AOPA Pilot Blog: Reporting Points

The AOPA 2012 Sweepstakes “Tougher Than a Tornado” Husky got its nickname by surviving the Sun’n Fun tornado on March 31. But the airplane seems to attract extreme weather conditions wherever it goes.
On a recent trip to Wyoming, severe thunderstorms (the unforecast kind) blew through the night after the Tornado Husky arrived. In Montana, its arrival was accompanied by a fierce summer squall. Back at AOPA headquarters in Maryland, it recently went through an extremely rare 5.8-magnitude earthquake. And this weekend’s forecast: Hurricane Irene.
Coincidence?

Jeppesen Digital Presses

With its new Mobile FliteDeck iPad app, you might think Jeppesen has only recently begun a strategy to move away from paper charts, but you would be wrong. During a recent visit to Jeppesen headquarters in Denver, I was once again reminded of a strategy put in place a decade ago by the company’s leadership to transition away from paper.

While the true paperless cockpit is just now arriving, the transition has been successful, if not complete. Not many years ago, Jeppesen printed some 8 billion (that’s with a “B”) pieces of paper–paper en route charts and terminal procedures. This year it will only be about 1 billion. An even bigger difference is that now, most of that printing is done as print-on-demand instead of offset printing on mammoth presses.

The digital print-on-demand process is much more efficient and cost-effective. Today, if you special order an approach book, for example, chances are it will come off the digital press today and be in the mail today. No longer must Jeppesen guess how many people will want that book and then print extras on the offset press.

Take a look at the video link at the top of this post for a quick look at how the print-on-demand presses work and stay tuned as Jeppesen continues to work with its customers to transition to an all-digital world.

A more indepth video look at Jeppesen’s charting operation is on AOPA Live.

The best replacement yet for paper charts is the iPad. A look at Jeppesen’s new FliteDeck Mobile app is also on AOPA Live.

Like me, Harriet Quimby worked in newspapers for awhile and became intrigued by aviation through the pages of a magazine. That’s pretty much where our similiarities end.

Quimby was writing for something called Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly in 1910 when the magazine published an article promoting an upcoming international “air meet” at Belmont Park in New York. She went, watched the pilots, decided that flying didn’t look too difficult, and started taking lessons. On Aug. 1, 1911, she became the first U.S. licensed female pilot.

It sounds so cut and dried, but I find myself thinking about what she must have experienced to earn that title. Start with the clothes. She couldn’t wear pants, nor would she wear “harem-style” skirts that French female pilots favored. According to Eileen F. Lebow’s excellent book, Before Amelia, Quimby designed her own flying costume: a plum-colored wool suit that converted from knickerbockers that could be tucked into boots to a full skirt by undoing some buttons. If I had to design a completely new type of clothing for something I wanted to do, I’d probably take up knitting instead.

Some things Quimby experienced will sound very familiar to today’s aviators. Interviewed by the New York newspapers when she earned her ticket, she was asked about “the months of predawn rising, the inconvenience of weather, the expense”–was it worth it? Apparently so. She later became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, and would have been the first woman to participate in air mail delivery had she not died in an airplane accident 11 months after she earned her license.

I didn’t know a lot about Quimby before writing this blog. My own aviation role models are the women who ferried military aircraft during World War II–the WASP. Whenever I struggled with a concept or worried that I wasn’t up to the flying task at hand, I pictured those women in their flight suits, climbing into  B-26s, and B-29s, and drew inspiration from their strength. Now I wonder who their aviation heroines were. Could one of them have been a petite woman in a plum-colored wool flying suit?

Nothing in my flying experience prepared me for flying with Red Bull’s Chuck Aaron, the only helicopter pilot approved by the FAA for low-level aerobatic helicopter demonstrations.

Our short flight on Friday, April 29, included loops and rolls — familiar maneuvers in fixed-wing aircraft — but totally foreign in a helicopter.

Look for a far more detailed article in a future edition of AOPA Pilot magazine.

See what I was talking about in the April AOPA Pilot article on Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Ride along during a Teton Aviation glider flight out of Driggs, Idaho. It’s available to tourists, but this was a solo flight. See places other visitors to Jackson Hole will never see. On a sad note, the video was shot in 2010 and the towplane pilot is Blake Chapman. On April 8, 2011, Chapman died in a Husky crash. This video is dedicated to him for helping thousands of tourists explore “The Grand,” the biggest peak in Grand Teton National Park.

I’m still scratching my head over the 24-year-old pilot who landed a Piper Archer on New York City’s Rockaway Beach–about three miles from John F. Kennedy International Airport–on Monday night, and then reportedly told authorities afterwards that “It happens all the time in Alaska!” They apparentlyweren’t amused.

His conversation with air traffic control is downright bizarre, and the controller seemed to do everything he could to discourage the landing. The pilot was very careful not to declare an emergency.

The FAA is still looking into the incident. If you were the investigator assigned to this matter, what would you do?

Not too low, four Air Force T-38 pilots found out after a fly-by before a University of Iowa football game on Nov. 20, 2010. Following an investigation, the pilots were disciplined for flying too low and too fast, and the lead pilot will leave the Air Force, according to the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

How fast is too fast? Faster than 300 kts–and maybe closer to 400–below 10,000 feet msl, before the game and during a practice flight the day before.

How low is too low? The jets reportedly cleared a scoreboard by 58 feet. Radar put the flight at 176 feet agl, just 16 feet higher than the stadium’s press box.

The report noted that the fans inside the stadium enjoyed the flyover, and a number of YouTube videos appear to confirm this. It’s not clear how many fans’ ears are still ringing from the experience, however.

Over the past nine years that I’ve served as AOPA’s media relations director, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Molly McMillin, aviation writer for the Wichita Eagle newspaper, on a number of stories. I’ve always found her reporting to be insightful and eminently fair. She goes to great lengths to get a story right.

Now she’s gone the extra mile.

Molly recently earned her private pilot certificate, training and taking her checkride in her father’s 1956 Piper Tri-Pacer. She blogged about the experience and the thrill of receiving her permanent certificate – the one with Wilbur and Orville on it – in her Air Capital Insider blog. You can read it here: http://bit.ly/eISHGD.

Congrats, Molly!

Molly’s in an enviable position among her fellow reporters – and not just because she’s now a pilot. She covers a beat. Beat reporters get to learn about a particular industry, in Molly’s case aviation, learn who the players are and what issues are important and why. So their stories are often more nuanced and really help their audience understand an issue.

General assignment reporters, on the other hand, have to be instant experts in anything and everything. That can make my job quite challenging sometimes, when dealing with someone whose total aviation experience is riding in seat 17B. By the same token, I see it as an opportunity to expose someone new to aviation in general, and general aviation in particular. Sure, it’s not as good as taking someone up for a flight in a GA plane, but it’s a chance to increase understanding and maybe burnish the image of GA a little among the non-flying public.

Occasionally we get very lucky and hear from a reporter who has some experience with general aviation, or if we really hit the jackpot, one who’s a pilot, like Molly.

If you’re a pilot, you can help share the knowledge by taking a reporter flying. If you’ve never taken someone up for an introductory flight, AOPA has a brochure called Take ‘Em Flying! that offers some ideas.

Who knows? Your efforts might lead to better coverage the next time a small plane becomes the big story in your community. You might even plant a seed that grows into a new pilot! Like Molly!

Chris Dancy
AOPA Media Relations Director

Our February “Dogfight” about proper pattern-entry procedures at non-towered airports has generated quite a stir, and I’ve been called all sorts of interesting names (“renegade,” “anti-authority,” and “anarchist” are my favorites) for questioning the efficacy of the FAA’s standard 45-degree entry.

I’d just like to point out that the U.K., Canada, England, New Zealand and the rest of the English-speaking world has solved this problem long ago. While I hope to keep their fees and privatized ATC north of the border, I wish our FAA would cut and paste this portion of the Canadian regs into our own FAR/AIM. It’s logical, safe, and would be a welcome improvement to the way we fly.

The Canadian Way

We all remember that on this date in 1903, the Wright brothers made their first powered flight from Kill Devil Hill on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

December 17 also marks the first flight of the iconic Douglas DC-3; 75 years ago today, its wheels left the runway at Santa Monica Airport in California.

While no original Wright Flyers are flying today, a remarkable number of DC-3s remain airworthy and take flight regularly. See some recent AOPA Live videos featuring the DC-3.