AOPA Pilot Blog: Reporting Points

Green is fashionable these days, but Embraer now makes its Ipanema (the EMB 200 series) agplane in an E96 ethanol-burning version. It uses a modified 320-hp Lycoming IO-540 that has bored-out fuel nozzles for more power than standard-issue IO-540s. As a result, the Ipanema also burns more of that eco-friendly fuel. In the past 40 years of its production, Embraer has sold 1,050 Ipanemas. But since 2004, 50 were all ethanol-burners. These are called EMB 202As.

Like meat? Go to Brazil. I’m visiting with Embraer here, and its employees are fond of a certain type of restaurant.

They’re called churrascarias. I think that’s Portugese for “carnivore temple.” You go in, sit down, and pretty soon here comes a waiter with a huge spit of meat. You take a slice. He comes back again. You take another slice. This goes on until you turn on the “no mas” indicator on your table. No kidding. And even then, the guy keeps coming back at what seems like one-minute intervals. It’s a veritable river of meat. This keeps up until you either die of a burst stomach or urgently signal for the bill.

I took home a card showing all the meat cuts. It’s a meat road map. Now I can tell you what I ate: filet mignon, rump ( I don’t speak Portugese, so I just nodded when he said “Lagarto”), neck meat, and hump. That’s the large blister-o-meat on the back of a bull’s neck. Washed it down with a thimble of “43″–a Spanish herb liquere.

I’m currently in Brazil, at Embraer’s Sao Jose dos Campos plant. But today I flew on the company shuttle ( a Brasilia) to Embraer’s Gavaio Peixoto airport (SBGP)/factory/flight test center to fly the Phenom 100. The plane I flew was prototype number 1, and loaded with racks of flight test instrumentation. Anyway, the weather was somehat crappy, what with a 500-foot ceiling and torrential rain. It came down in buckets, filling the SBGP water-test trench in seconds. It is summer here, you know.

Aboard were Embraer captain Luiz Cesar, communications strategy advisor Danial Bachmann, and flight test engineer Maximilian Kleinubung. Kleinubung wanted me to do some 5- and 3-degree banked turns for auopilot data, but that wasn’t to be, as we’ll see.

The flight gave me a chance to fly the G1000 Prodigy avionics, which featured a test version of SVS and HITS imagery/cues. Got in two instrument approaches–both in anger (i.e. real IFR weather, not rage at the approaches themselves)–an ILS to Campinas Airport, an an RNAV back into SBGP. There was turbulence, but the P100 rode it well. The onboard Garmin radar served us well, too.

The trip to Campinas was vector-laden and procedurally complicated, and the weather helped in setting me to make peace with the G1000 in a high-workload environment. You can’t beat this kind of dual.

All the vectoring, and a low approach, made us burn up a lot of fuel in the fuel-unfriendly low-altitude environment. So there was no time for stalls or single-engine work. Let along the autopilot data. So it was up to 340 for some cruise numbers, then back to SBGP. In all, a great way to spend the day. And a fine airplane.

By tomorrow, the front is supposed to pass to the northeast, and skies will hopefully clear well enough for those stalls and V1 cuts.

It used to be that reporters used 4 X 8 inch spiral-bound notebooks to jot down information. But after a trip to Border’s, I’ve been trying out Moleskines. (Still don’t know how to pronounce it). The Moleskines have 192 pages to the spiral-bounds’ 70, and they’re built tough. And there’s some neat extras. They have black leather covers, an expandable pocket for holding recipts, business cards, etc., and an elastic band that keeps the Moleskine closed when not in use. There’s a place where you can record your name and address, and even offer a reward if you lose it. At 3 1/2 X 5 1/2 inches they’re also more compact than the old standbys, so you can shove them into a pocket without it sticking out–or the spiral binding snagging. People who see mine ask all about it, then go off and buy their own. A new trend? At about $10 a pop, they ain’t cheap, but they do grow on you. Just a little too small, sometimes.

Sure, the weather is nice in Phoenix, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m at the 89th annual convention of the American Meteorological Society, where a primarily academic crowd of some 4,000 weather professionals are assembled. From 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m, hundreds of seminars are conducted. Most of them this year address climate change, but several discussed some aviation aspects of satellite metorology and lightning forecasting. To someone familiar with aviation conventions, the structure here would seem unusual. Mornings and afternoons are for lectures. A daily briefing comes at 12:30 to 1 p.m. The exhibit hall doesn’t open until 5:30 p.m., and it shuts down at 7:30 p.m. I went to the briefing, which was topped off by a review of the day’s “space weather.” Turns out that space weather–which encompasses solar radiation levels and solar storms–is provided on a daily basis to aircrews flying airliners across Polar routes. The atmosphere is thinnest there, so solar radiation poses a big hazard. Big enough to cause reroutings.

Friday’s the last day for Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Sad thing, really.  Regional airliners and general aviation flights will now have to go to far away Schoenefeld Airport–about an hour’s drive, or subway ride, from Berlin’s city center. True, traffic at Tempelhof had slowed since the mid-1970s, when the major airlines left to go to Tegel, another Berlin airport. By the way, Tegel itself is scheduled to close in 2012 or 2013. Meanwhile, Schoenefeld (to be renamed Berlin-Brandenburg International, or BBI) is designated as Berlin’s sole airport. But it’s in no way prepared to handle the influx of new flights that would have used Tegel or Tempelhof.

So add one more to the growing list of the world’s shuttered downtown airports.

We’re covering the Tempelhof closing online, and hope you’ll check out the story and video of an ILS approach (in VFR conditions) that I made to runway 27L last year, as part of our anti-user-fees initiative. Even flew between those apartment buildings, just like the DC-3s and -4s that shot the same gap during the Airlift.

What do you think of this closure? Anybody out there ever flown into Tempelhof, flew in the famous Berlin Airlift to Tempelhof in 1948-49, or served there when it was an Air Force base?

Enjoy these three videos, testimony to a grand airport in world and aviation history.  

Click here if the video won’t play.

Click here if the video won’t play.

Click here if the video won’t play.

Are you like me? Do you ride a motorcycle and fly small airplanes? If so, you’ve heard a variant of the following question from the unanointed:

“Are you crazy, flying that dinky airplane/riding that motorcycle? Don’t you know you can crack your skull open that way?”

Of course I know. And yet, I do it again and again. Why?

A new book, Bodies in Motion: Evolution and Experience in Motorcycling, by Steven L. Thompson, a good friend and former executive editor of AOPA Pilot, goes into the reasons why we pilots (and motorcycle drivers) are drawn to the kicks of our very special pursuits. And it’s not because we’re crazy. Rather, Thompson posits that our need for psychokinetic thrills is rooted in human evolution. In short, humans evolved from apes, which swung from trees and so became adapted to–and enjoyed the sensations that accompany–the g-forces, hand-eye coordination, and odd attitudes that attend this kind of body-motion. 

Fast-forward to modern man. What kid doesn’t like spinning around until he/she is so dizzy that he/she falls down? Or swinging on “monkey bars”? It’s the same thing when we get older, have a bit more money, and still want to live on the edge. Admit it, you like steep turns–in the air and on the ground. And aerobatics? ‘Nuff said.

Of course, social aspects also creep in, Thompson says. Just as some are drawn to Harleys, some to Suzukis, and some to BMWs, so are some pilots drawn to Bonanzas, Mooneys, Cessnas, or radial-engined classics. But Thompson makes an argument that pure physical sensations are at work, too. In Bodies in Motion, there’s an appendix that quantifies the vibration levels at the handlebars, seats, and foot pegs of various motorcycles. You could do the same study for airplanes, I suspect.

Different strokes for different folks. Whether you like the buzz of a crotch rocket, the purr of a Goldwing, the rumble of a radial, or the shriek of an MU-2, you’re bound to enjoy reading Thompson’s intellectual musings on why we do what we do. They don’t call them “ape-hangers” for nothing!

Check it out at Amazon or Aerostich. $19.95.

P.S. When I’m riding, I like to stick my head down so I can see past the fairing and watch the front wheel pump up and down as it takes the bumps. When flying, I like to look back and sneak a peek at the tail. Looks odd, in a leaving-things-behind kind of way. And takeoffs always give me a charge….

I just came back from my first-ever TBM Owners and Pilots Association convention. Located at a resort in Traverse City (TVC), Michigan, the event drew 78 TBM 700s and 850s, along with their owners. A Socata official said that this assemblage accounted for one-third of the US TBM fleet.

The five-day schedule involved seminars every day, and there was even an exhibition hall with booths representing Garmin, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney, and many other companies. I went to give a talk about large-droplet icing and ice-induced tailplane stalls. Even at 7:30 a.m. I had a good crowd.

AOPA ASF’s Bruce Landsberg gave a talk about ASF’s initiatives, such as their popular online safety courses.

The trip up and back was memorable, too. The trip from our home base at Frederick, Maryland, to TVC included a flight through a large patch of clouds–some of them featuring moderate rainfall–and an ILS approach to TVC. Flight Service put a huge convective sigmet around most of Michigan, but all I could see on Tom Haines’ Bonanza’s Garmin 530 datalink view was some yellow in a sea of green returns. With no contouring cells, and no Stormscope strikes, I decided to keep on truckin’. There were a couple of bumps, but mostly it was rain–and an 800-foot ceiling in rain for the arrival at TVC.

Coming back, I caught a 20-knot tailwind and saw groundspeeds as high as 194 knots. At last–a decent tailwind! Of course, the trip would have been even faster in a TBM, but that’s another story.

Bottom line: TBMOPA is an impressive organization, full of dedicated owners. I’ll be back for next year’s convention, at Tuscon.

My “On Final, On the Gauges” article in the August AOPA Pilot discussed IFR final approach procedures, and it apparently hit a nerve in the “holding in lieu of” department. My read of the AIM, as set out in AIM 5-4-9, is that you don’t need to make that trip around the holding pattern–even if it’s published in bold on the approach plate–as long as: No PT is on the chart, when you’re getting radar vectors to the final approach course, when you’re doing a timed approach from a holding fix. Anyone ever done a timed approach? Not me.

Member George Shanks wrote me to emphasize that most RNAV (GPS) approaches with the “T”-style entry paths to the FAF are also exempt from holding. “If the approach is in the “T” or inverted “L” format and fly-by waypoints are in use … it would not be necessary to use the course reversal pattern.”

Jose Riera has a good question: “If a holding pattern is depicted at the FAF, you are required to make one turn around before resuming your course inbound to the runway. Can you tell me why this is?”

Personally, I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with steering clear of obstacles or terrain. All I know is that most times you’ll be on vectors from ATC, and a hold-in-lieu-of PT would be unlikely. Which is good, because let’s face it, most of us just don’t want to hold …..

Anybody else with views on holding at the FAF?

AOPA-Germany’s managing director, Michael Erb, wrote me the other day asking for help in saving Berlin, Germany’s Tempelhof Airport. It may be the last chance to keep the historic airport open. A referendum to keep the airport open failed to get enough votes earlier this year. And Klaus Wowereit (pronounced Vo-ver-ite), Berlin’s mayor, who has always wanted to close Tempelhof, now seems to be on track to getting his way. He’s the Richard Daley of Berlin.

Erb sent me a link that you can use to send in your vote to preserve the airport as a UNESCO world heritage site. Here it is:

http://www.rescue-tempelhof.org/

Fill it out and send it in. It’s the most we can do at this point.

How ironic that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama used the Berlin Airlift so often in his recent speech in Berlin. Without once referring to the airport that made it possible. Anyway, here’s a way to make your voice heard on the matter.