 2011, Google’s founders saved Hangar 1 from demolition by underwriting its restoration. Three years later, Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures signed a 60-year lease with the General Services Administration to manage Hangar 1 and the surrounding airfield.

Across the main runways from Hangar 1 are the smaller Hangars 2 and 3, two of the world’s largest freestanding structures. They are two of the 17 wood blimp hangars the Navy built during World War II for its antisubmarine blimp fleet. Hangars 2 and 3 are two of the seven survivors (there are two more in Tustin, California, two at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and one at Tillamook, Oregon). Pathfinder 1 made its first flight inside Moffett’s Hangar 2 on May 12, 2023.

After Pathfinder 1 finishes if Moffett Field flights, it will move to Akron, Ohio, home of the 1175-by-325-foot Akron Airdock, which LTA bought in 2022. Once the world’s largest structure without internal supports (it covers 364,000-square-feet, roughly 7 football fields), the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation built it in 1929. From it emerged the US Navy dirigibles Akron, ARS-4, in 1931, and the Macon, ARS-5, in 1934.

Pathfinder 1 is but a prototype, to be followed by larger iterations as the test program progresses. And, in time, it will offer aviation aficionados the unique opportunity to witness the past, present, and future of one (lighter than air) aspect of aviation. –Scott Spangler, editor

October kudos to the editors of NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) Callback for selecting atypical reports for their periodic “What Would You Have Done?” issue. In all the years I’ve been reading the selected scenarios to challenge and expand my aeronautical decision-making universe, this is the first time I’ve faced the unfamiliar regulatory and operational environment of a Part 107 unmanned aircraft system (UAS).

In “Part 107—Night Stealth,” the drone PIC “observed…while on a photography session, another small UAS operating with no anti-collision lights during dawn. I had two anti-collision strobes…activated and operating continuously. I immediately evaded the area to avoid a collision, since the other PIC was flying erratically. I departed about 150 feet north, and the other PIC followed and continued to fly erratically below me.”

At first reading, an initial reaction would be to bring my drone home while avoiding the erratic wandering of the lightless drone. But this was my Part 91 brain thinking. How would a rudimentary understanding of Part 107 affect my decision? To find out, I found the August 2016 edition of FAA-G-8082-22, the 88-page Remote Pilot—Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Study Guide and settled in for a quick read of the chapters that would, most likely, provide the information I needed.

Chapter 1: Applicable Regulations, surprised me. “Be familiar with 14 CFR part 107 and all parts referenced in part 107, as well as AC 107-2.” Given some time to think about it, getting links to the current links should not have surprised me. As they are in manned aircraft, the remote pilot in command is responsible for and is the final authority in the drone’s safe operation, and that the R-PIC complies with the requirements of Part 107, which I’m guessing that the rogue operator in the reported scenario was not doing.

Yup, according to §107.29, Operation at Night, the other operator was violating the regs. To fly at night, or during civil twilight, an appropriately trained and tested R-PIC can fly a drone with “lighted anti-collision lighting visible for at least 3 statute miles that has a flash rate sufficient to avoid a collision.” In addition, “The remote pilot in command may reduce the intensity of, but may not extinguish, the anti-collision lighting if he or she determines that, because of operating conditions, it would be in the interest of safety to do so.”

§107.37, Operation Near Aircraft; Right-of-Way Rules, is straightforward. Drones must yield to all other flying machines, and “may not pass over, under, or ahead of it unless well clear.”

I didn’t expect the regs to provide any guidance on what to do when someone else is going rogue. Maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for in AC 107-2A, dated February 1, 2021. Section 5.11.2, Safety Risk Assessment, pointed me at Appendix A for “additional guidance on how to conduct an overall safety risk assessment.”

Section 5.13, Remaining Clear of Other Aircraft. Now we’re getting somewhere. “The remote PIC must be aware of other aircraft, persons, and property in the vicinity of the operating area, and maneuver the small unmanned aircraft to avoid collision.” This supports my first-glance decision to return to home base. Even if the other guy is flying rogue, “The remote PIC must take action to ensure other aircraft will not need to maneuver to avoid colliding with the small unmanned aircraft.”

Section 5.18, In-Flight Emergency, and Section 5.19, Careless or Reckless Operation, only recommended not participating in these operations, not what to do when someone else is. I did learn, however, that drone pilots face a wider realm of careless of reckless: “Because sUAS have additional operating considerations that are not present in manned aircraft operations, there may be additional activity that would be careless or reckless if conducted using an sUAS. For example, failure to consider weather conditions near structures, trees, or rolling terrain when operating in a densely populated area could be determined as careless or reckless operation.”

Off to Appendix A, Risk Assessment Tools, which presents decision-making and crew resource management examples. Nope. The closest example was a drone filming an accident scene when an EMS helo arrives and appropriates the drone’s landing site. The short solution is to avoid the helo and find an alternate landing site. This also seems to support my initial ASRS decision. I wonder what the reporting R-PIC did?

The R-PIC did what I would have done, but he also took another step. The drone pilot “drove to find the PIC of the [other] UAS and asked if he was the operator.… He replied…he was. I then discussed with him if he was a Part 107 pilot. He replied he was.… [I] asked why he did not have anti-collision lights on and recommended he … use one during night or dawn operations. He stated he didn’t need to use anti-collision lights because he was flying under recreational/hobbyist flight rules. I informed him regardless he must have anti-collision lights on during dawn and night operations…to avoid an incident.” Given the locked and loaded American culture, I would not have done this. Scott Spangler, Editor

With autumn’s annual bird migrations underway, on October 3, the FAA issued a 4-page Special Airworthiness Information Bulletin 21-17 addressing Rotorcraft Bird Strike Protection and Mitigation. It also introduces the voluntary Rotorcraft Safety Promotion Concept (RSPC) that encourages the installation of safety enhancing designs, using specific safety equipment, and implementing operational procedures to mitigate the risks of helos having runs-ins with our feathered friends. Unlike fixed-wing aircraft that zip through densely populated avian territory, helos face increased bird strikes because they cruise in the lower reaches of the atmosphere, 3,500 feet and below, where 90% of snarge is created.

The RSPC webpage links to a list of bird-strike compliant helos. There are nine of them: the Airbus H225, MBB-BK 117 C2, D2, and D3; the Leonardo AB139, AW139, AW169, and AW189; and the Sikorsky S-92A.

It is followed by the Illustration of Voluntary Bird Strike Options that take normal category Part 27 helos toward the bird strike requirements of Part 29 transport category rotorcraft. These enhancements include bird resistant polycarbonate windshields, bird deterring lights, audio, and high visibility main rotor blades, and flight manual limits that limit the indicated airspeed to 80 knots.

Other operational risk mitigation options include flight planning and in-flight decisions that avoid bird-rich environments, mindful that these areas and the avion populations wax and wane with the season. If encountering birds in flight, slowing down, if practical, should be the pilot’s first reaction. More than three-quarters of all helo bird strikes happen when flying faster than 80 knots.

Gaining altitude, if possible, is another operational mitigation option. The SAIB says the likelihood of a bird strike decreases 32% for every 1,000 feet gained from 500 feet above the ground. And helo pilots should know and remember that birds fly at higher altitudes at night than they do during daylight.

Rotary wing aviators should also know and remember that their last line of bird strike defense is wearing a good helmet with the visor firmly in place. And if you fly in a birch world, you might consider the face guard many military helo crews use. Collecting snarge for a wildlife strike is never a good time, especially if you are scraping it from the facial folds of any member of the helo’s crew. –Scott Spangler, Editor

The brothers Wright solved the conundrum of three-axis control for powered aircraft with the pitch, yaw, and roll control through the combined forces of an elevator, rudder, and wing warping. Glenn Curtiss effectively won his roll control legal battle with the brothers when he replaced a warping roll with a French “little wing, “ aka the aileron. (And then came roll-control spoilers, like those on the P-61 Black Widow.) One wonders what the Wrights (and Curtiss as well) would think of a powered flying machine that achieved three-axis control without any of these moving control surfaces? For DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Aurora Flight Sciences, a subsidiary of Boeing, is building the X-65 to realize the possibilities of Active Flow Control, part of DARPA’s CRANE, Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors.

The X-65’s geometric joined-wing structure certainly is revolutionary, and I would have loved to have listened to the meeting that renamed aerodynamic flight controls, the rudder, elevators, and ailerons “effectors.” At least it makes sense. Without moving flight controls, active flows of air will effect changes in the unmanned X plane’s pitch, roll, and yaw. But wait! There’s more! The 7,000-pound research aircraft includes modular wing configurations so it can integrate and test other advanced CRANE technology. As DARPA put it: “Crane seeks to optimize the benefits of active flow control by maturing technologies and design tools, and incorporating them early in the design process. Active flow control could improve aircraft performance by removing jointed surfaces, which currently drive design configurations that increase weight and mechanical complexity. Demonstrating AFC for stability and control in-flight would help open the design trade space for future military and commercial applications.”

Time will tell whether the X-65 begins its flight testing, scheduled for 2025, but the project has completed four weeks of wind tunnel testing in Phase 1. Surely those tunnel tests included controlling the aircraft’s attitude with inhaling and exhaling air from the myriad vents on the wings that give Active Flow Control its name. With only a rudimentary comprehension of fluid dynamics, it seems that ACF will create a pitch, roll, and yaw effector by changing the shape of the boundary layers flowing over the geometrically joined wings. (Here is BAE’s YouTube take on the subject.) What I’m curious to learn is how effective this new active flow effector is compared to mechanical airflow deflectors, the traditional rudder, elevators, and ailerons (and spoilers, too!). The roll control legal patent battles between the Wrights and Curtiss aside, the aileron won because it was more immediately effective and it was easier to design and build, and it weighed less. In these regards, aviation’s practical demands remain unchanged. Scott Spangler, Editor

To maintain my social skills, on Fridays I hike the Wiouwash Trail for 2.46 miles from the trailhead just east of Winneconne to the Bare Bones Brewery, which is trailside where the former interurban railbed enters Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on its northwest side. The Bone opens at noon, and I’m a member of its mug club. Exercise leading to (and from) good beer is guaranteed, and rare is the Friday that does not include a handful of people to talk with.

Conversations typically start with beer, and the craft breweries we’ve visited. This conversation is usually punctuated with our respective vocations and avocations. Talking with a couple somewhere in their 50s, the woman seemed especially interested after learning I was a pilot. She’d not met many, she said, and she peppered me with a curious collection of questions, such as who were the best pilots I’d ever flown with (a story for another day).

Flowering from the old saw that “There old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilot,” Most of them seemed to focus on things that define a pilot’s personality. Delving into this spectrum, which ranges from timid to foolhardy, I described myself as a pragmatic pilot who considered the relevant risks and played them out as possibilities influenced by the flight’s conditions. For more than 50 years now, mantra has been, “If in doubt, don’t.”

The couple asked if this guiding principle grew out of some inflight epiphany. In truth, this aviation moment that defined my flying life occurred in Alameda, California, during February 1973, three years before I started my flight training farther down the coast, in Long Beach, in 1976. Just before intermission during the film, Fiddler on the Roof, at the Alameda Theater, A Navy A-7 Corsair II dove almost straight into an apartment building a little more than a half-mile down Central Ave.

A photographer stationed at NAS Alameda, I spent a couple of weeks documenting this undesirable aviation outcome as the mishap investigators dug into the hole sifting the mess searching for evidence, for some clue to the mishap’s cause. They found the A-7’s engine about 20 feet under the basement garage floor. As far as I know, they never did find any of the pilot’s remains, but the 10 civilians who resided in the apartment building introduced me to the unmistakable, unforgettable aroma of seared human flesh.

The flight of two A-7s had left NAS Lemore on a night out and back training flight, and the flight’s leader said suddenly, his wingman was no longer off his wing. The rumor among the people sifting through the site was the pilot was sucking on a cigarette in-between whiffs from his oxygen mask, not an approved procedure at 37,000 feet. Nothing in the mishap investigation confirmed this rumor, but what stuck in my 18-year-old mind is that a momentary lapse in judgement, no matter what it might be, can turn any airplane into a dirty collection of metal scraps, slivers, and shards spread across a hangar floor. Aside from the compacted lump of the A-7’s Pratt&Whitney TF30-P-6 turbofan, few of them were larger than an index card.

Photographic work on subsequent fatal mishaps, the final approach meeting of the four turboprop P-3 sub hunter and a Boeing 707 lookalike, the Convair 990, at NAS Moffet Field on the other side of San Francisco Bay, and a Marine Reserve CH-53 that shed a main rotor blade up north in the Napa, fixed this reality in memory.

Asking for an example of how this guided my flying life, I recalled my invitation to introduce the “new” Cessna 172 to Flight Training’s readers when Cessna resumed production of its single-engine airplanes. It was an event attended by usual GA media outlets, and for some reason, I was selected first to fly. Searching for differences between the legacy Skyhawk and the new one, I started by following the handbook’s preflight inspection checklist. I stopped when I found good sized nick in a prop blade, and said I would not fly the airplane until the problem was properly addressed.

Seeing two quizzical looks above their beers, I explained that the nick might lead to the loss of part of the prop blade, and that the unbalanced blade might torque the engine off the airframe, which would destroy not only the center of gravity but also the airplane’s aerodynamics, and what was left would fall out of the sky. I like flying a lot, I said, but not enough to die for, especially when it would have been my fault for taking off with a known problem. “Ultimately, we all are responsible for the consequences of our decisions. –Scott Spangler, Editor

In June 2023, the FAA published a 167-page document outlining the agency’s desire to replace dozens of 40-year-old airport control towers with new environmentally friendly brick-and-mortar structures. These towers are, of course, where hundreds of air traffic controllers ply their trade … ensuring the aircraft within their local airspace are safely separated from each other during landing and takeoff.

The FAA’s report was part of President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act enacted on November 15, 2021. That bill set aside a whopping $25 billion spread across five years to cover the cost of replacing those aging towers. The agency said it considered a number of alternatives about how to spend that $5 billion each year, rather than on brick and mortar buildings.

One alternative addressed only briefly before rejecting it was a relatively new concept called a Remote Tower, originally created by Saab in Europe in partnership with the Virginia-based VSATSLab Inc. The European technology giant has been successfully running Remote Towers in place of the traditional buildings in Europe for almost 10 years. One of Saab’s more well-known Remote Tower sites is at London City Airport. London also plans to create a virtual backup ATC facility at London Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe.

A remote tower and its associated technology replace the traditional 60-70 foot glass domed control tower building you might see at your local airport, but it doesn’t eliminate any human air traffic controllers or their roles in keeping aircraft separated.

Max Trescott photo

Inside a Remote Tower Operation

In place of a normal control tower building, the airport erects a small steel tower or even an 8-inch diameter pole perhaps 20-40 feet high, similar to a radio or cell phone tower. Dozens of high-definition cameras are attached to the new Remote Tower’s structure, each aimed at an arrival or departure path, as well as various ramps around the airport.

Using HD cameras, controllers can zoom in on any given point within the camera’s range, say an aircraft on final approach. The only way to accomplish that in a control tower today is if the controller picks up a pair of binoculars. The HD cameras also offer infrared capabilities to allow for better-than-human visuals, especially during bad weather or at night.

The next step in constructing a remote tower is locating the control room where the video feeds will terminate. Instead of the round glass room perched atop a standard control tower, imagine a semi-circular room located at ground level. Inside that room, the walls are lined with 14, 55-inch high-definition video screens hung next to each other with the wider portion of the screen running top to bottom.

After connecting the video feeds, the compression technology manages to consolidate 360 degrees of viewing area into a 220-degree spread across the video screens. That creates essentially the same view of the entire airport that a controller would normally see out the windows of the tower cab without the need to move their head more than 220 degrees. Another Remote Tower benefit is that each aircraft within visual range can be tagged with that aircraft’s tail number, just as it might if the controller were looking at a radar screen. Read the rest of this entry »