General Aviation News

It’s winter, so time to shop for a seaplane

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It may seem like the dead of winter if you’ve already been grappling with heavy snows across America’s north. Therefore, it must be time to shop for boats, right? And if that sounds reasonable, why not a seaplane?

Saturday, Nov. 14, was the final day of the last airshow of 2019. The 2019 DeLand Sport Aviation Showcase suffered its chilliest weather of the four years it has been operating.

Nonetheless, my unscientific survey of airshow vendors jibed with numerous comments from individual pilots: Despite the less-than-ideal weather this year, sales of aircraft and other aviation gear proceeded. Show organizers said attendance was up more than 20% this year and every planned exhibitor space was sold.

Given this year’s uncharacteristic chill, the 2019 running of the Deland Showcase bore a resemblance to the boat shows I used to marvel at in my former home of Minnesota. How’s that?

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Roundabouts and runways

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Let’s say you and I live in a small city of 30,000 people, more or less. We drive the roads regularly to go to work, drop the kids off at school, make a quick run to the grocery store, and maybe keep a medical appointment or two. So do our neighbors. America is a car culture after all. In our hypothetical town about 10,000 of us are actual drivers.

Our first roundabout appears on the edge of town, outside the heavily trafficked downtown area. A single-lane roundabout, it’s a simple example of this traffic taming design. This particular roundabout is intended to handle the traffic at a four-way intersection where two roads cross at a right angle. Today there isn’t much there, but there are plans for rezoning that will allow commercial and industrial development in the future. The development will benefit our town’s bottom line.

All good so far, right?

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Ask Paul: Why is only the #4 cylinder having problems?

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Q: Dear Paul, could you help me solve a problem I have in the #4 cylinder of an IO-540-K1K5 engine, which is mounted on a Pillan T-35 aircraft of the Chilean Air Force?

We already checked the draft of the magnets and their fall. These are OK.

The other cylinders are working well. We checked the fuel injectors and the fuel distributor and they are also OK. The baffles and fairings are also OK, as well as the signals to the instruments.

Could you tell me something else about this single-cylinder isolated fault?

Mario Rodríguez Yáñez, Santiago-Chile

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Welcome to the cusp of yet another new age

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This past week something remarkable occurred on live streaming video for all the world to see.

Elon Musk, the enfant terrible of the tech world, introduced the public to a pick-up truck so far out of the mainstream in terms of styling that many initially took it as a joke. Surely there must be a more traditional looking model sitting in the wings, ready to roll out after we all had a good laugh at this ugly duckling.

Nope. The unfinished steel shell, blacked-out windows, and sharp angular form are the real deal. This news surprised a great many who had been anticipating something amazing, not something so repugnantly unrefined.

When the markets opened, Tesla stock fell more than 6%. The world saw and the world responded. Musk’s big reveal was a bust. The CyberTruck would be a loser of the first order.

Or so it seemed. Musk came back with fire, tweeting that his company had received 146,000 orders for the much maligned vehicle in just 24 hours, which translates to $8 billion in sales.

In the interest of full disclosure I’m honor bound to mention, one of the orders on Tesla’s books belongs to me. There will be a CyberTruck in my driveway sometime in late 2021, or 2022, or something like that. I believe in a weird, bright future. 

So, what’s all this got to do with aircraft, aviation, or the price of avgas?

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Fear: Real or imagined

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Fear is a lot like stress.

Anthropologists and other scientists will argue that human beings were designed to experience stress as a lifesaving response to an environmental factor — lions, tigers, or bears, for example.

Fear is the same thing. It’s built into us as a self-preservation agent. It helped keep us safe from predators and Mother Nature way back when we weren’t at the top of the food chain.

Now that we are, and we can protect ourselves from environmental dangers, fear is largely self-induced. What we fear drives our thinking and how we behave.

Most stress modern humans experience is based on self-imposed, generally unlikely fears. I researched the database for reports to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System related to “fear” to get a sense of what pilots are willing to admit.

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A little give and take never hurts

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I’d like to make a confession.

The truth is I like to think of myself as a reasonable guy, a nice guy, the kind of guy who would not just lend, but actually give away, a cup of sugar if a neighbor came by asking for one.

Be that as it may, I don’t always agree with the folks managing my local airport. They sometimes do things that make no sense to me, financially or in terms of marketing the facilities. On other occasions I find they don’t take an appropriate interest in the visionary ideas I share with them. They just don’t seem to care.

This can be tremendously frustrating. 

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Altitude treasure hunt

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Karen, a commercial pilot from Utah, asks: “Where on an airport is the “official” altitude measured? Is it the ramp, the terminal, the beacon tower, the middle of the runway? If so, which runway? I was on the ramp at Hemphill County Airport (KHHF), in Canadian, Texas, the other day and the terminal is on a hill overlooking everything and it got me to wondering.”

I confess that I never thought about where the official altitude of the field is measured from until you asked, nor do I recall any instructor ever teaching me about this back in the day.

But once you brought it up, I can think of dozens of airports that are far from flat. And I, too, have been to KHHF, with its uphill hike to the pilot relief station. And it’s the only airport that I’ve ever visited that has a subterranean tornado shelter!

Not that I was there during a tornado or anything, but finding the answer to your question initiated a whirlwind of activity.

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To your health

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Long ago, before AstroTurf was in wide use, before Quantitative Easing was a thing, when we were still talking about the scourge of global cooling, there was only one pathway for the average Jane or Joe to follow should they decide to get involved in general aviation. That path led directly through the office of an FAA Designated Medical Examiner.

Today, there are three entirely separate paths for us to choose from.

I call that progress. 

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