12 Aviation Resolutions – A Blogging in Formation Post

1 January 2014 by Andrew Hartley 6 Comments

This is installment nine of the Blogging in Formation Series, a monthly series where six big-time aviation bloggers put their heads (and blogs) together and post about the same topic, each in their own special way.

Ah, New Year’s.

The time of year to suffer all the prediction posts about what will happen in the upcoming year. If you have been a follower of the Blogging in Formation series for any length of time, you are aware of my disdain for predictions.

So I’m not going to do one.

What I will do is suggest how you might choose your resolution(s) for 2014 – at least as they relate to aviation.

But first, let me give you my aviation resolutions for 2014:

Complete my CFII (by March?)
Blog more regularly (if it weren’t for Blogging in Formation, I wouldn’t have blogged at all the past few months)
Podcast more consistently

Now they are out there and public! That should be even more motivation for me to follow through on all of them in 2014.

But what about you?

If you are reading this post and following the Blogging in Formation series, you are either a pilot or you would like to be a pilot!

With that in mind, I’d like to suggest 12 aviation resolutions – 1 for each month of the year of 2014. You certainly don’t have to do all of these, but what a fun challenge that might be – to do one of these suggested resolutions each month in 2014 (just print this post and use it as a checklist – you’re familiar with checklists, yes?)! Or simply choose one of these if you are having trouble deciding on your own aviation resolution for 2014:

If you are not a pilot yet – START YOUR TRAINING!Go out to your closest airport and talk to an instructor about starting (or finishing) your flight training. Set a goal to get through solo, or to complete a Sport Pilot Certificate, or Recreational Pilot Certificate, or even go all the way through the Private Pilot Certificate!
If you are already a pilot – GET A NEW RATING!

Start working on that instrument rating, or a Seaplane Rating, or Multi-Engine, or Glider, or Rotorcraft – you get the idea!

Simply set more time aside to fly!Do your best to at least stay current. Get your Flight Review done if you need to, and go get an instructor and practice landings at least once every ninety days! Don’t fool yourself into thinking that this makes you proficient, but also take pride in being able to call yourself a “current pilot” – even if that is all you can manage!

The $100 Hamburger FlightThese days it might be a $250 hamburger, but the idea still stands. This resolution is one you could do twelve times throughout the year and still meet the spirit of the post. It might even help you meet resolution 2 if you do it consistently!

Fly a Different TypeIt’s quite possible that you flew one type of airplane while getting your certificate – most likely a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Go out and fly a new kind of plane! If all your training was in a high-wing, go out with an instructor (or another pilot who is familiar with the plane) in a low-wing. Or a glider. Or a helicopter. Or a high-performance/complex something. Get creative! Have fun!

Take someone on their first flightThere is nothing quite like taking someone on their first airplane ride – whether they love it or they vomit on final approach (both of these have happened to me on intro flights) it is an experience that you both will remember! Imagine the impact we could have in getting people interested in aviation if every pilot took up one new-to-flying person per year!

Shoot an instrument approachEven if you don’t have an instrument rating, and even if you never plan on getting one, get with an instructor or another current and proficient instrument pilot and go shoot an approach. Breaking out of the grey and haze of the clouds and seeing an airport in front of you is nothing short of magic, and every pilot should experience this from the cockpit at least once in their career, even if the career is a hobby!

Give Back
Join the Civil Air Patrol and fly as a mission pilot on search and rescue missions. Volunteer as a pilot for Air Care Alliance and fly medical patients to badly needed treatments. Or save animals from being euthanized by volunteering for Pilots-N-Paws and flying animals to no-kill shelters or to their new homes. Or choose from many of the other aviation charities out there!

Fly in to a Fly-In Breakfast (or lunch or dinner or Saturday at Sporty’s for a free Hot Dog)
Check out Social Flight or Google “Fly-Ins in [your area]” to find an airport that has this kind of activity scheduled and go! This is a great way to use your certificate for something other than flying the pattern or flying circles around your (or your friend’s) house.

Fly to an unfamiliar airport
This one can be combined with several of the others, but keeping yourself sharp by planning a flight, navigating to a new place, and finding that new airport that you have never been to before is not only valuable and ego-boosting – it’s fun!

Take an actual vacation by airplane
For all the talk of the utility of the airplane, I don’t actually know very many people who have taken a plane to go on vacation once they have their pilots license and the ability to do so. So go take a long weekend with the family and fly somewhere you would not be able to go by car – whether that is simply a farther distance or a place that is difficult to get to by car, but not so difficult by airplane (I’m thinking backcountry out West)!

Fly into / out of a grass strip
For some, this may be how they fly every time they go up, but for many pilots doing a soft-field takeoff or landing is a maneuver they have to demonstrate to get their certificate, but they will only ever do it from a concrete strip. Go out and do it for real – with an instructor or an experienced pilot who is familiar with turf operations, of course!

Aerobatics or Upset Recovery Training
Take an aerobatic lesson or several. Complete an Upset Recovery Training course. Or just get an instructor and do some spin training! Any of these things will increase your comfort with the plane, will increase your skills and confidence as a pilot, and will make you safer. Not to mention they are a whole ton of fun!

So there you are! Take any or all of these suggested aviation resolutions and make a commitment to do them in 2014!

And let me add 1 more – read the other Blogging in Formation posts this month! We are trying out a new format: two bloggers a day, completing the series in three days instead of six. So go read Karlene’s post today too! Here’s this month’s schedule:

Jan. 1: Smart Flight Training – Andrew Hartley & Flight to Success – Karlene Petitt
Jan. 2: House of Rapp – Ron Rap & Adventures of Cap’n Aux – Eric Auxier
Jan. 3: iFlyBlog – Brent Owens & Mark L. Berry

Andrew Hartley is a certificated flight instructor and commercial pilot in Columbus, Ohio. He hopes his new year’s resolution to only say nice things about people isn’t misinterpreted as a vow of silence.

11 insane (but true) things about aviation

4 August 2013 by Andrew Hartley 16 Comments

Aviation on my Mind — Image courtesy of Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

For this month’s Blogging in Formation post, we formation bloggers decided to write on the topic of “Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”

Yikes – talk about wide open… and considering I talked about my most memorable (read: strangest) flight a couple of months ago (you remember – really boring, long flight gets exciting really quick when a meteorite nearly shoots us down?), I decided to take a bit of a departure from MY flights, and talk about some of aviation history’s (and aviation TODAY’S) strangest facts.

What follows is a list of 11 insane (but true) things about aviation – and I’ve upped the ante by adding one (1) FALSE aviation “fact,” for a total of 12. And I’ll be running a contest… leave your guess in the comments as to which one of the below “facts” is actually “fiction,” and I’ll select one person who answers correctly (random selection) to receive an issue of a vintage aviation magazine!

Now for the rules (not that I can enforce them) – please don’t use Google or any of the other interweb searching technologies available to us in this fantastic day and age we live in. This will be on the honor system, so simply read the items below, and based on your knowledge of aviation trivia, pick out the one that is false (or make an educated guess as to which one you think is false). This will not be as easy as you may think. I’m giving one week to read and comment, so as this post went live on Sunday, August 4th, 2013 at 12:01am eastern time, you have until midnight eastern time on Saturday, August 10th, 2013 to comment. I will post a follow up giving the correct answer, as well as announcing the answer and winner on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, so click the links above (or below) to follow Smart Flight Training there so you don’t miss the results! You can also subscribe to the Smart Flight Training blog in your favorite RSS reader (I suggest Feedly).

UPDATE: While the contest is over, please feel free to continue to comment and take your guess at the false item on the list. If you are impatient and want to see the answers, they can be found on the post “And the Winner is…“

Now – on with the show!

11 Insane (but true) things about Aviation

1) Man files flight plan from New York, NY to Long Beach, CA – but ends up in Ireland!

In 1938, Douglas Corrigan flew from Long Beach to New York, and filed a flight plan to return to Long Beach, but instead flew to Ireland – earning him the nickname “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Corrigan had been denied permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, and he blamed his directional “mistake” on a navigational error, caused by heavy cloud cover that obscured landmarks and low-light conditions, causing him to misread his compass.

2) The first pilot’s license did not belong to one of the Wright brothers!

Pilot Certificate number 1 was actually issued to William P. MacCracken, Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, and not until 1927 (even though the Wright Brothers’ first flight was in 1903). The story goes that Mr. MacCracken offered the honor to Orville Wright, who declined since he was no longer flying.

3) The first aircraft to be intentionally shot down by another aircraft went down on October 5, 1914, when the observer in one plane shot the pilot in another plane with a hand gun.

Prior to this, military aviation was more a “gentleman’s game” – with pilots on opposing sides waving and saluting each other as they passed.

4) The remains of Bert Hinkler’s glider CANNOT BE DESTROYED!

Alright – grab a piece of paper and a pencil for this one… it’s a little convoluted: Bert Hinkler was the first person to fly solo from England to Australia, and to the first to fly solo across the southern Atlantic Ocean. He practiced flying in gliders he built himself. He died in 1933, crashing in a second England to Australia flight attempt. Now for the weird: a piece of wood from one of Hinkler’s gliders was given to U.S. astronaut Don Lind as a token of appreciation for visiting Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia (where the Hinkler Hall of Aviation is). The piece of wood was in turn given to Dick Scobee, the captain of the space shuttle Challenger mission. The piece of wood was on the Challenger, in a plastic bag, in Scobee’s locker when the Challenger exploded in 1986. The bag and the wood were recovered from the sea, identified, mounted, and later returned to the Hinkler Hall of Aviation in Bundaberg.

5) The deadliest accident in aviation history actually occurred on the ground!

On Sunday, March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747 aircraft collided on the ground, killing 583 people and destroying both aircraft. Due to low visibility and other factors, one 747 was attempting to take off while the other was still on the runway.

6) Inspiration can come from anywhere: My Little Pilot: Flying is Magic

Oklahoma’s Vance Air Force Base has a pilot training unit that has adopted a pink, My Little Pony-inspired patch (as opposed to the typical scorpions, skulls, and other “manly” (and more typical) options. I guess the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has also allowed the bronies in the military to come out of the closet, er, stable.

7) In the “Man Bites Dog” Category – Someone actually ATE a Cessna 150

It took him two years, but Michael Lotito literally ate a Cessna 150. Apparently Lotito was a french entertainer who deliberately ate indigestible objects, such as bicycles, beds, shopping carts, chandeliers, a coffin, and the aforementioned Cessna 150, among other things. He said these things were not a problem, but bananas and hard-boiled eggs gave him indigestion.

8) A Hopping Rocket?

SpaceX has created a rocket that is capable of launching straight up (as all good rockets should), and of returning to the ground – also straight up and right back to it’s original position on the launchpad! Called the Grasshopper Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle, it’s most recent test had the rocket take off, hover momentarily at about 820 feet, then return safely to the lauchpad, still in it’s original upright position, allowing the rocket to be reused. Take THAT North Korea.

9) An over-under, makeshift four-engine biplane

In 1940, two Avro Anson airplanes from an air base in New South Wales, Australia were training together. During the training, they collided and stuck together, one on top of the other, killing the engines of the upper plane, and the controls of the lower. Both crew members bailed out of the lower aircraft, and the navigator bailed out of the upper aircraft. The pilot of the upper plane realized he still had control, so flew on for five more miles before making an emergency landing. The upper aircraft was actually fixed and flew again!

10) The Bungle Award – an award you DON’T want to win

Pilots are good at what they do, and generally take flying very seriously, but we are also fond of jokes and humor! In that vein, the Bungle Awards were created to “honor” the inexcusable, “dumb” mistakes that get made sometimes (like taxiing into a parked airplane, dragging your wing down the length of a hangar, or taking off with too little fuel and having to lang off airport out of gas). Some Air Force Bungle Awards can be seen in museums, though since they were unofficial, no one knows to whom they belonged, when they were given, or for what, exactly, they were awarded!

11) The Hughes H-4 Hercules – a.k.a. The Spruce Goose

Howard Hughes’s H-4 Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in history. Due to wartime restrictions on using aluminum, the aircraft was built out of wood, earning it the nickname “Spruce Goose” (even though it was actually made out of birch). It had 8 engines, each producing 3000 horsepower. It only flew one time, for about a mile and at about 70 feet above the water, on November 2, 1947.

12) Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need “roads.”

The elusive flying car we have all been waiting for is finally (nearly) here. A company founded by attendees of MIT called Terrafugia is flight testing and working on FAA (and DOT) approval for their “Transition” flying car (but don’t call it that when they’re around – they insist that the Transition is a “roadable aircraft,” NOT a “flying car”). With two seats and folding wings, the Transition falls under the “light sport” category of aircraft. Terrafugia doesn’t even have final approval on the Transition yet, but word is, they are already looking into the future at a vertical takeoff and landing, self-flying aircraft that would truly allow anyone to avoid the ground-bound traffic and commute above the fray. Does anyone else find that just a little frightening (yet awesome)?

Check out all the Blogging in Formation posts:
Saturday, August 3: Dan Pimentel (Airplanista)
Sunday, August 4: Andrew Hartley (Smart Flight Training)
Monday, August 5: Brent Owens (IFlyBlog)
Tuesday, August 6: Karlene Petitt (Flight to Success)
Wednesday, August 7: Eric Auxier (Adventures of Cap’n Aux)
Thursday, August 8: Ron Rapp (House of Rapp)

Thanks for reading the Smart Flight Training blog – I hope you enjoyed this post, and don’t forget to leave your comment about which “fact” above you think is actually “fiction” for your chance to win an issue of a vintage aviation magazine! Tailwinds, and have a great week!

Andrew Hartley is a certificated flight instructor in Columbus, Ohio.

Blogging in Formation – The Future of Aviation in the USA

30 June 2013 by Andrew Hartley 6 Comments

Fortune Teller — Image Credit: Vjeran Lisjak

Each month, a visionary group of six formation bloggers blogs about something aviation related, each from their own perspective, for six days straight. Our first series was about how we got into flying. In month two, we discussed our most memorable flights.

As a series, we generally all post the first full week of each month, but this month we are changing it up just a little due to the American Independence Day holiday on July 4th. This month, we are starting a little earlier than usual and changing up the order of bloggers, all so that we can focus on a topic near and dear to all of our hearts – our freedom to fly and it’s future in the US. See what we did there? FREEDOM to fly? INDEPENDENCE Day (a celebration of American FREEDOM)?

Okay – so enough with the obvious.

Let’s talk about this month’s topic – the future of US aviation.

There are so many directions to go on a topic of this magnitude, and I’ll start by saying how much I hate predictions. Not because I hate being wrong (that happens CONSTANTLY), but because people make predictions all the time, but rarely revisit their predictions to talk about whether or not they actually happened (and why or why not – which is the more important part, in my opinion). Think New Year’s predictions or the stock market financial talking heads. Blech.

That said, I CAN say with relative confidence that the future of aviation is the present. Aviation generally changes SO SLOWLY (dreadfully so), that the things making news today can be confidently predicted to be making news tomorrow. On the negative side – think user fees. We’ve been fighting user fees pretty much every year and under every president since at least Clinton (and probably before). It’s a fight we will continue to have in the future in the US, and it is not a small issue (look at general aviation in many other countries (such as the Netherlands – where the loss of business far outweighed the gain in revenue) and the UK, Germany, etc.) and you’ll see that this issue is no small potatoes for us here in the US if we want to maintain our freedom to fly (relatively) affordably.

On the positive side, let’s talk technology. Technology has been advancing faster and faster for all of recorded history, and its velocity today is nearly unimaginable. One of the issues US aviation has had (and still has) is safety – how can we continue to improve our safety record? One of the ways this is happening is with “synthetic vision” technology – something like “Head Up Displays” or HUDs, which have been the sole domain of fighter jets for years, but are now making their way into business jets. It’s only a matter of time before they become available (and even standard) on GA airplanes. There are already even synthetic vision apps for your phone or tablet!

But now let’s focus on something I personally think is inevitable: the greening of US aviation (and aviation in general worldwide). I’m one of those rare birds who is a pilot and an environmentalist (sue me). I’ve been following with interest the “unleaded avgas” research and experimentation with “mogas” and biofuels, and this is one issue that is not going to go away, no matter how much the industry and alphabet groups (such as AOPA, NBAA, etc.) try to push it off for as many reasons as they can come up with.

For one thing, as the holder of an MBA in entrepreneurship (yet another of my many onion-like layers), I know that business and industry tend to fight change like a cornered animal when that change is being discussed and contemplated (the fighting gets fiercer the closer it is to happening), but I also know that those same businesses and entrepreneurs are the most creative when it comes to ultimately figuring it all out when the change is actually upon them. Regulation for the public good is usually a good thing overall – and business has always (and will always) be the best placed and most motivated to make it work for them – no matter how much they gripe about it.

There are many examples today of ways people are trying to make flying greener – not the least of which is a number of electric aircraft currently traversing the country and the world! Pilot Chip Yates is planning on becoming an electric Charles Lindbergh by flying an electric aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean. Pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg have been flying the Solar Impulse around the world (albeit very slowly), having recently flown from Cincinnati, Ohio to Washington, D.C. (at a whopping 39 knots or so at 10,000 feet). One of Borschberg’s statements from the above-linked article struck me, since it speaks to multiple aspects of the greening of aviation in the US:

…Borschberg acknowledged that 100 percent solar-powered airplanes are not normal in day-to-day aviation, he said some of the ideas behind the Solar Impulse could find its [sic] way into general aviation aircraft. “I will see the first [general aviation] electric propulsion coming soon,” he predicted. A plus with that: Fewer noise complaints at airports. “This airplane doesn’t make any noise,” he said.

Electric, nearly noiseless flight is happening now, and will only get better and find its way into our day-to-day flying. But another green idea (that pilots will readily admit, whether they are granola-crunchy or not), is simply increasing the efficiency of aircraft. This can range from “lean-of-peak” operations (sound off in the comments, those of you on both sides of the LoP debate) to new aircraft designs that fly on less than 3 gallons per hour of fuel (that’s better than most cars on the road)! Talk about a great way to make less impact on the environment (and less impact on your pocketbook, with avgas reaching into the $6s and higher per gallon)!

So on top of higher efficiency and different power generation, which directly impact the earth and our environment, pilots today (and tomorrow) can also indirectly impact the world both environmentally & socially by flying for non-profits such as Pilots N Paws (pet rescue), Angel Flight (flying medical patients to care), LightHawk (environmental protection through flight), Civil Air Patrol (search & rescue, among other things), Kids in Flight (giving seriously ill children a chance to experience aviation), Angel Flight ( free air transportation for any legitimate, charitable, medically related need), and even mission trip flying (if you’re a religious person). This list barely scratches the surface of what good aviation can do in the world, environmentally and socially. I personally think that the above FAR outweighs any bad aviation may do socially or environmentally…

My Daughter, Wynnie, on a rocking plane!

So with that, I’ll leave off with with one final prediction about the future of US aviation – and this one is more certain than anything else I’ve discussed above: that what we do right now to get and keep the next generation interested in aviation is more critical than anything else we can do as pilots and enthusiasts to secure the future of general aviation in the US. One of the upcoming Formation Bloggers – Karlene Pettit – recently wrote a couple of posts speaking to this very thing – one about the upcoming movie Planes, and a more recent one about the upcoming kid’s TV show “Airpark” – and this is one of the ways that we can ensure that there will even be pilots in the next generation… popularization of flight has declined ever since its peak with Top Gun, and it’s time we bring it back and ensure that US aviation (and aviation across the world) even HAS a future – if the kids don’t care, our dwindling population will continue to shrink.

And that would be a great loss of freedom, don’t you think?

Please check out all the “Formation Bloggers”

Saturday, June 29: Dan Pimentel (Airplanista – The Future of U.S. Aviation: Again, the Resiliency of the GA Family Will be Tested)
Sunday, June 30: Andrew Hartley (Smart Flight Training – The Future of Aviation in the USA)
Monday, July 1: Brent Owens (iFlyBlog – The Future of Aviation in the U.S.)
Tuesday, July 2: Karlene Petitt (Flight to Success)
Wednesday, July 3: Eric Auxier (Adventures of Cap’n Aux)
Thursday, July 4: Ron Rapp (House of Rapp)

Andrew Hartley is a certificated flight instructor in Columbus, Ohio.