As an aviation and aerospace podcaster, this is always a unique time of the year for me.  By now, airshow season in the northern United States is over and I usually have a huge pile of content from the season that I can sit back and really think about. 

It’s not that I don’t fly or go after great experiences in the winter (in fact, the Super D gets great hang-time on the hammerheads during the colder weather!), but the pace slows up a little.  Year-end stuff at work is going to keep me out of the sky to some extent and I’m not actively working on any particular rating again until spring.  Many of my fellow aviators and aviation enthusiasts are also scaling back a little, too.

The important thing is that we all have time to think.  About next summer.  About what aviation means to us.  And we have time to make plans and set agendas.

In particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about my local airport.  I fly primarily out of Oakland County International Airport (KPTK or “Pontiac”), where Sutton Aviation rents me aerobatic trainers andprovides instructors and where the CAP Michigan Wing’s glass-cockpit C-182T Nav III is based.  The picture above shows the ramp there during the airport’s open house on 16 August.  I took it from the back seat of one of CAP’s gliders during a demo flight (and, yeah, I got to log it).

Now is a good time to get involved with your local airport.  To make the calls and hit a meeting or two to really understand what’s going on in the pilot community there and to understand how the airport is faring among its many constituencies.

It’s easy to think of pilots and passengers as being the only constituencies of the local airport.  But it’s a lot broader than that.  The surrounding community is a big consideration.  Most of the people over whose homes we fly are non-pilots and, unbelievable as we might think it, many don’t particularly like aviation or aviators.  Many of them think of us as a nuisance because of the noise we make and might even harbor fears that one of us might drop a Cherokee in their yard someday.  And no noise abatement program or commitment to safety is going to change their minds.

Unless we get out there and take our message to them.  Your local community of pilots, maintainers, controllers, and others is very well positioned to help do that.  After all, those folks know the facts and are probably able to express their excitement about aviation in a genuine way that can reach members of the community.  And, by the way, if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those actual or potential communicators that I’m talking about.

This is a great time of year to make a few phone calls and get involved in the promotion and support of your local airport.  The operational tempo is a little slower and we can all take a little time to attend a meeting, take on a volunteer opportunity, or simply become more informed about the airport and its constituencies.  And it’s never too early to get involved in the planning for next summer’s activities like open houses, airshows, and other events.  Believe me, it’s already going on.

The AOPA Airport Support Network (“ASN”) is a good place to start.  Check out http://www.aopa.org/asn/, where you can find out who the ASN volunteer is for your airport and, if you’re an AOPA member, you can e-mail the volunteer directly from the ASN web page.  The page also has a lot of great downloadable resources, including AOPA’s Guide for Airport Advocates: Participating in the Planning Process; AOPA’s Guide to Airport Noise and Compatible Land Use; and The Complete Guide to Holding an Airport Open House.

Not every airport is under threat from its local community, a fact that is due in no small part to the efforts of AOPA, EAA, and other groups.  In those cases, you can join in the effort to keep the ball rolling and make sure that the message continues to go out to the community.

Some airports are under threat from development, encroachment, and just plain misunderstanding.  If your local airport is one of those embattled facilities, ASN can help you to find out how to help protect the airport and communicate effectively with your friends and neighbors about it.

And it doesn’t stop there.  You might find local pilot groups, EAA chapters, IAC chapters, CAP squadrons, and others who share your love of aviation.  You won’t know until you start poking around and getting involved.

It’s a great time to pick up the phone and use these colder months to get involved at your local airport.  Some of your best friends are probably waiting to meet you.

Aviation is always and ever about having new experiences.  And, ideally, sharing those experiences with others.  At Oshkosh, I had the opportunity to fly the Remos GX, a light sport aircraft (“LSA”) manufactured by Remos Aircraft.  And I did it with a group of good friends that ran the gamut of skillsets, missions, and capabilities.

This was my first time flying an LSA of any kind.  I had been thwarted by weather the few times that I’d tried to schedule a flight in a Flight Design CT in my old stomping grounds of Hillsdale, Michigan, where Flight Design’s northern Midwest distributor, Hillsdale Aero, is located.

So it was an unexpected bonus that Rod Rakic and Mike Miley of www.mytransponder.com arranged for a group of new-media types to go fly this aircraft.

We showed up at Orion Air on the field at Oshkosh in the morning and each hooked up with a demo pilot and airplane put of a rotating fleet of three GXs and departed to the north of the field to go crank and bank for awhile.

I enjoyed flying the airplane.  It was responsive, it met all of the book numbers, and struck me as meeting all of the promise of the LSA category.  I need to fly a couple of other LSAs in order to have a real feel for how the Remos GX stacks up, but I’m a confirmed fan of LSAs if the GX is at all indicative.

But here’s the best part.  As I was preparing to do the coverage, I realized that I didn’t have enough of an experience out of one flight to fully cover the aircraft for my podcast, Airspeed.  I really needed some other perspectives.  Rod and Mike had gathered such a wide-ranging group of people to fly the demos that day that I decided to just throw the doors open wide and invite everyone who flew that day onto the episode to talk about the aircraft.  David Allen, Scott Murphy, Bill Williams, and Mike Miley accepted the invitation and all piled onto a Skype call and recorded a really interesting episode.

David and Scott are student pilots to varying degrees.  Bill Williams is a recent private pilot.  I’m a reasonably experienced private pilot.  And Mike Miley is a highly-experienced instructor.  We had the waterfront covered.

The episode just recorded itself.  I didn’t really have to moderate at all.  Each of my friends asserted his point of view and identified what mattered to him from his perspective.  The students talked about each of operation, cost of training, and the likelihood that the aircraft would be available at flight schools in their areas.  The already-certificated pilots talked about gross weight and ability to accomplish go-places missions.  Mike talked about what it would be like to instruct in the aircraft.

And, in addition to taking away some insights about the aircraft that I had not had myself, I was reminded just how much one can learn among pilots by just sitting back and listening.  Especially if we’re used to talking and being listened to.  I recall a couple of points in the conversation where I just left my microphone off and took notes as the students became the instructors, identifying with great clarity and energy what mattered to them about this aircraft and what ought to matter to LSA manufacturers, regulators, and others.

This could have been a perfectly acceptable episode of the show with just me talking.  But it turned out to be so much more just by adding some additional voices.

As pilots, we’re all pretty good talkers.  It’s what we do.  If the words “there I was at five thousand feet . . .” don’t come out of your mouth at some point during the first couple of years of your flying, you’re not doing it right.  It’s about adventures and experiences worth relating to friends and anyone else who will listen. 

But it’s also about listening.  It’s about including others in your conversations and figuring out how their experiences matter for your own purposes.  How what they’re learning applies to you.  How what they know will help you along in your own journey. And how glimpses back along the road that you’ve travelled make your own journey so much more special.

Long and short, I set out to put out a regular episode about a very capable LSA.  And I got a welcome reminder about how much out collective conversation matters.

You can see the show notes and listen to the episode at http://tinyurl.com/kludml.

Pictured in the group shot above are (L-R): David "Ducky" Allen, Scott Murphy, Cole "FOD" Tupper, Bill Williams, Rod "Fanboy" Rakic.

We’re all familiar with the broad efforts by AOPA, EAA, and others to promote general aviation to non-pilot constituencies.  Films like One-Six Right and the upcoming A Pilot’s Story tug at heartstrings.  And merely flying slowly over a neighborhood some severe clear Saturday morning could capture the imaginations of dozens of neighborhood kids.

But when’s the last time you waded into the fray, plucked a specific non-pilot from the masses, and opened the world of aviation to him or her?

It can be as simple as lunch.

I called up my friend Stuart last week and told him that we ought to have lunch someplace near the airport soon so I could show him around and show him firsthand what I babble about all the time.  We agreed on a time and I picked him up earlier today at his office.  I had grabbed a couple of sandwiches and soda pops from the deli and they were belted into the back seat on the short drive to the airport.

First stop, the GA ramp at Oakland County International Airport (KPTK) in Waterford, Michigan.  The airport open house is this Sunday and I had heard that the CAP glider would be on the ramp today for display this weekend.  I keyed through the gate and we walked around the glider.  GA aircraft of every description were performing operations on 27L and 27R and I pointed out at least five different kinds of aircraft and described what they were doing.

Then it was off to the north side to Sutton Aviation.  I fly the Super Decathlon there when training for acro and we were lucky enough to find it on the ramp.  I walked around the aircraft and verbally went through the preflight items, pointing out control surfaces, the tailwheel, the constant-speed prop, and other elements.  Then I loaded Stuart into the front seat.  Stick in his right hand and throttle in his left,  I could see a genuine smile cross his face.  He asked a lot of good questions and wanted to know what each input to the stick and/or pedals did.

Then it was over to Victor Row to the CAP hangar.  Any time I show off the airport to someone, I make a point of plugging CAP.  Anyone I manage to get excited about GA is an excellent candidate for CAP.

Stuart seemed to be amused as we drove through the gate and then down the taxiway between the hangars.  Heck, I’m still amused any time I drive a car on airport grounds, even if it is outside the movement area.

I opened up the hangar and gave him a tour of the hangar and the G1000-equipped airplane, him in the left seat and me in the right.  He had even more questions and was struck by the differences between the Super-D and the C-182T Nav III.  That was an opportunity to discuss the breadth of GA and the tools available for different pilots and different missions (not to mention the CAP-specific operations and the specialized features of the aircraft).

Then lunch.  We pulled up a couple of chairs to the desk in the hangar and spent an hour eating and just shooting the bull.  As though on cue, a guy from an adjacent hangar ambled over and talked for a few minutes.  Aircraft ran up, took off, landed, and taxied just outside the door.  It was a mild day and the late-summer breeze swirled gently around the hangar door.  Every element of aviation that I’ve grown to love surrounded us and the airport seemed to welcome Stuart.

Then we buttoned up the hangar and I dropped off Stuart at his office before returning to mine.  Total time invested? 2.5 hours on the personal Hobbs meter.  Impact?  Who knows.

I’d be surprised if I heard Stuart and an instructor on the frequency tomorrow morning. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it next spring. And even if Stuart never sees the broadside of a huge cumulus cloud through the front window of a flying machine at 110 KIAS, he’s one more member of the local community who’s been inside the fence and seen what goes on in there.  And he’ll bear these sights and sounds in mind when he talks to friends and when he votes.

I think that the big GA campaigns are wonderful.  Thanks to Mr. Freeman, Mr. Ford, and all of the others who give their time, money, and support to them.  They’re necessary to maintain that beach head in the quest for the hearts and minds of the non-flying public. 

But I think that most of us miss the opportunity to do what the broad campaigns can’t:   Have lunch.

Go get one of your non-aviator friends, hit the deli, and go out to the airport.  Show him or her around.  Let him or her sit in an airplane and play with the controls.  Introduce him or her to the people there.  Eat a sack lunch sitting just inside the hangar door and wave to anyone who taxis by.  Show your friend what goes on an average day inside the fence at your particular microcosm of the Big Dream.

Don’t be worried that the experience isn’t sufficiently One-Six-Right-like or not worthy of a cameo in A Pilot’s Story.  After all, your heart beats a little faster with such stimulus as this, right?  That’s because it is intrinsically beautiful and exciting.  And your friend will pick up on it.

We pilots and enthusiasts are in a constant campaign for the hearts and minds of our non-aviator brothers and sisters.  And one of the most effective tools in this campaign is so simple that it escapes notice much of the time. 

Have lunch.  It can be that simple!

I had the chance to fly a couple of aircraft at the show, the first of which was the Cessna Citation Mustang, Cessna’s single-pilot-certified, 340-knot, six-place very light jet (“VLJ”), and cover the experience for Airspeed.

It was a great demo. Jo Hunter, David Allen, and Rod Rakic shot all kinds of video and stills to supplement the cockpit audio I was recording up front. I’ll have audio and video episodes up soon and I’m excited about getting to the editing workstation.

If you’re keeping count, Jo, David, Rod, me, and the Cessna demo pilot make up only five people for this ride in a six-place jet. As has been the case in recent years, I brought my son, Cole, who’s seven and was attending his third AirVenture.

Most of the time, I just assume that I’m not going to get to fly anything. My wonderful wife, Mary, has some trepidation about letting me fly our kids. I respect her feelings about that. We aviators have many constituencies to which we represent our passion and that includes our families. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a trust-building thing. You have to demonstrate competence and safety over a long period of time.

So that, along with my reluctance to leave Cole at the FBO and the fact that most of the aircraft that I fly at shows like this don’t have the seating or require parachutes for the flying we’re going to do, means that I don’t fly anything and, in any case, don’t fly Cole.

But this was a special opportunity. A twin turbine with plenty of seating and a factory demo pilot in the right seat. I can’t imagine a safer scenario. It was time to get Cole up.

I asked Angela Baldwin of Cessna whether I might take Cole along in the back on the demo and she thought it was a great idea. After all, one of the missions for this aircraft is getting the family around the country to make the most of those too-rare opportunities for leisure. I asked Cole if he wanted to go and he gave me a big “yes” with no hesitation.

I loaded him into the back seat and briefed him. Jo, David, and Rod all know Cole and volunteered to answer any questions he had.

Long story short, I got to fly a spectacular demo. We launched out of Appleton and headed for K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base at FL 300 (30,000 feet above sea level). I hand flew the airplane except when we were demonstrating the autopilot or when at altitudes that require autopilot use.

We brought it back to 15,000 feet and got a 2,000-foot block of airspace and did the airwork. Steep turns each way and then three stalls (cruise power, idle power in a 20-degree bank, and power-off pitch-only recovery). This, of course, meant some interesting sight pictures out the window for Cole and some interesting differences in apparent weigh of his butt in the seat. Rod helped to explain what was going on and it turns out that the stalls were his favorite part of the ride.

We came back in and I landed the aircraft unassisted. (Holy crap! I just landed a jet!). Maybe it’s the trailing-link landing gear or maybe I’m a hot-handed, Scheyden-wearing master aviator. Maybe it’s a little of both.

After we buttoned up the aircraft and thanked the demo pilot, we made our way into the FBO and I had the chance to give Cole something that I’d been holding for him for a long time. A brand new Jeppesen logbook. I filled in the first line with the details from the flight, made the remark “First flight with dad,” and gave him the logbook.

This was my first jet flight flying the aircraft in all relevant phases of flight. And the Cessna Citation Mustang is a magnificent machine. I’m still daydreaming about the flight.

But the most important part was the first flight with my son. I got to sit in the left seat using all of the hard-won and oft-practiced skills I’ve been developing over the last eight years. And he got to see his dad put his hands, feet, and brain where his mouth has been for so long. A special flight in every way.

I explained the flight and the circumstances to Mary afterward and she’s good with it. It might be awhile before I get Cole up in a smaller aircraft without a mad-skilled factory demo pilot in the right seat, but that time will come. When I and my fellow pilots have continued to demonstrate skill, devotion, and discretion in every aspect of our flying so that even the skeptical have to admit that we’ve addressed all of the risks as best we can. It’s not that she’s down on aviation. She's not. It’s that she’s very up on our son and it requires an emotion-laden calculus in order to balance the experience with the risk. A calculus in which we all engage. I get that. And I’ll keep on earning that trust until we can get up again, probably in an LSA in Hillsdale this year or next.

In the meantime, I got to fly my boy. A milestone for any pilot. And for any son.

CBS Story Screen Grab

CBS Evening News ran a report by Sharyl Attkisson on Monday titled Tiny Airports Get Big Cut of Stimulus Cash.  You can check it out at http://tinyurl.com/ltk3dr.

A half-researched and poorly-understood effort by an editorial team that doesn’t understand the subject matter that it’s covering.  And doesn't seem to care.  And, most disturbingly, it appears not to matter to these folks that the public is likely to take the reporting at face value despite the inaccuracies and innuendo.  This is, afer all, CBS News.  I heard once that Walter Cronkite spent some time there.  I could be wrong.

Ah, where to start?  Seriously.  I had a huge problem writing this piece because there’s such an assemblage of wrongness from which to start.  So let’s dive in and cover a couple of the most glaring problems.

First, the most prominently-featured airport.  CBS makes the place out to be a private country club for social gatherings where stowage of golf clubs and martini kits are the chief weight and balance considerations for departing aircraft.  CBS refers to the Williamson Flying Club, the owner of the airport, as “a private social club for local pilots.”  Does that conjure images of ascot-wearing local robber barons standing around their private airliners wondering what the poor are doing today?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Williamson Sodus Airport is a rural airport located in New York about four nautical miles south of the Lake Ontario shore.  It has a paved 3,800-foot runway (10 and 28) that’s 60 feet wide.  It has two instrument approaches (RNAV 10 and RNAV 28) that permit IFR aircraft to approach down to 600 feet off the ground in instruments.  And there’s a dimple in the Class E airspace just above it to permit aircraft to remain in controlled airspace for most of the approach.

It’s more than 20 miles from any other airport and it provides a valuable back door to transient aircraft that experience weather, fuel, mechanical, or other issues.

You can train there and earn your FAA airman certificates and ratings.  You can land there for fuel (which is reasonably priced, according to Airnav) and probably get something to eat. You can shoot instrument approaches there.  The senior members and the cadets (youth age 12-21) of the Williamson Composite Squadron of the US Civil Air Patrol are based in Williamson and occasionally meet at, and conducts operations from, the airport.

Maybe it’s the word “club.”  The airport is privately owned by Williamson Flying Club, Inc.  Maybe CBS is reading too much into the name with the word “club” in it.  I might wonder about that, too, if I weren’t smart enough to do even the most basic additional research.  Fortunately, I’m sufficiently smart.  Or at least smarter than CBS News.

Williamson Flying Club, Inc. is a duly-chartered nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of New York since May 22, 1956.  It is limited by Section 201 of the state’s nonprofit corporation law to non-business, non-profit activities.  The airport was a farm in 1957 when the club seeded the first 1,800-foot grass runway at the present site.  And the club has, through its efforts, managed to preserve and build this great example of the American rural airport during the more than 50 years since then.

It’s not odd that the airport is privately owned.  In fact, more than 1,000 public-use airports in the US are privately owned.  That’s nearly one in five such airports.

Williamson-Sodus Airport is open to the public. I can go land there any time I like and so can any of the other hundreds of thousands of certificated pilots in the US, together with their friends, relatives, employees, patients, rescue subjects, clients, and others.  According to Airnav, some 74 aircraft are based at the airport.  (The club’s website identifies only four aircraft belonging to the club itself.)  Aircraft conduct about 73 operations per day there.  About 9% of the traffic is transient traffic from (and to) other places.

The fact of the matter is that there’s almost no way to know by looking at, landing at, or taking off from, the airport that it’s privately-owned.  In fact, although I don’t have the actual agreements, Williamson Flying Club probably had to agree to legion FAA requirements in order to obtain the federal funds for the runway work.  Requirements that keep the airport open to pilots like me and others if we want, or need, to land there.  Requirements that keep the facility dedicated to serving the national air transportation system.

Williamson Flying Club is certainly more than “a private social club for local pilots.”  It’s not, as CBS would have the soft-of-skull believe, a Great-Gatsby-esque country club where taxiing aircraft have to give way to polo ponies.  And I’m pretty sure that croquet is rarely played there. Williamson Flying Club is a nonprofit organization that runs a vital airport.

CBS then leers at you while saying that the $400,000 project took five days to complete and leers even more when it asks how many unemployed workers were employed by the project.  I’m not a paving contractor, but $400,000 doesn’t seem like a lot to surface most of a mile of 60-foot wide runway.  You have to buy aggregate and tar and stuff, too.  There are material costs.  And does CBS need to be reminded that people who are already employed (say, by runway paving contractors) need ongoing work to, uh, stay employed?  To keep them from becoming unemployed?  Or that having a viable runway for the next 10 years will support the growth of the surrounding communities, to say nothing of those who spend and earn their money at the airport flying, training, receiving maintenance and other services?

CBS goes on to complain about grants to airports in Indiana and Alaska.  I don’t know whether $800,000 is too much for an animal abatement program.  I suppose we’d need a light twin to take a Canadian Goose in the windshield to find out.  We seem pretty interested in abatement programs around New York these days, but only because it made national news.

With respect to Ouzinkie Airport  in Alaska, the words “cheap shot” come to mind.  Alaska is a remote place.  The airport is on Kodiak Island, 20 miles off the shore of what is already a remote place.  Ouzinkie, one of a relative few airports on Kodiak Island (yes, island - very important point here) is open to the public and hosts private and government activities, about 40% transient general aviation and 40% air taxi operations, according to the 2006 numbers (the most recent I could get my hands on).  I suppose $15 million to build roads wouldn’t have been a problem (it happens all the time elsewhere and benefits even smaller communities).  But I wouldn’t expect CBS to understand that airports are the roads of Alaska.  If you can’t get on board with putting money into airports in Alaska, you might as well give up that 49^th star on the flag and abandon Alaska altogether.  I’m not ready to do that.  I’m pretty sure that the Alaskans aren’t either.

Folks, Sharyl Attkisson, or whatever junior production assistant wrote the leering, innuendo-ridden story has probably long forgotten about it.  She and they are no doubt off on the next quest to become Nancy Grace.  Neither she nor they seem to care about the real underlying facts.  Pilots and others who understand the facts are left to mop up and hope that a few of the folks who depend on CBS to tell the whole story see this piece and get the rest of the story here.

I know that the public thinks that pilots like Sully Sullenberger spring from the womb with exquisite pilot skills that don’t have to be learned at small airports like Williamson Sodus Airport.  And that Alaska is all flat with four-lane divided highways that make flight unnecessary.

But we know better.  And CBS should know better.  I cry foul.  And you should, too.

Ah, this summer gets better and better!  First the formation photo flight with Billy Werth at the Indianapolis Air Show.  And now, full-up formation aerobatics with some of the masters of the craft, the AeroShell Team.

I attended the Battle Creek Field of Flight Airshow and Balloon Festival this weekend.  It’s one of my favorite shows and I was even a Thunderbirds media rider there last year.  And, with the great lineup this year, I was pretty excited to get there and see what parts of the envelope I might be able to explore.

The AeroShell Team is a four-ship precision aerobatic team that flies the North American T-6 Texan, the iconic WWII trainer that made pilots out of thousands of pedestrians.  I contacted Brian Regan, the lead pilot for the team, on Thursday and made arrangements to meet him when he arrived on Friday.  Once the Temporary Flight Restriction (“TFR”) for the Friday practice session ended in the afternoon, we launched in a single ship and headed out to the south to fly some acro.

It happened that Mark Henley, who flies the No. 2 ship (the right wing in this team) was arriving from the south and he joined up with us for some two-ship aerobatics.  We pulled a loop, a barrel roll, and some other maneuvers as a formation and it was great to be able to see right up close how precise the formation is and what goes into the airshow performance.

Over the course of the ride, I got a better sense for what it takes to do formation aerobatics.  The lead aircraft needs to fly precise altitude and airspeed and lay down a precise path in the sky that is predictable to the other aircraft in the formation.  The two aircraft on the wings are naturally flying longer or shorter paths in the sky in turning maneuvers and they therefore need to fly faster or slower and with greater or lesser degrees of control input.  The slot aircraft sometimes has the hardest time because it has to match up its energy state with the rest of the formation in sometimes rapidly-changing circumstances (such as at the top or bottom of a maneuver or during a rejoin).

I have a rough enough time getting my own airspeeds and energy vectors to come out right with hundreds of feet of tolerance within which to maneuver when I fly acro.  I can only imagine the precision that it must take to be able to lead a formation or to fly wing or slot, keeping station on the lead aircraft.  These guys are on a different planet in terms of skill level.  It was great being right up close and able to see how it looks from just a few feet away.

The other cool element was discovering the three-dimensionality of the show routine.  It’s easy when you’re stuck behind the crowd line to see the show as being pretty flat and occurring only in the vertical plane of the runway.  To a certain extent, that’s a function of the FAA regulations that govern airshows.  You have to have certain distances between the crowd line and the show line and performers can’t direct aerobatic energy toward the crowd (i.e. fly toward the crowd such that, if the pilot loses control, the aircraft is likely to continue into the crowd).

But the AeroShell Team agreed to fly my camera for the Saturday performance and I ended up with a couple of unexpectedly informative sequences.  In this one, you can see the smoke trails from the team’s squirrel-cage maneuver that involves loops or barrel rolls in succession at regular intervals.  You get a really three-dimensional sense of the aerobatic box here, especially the wind as it blows the smoke laterally across the show line.

The AeroShell Team is a jewel of the airshow circuit.  The aircraft make great round-engine noise and are gorgeous up there in the sky.  Make sure that you get out to see the team this year at an airshow near you!

If you ask SSgt Jason Bireley what he does for a living, he might say that he lies on his belly and passes gas.  SSgt Bireley doesn’t give me the impression of a guy who’d actually put it that way, but it’s true in a sense.  He’s a refueling boom operator on the KC-135R Stratotankers of the 72nd Air Refueling Squadron/434th Air Refueling Wing based at Grissom Air Reserve Base near Peru, Indiana.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to ride along on a refueling mission over the Carolinas with SSgt Bireley, fellow boom operator MSgt Scott Ward, Pilot LtCol Thom Pemberton, and copilot 2Lt Jacob Creel.  I rode along with about a half dozen local media personalities to get a look at what the 434th does on training flights like this.

“Lying on one’s belly and passing gas” is a rather radical simplification of what the boom operators on a KC-135R do.  In fact, it requires substantial flying skill. 

Flying skill?  You bet.  It’s hard enough to get the massive KC-135R and the C-17 Globemaster there in the picture into close trailing formation at 250 knots while dodging building anvil clouds in a 2,000-ft altitude block that starts at 26,000 feet.  The process is made easier and more reliable by the boom design, which includes a couple of wings (actually, there’s a lot of dihedral, or “V” shape, so the apparatus looks something like the V-tail on some Bonanzas and other aircraft).

The boom operator actually flies the boom left and right and he or she can extend or retract a lower portion of the boom to mate with a fuel receiving port on the receiving aircraft.  Lying on his belly with his chin resting on a padded support, SSgt Bireley flies the boom with his right hand using a control located directly below his right shoulder.  The control stick looks a lot like some of those I’ve seen in warbirds.

SSgt Bireley’s left hand operates two levers that drop, and then extend, the boom.  He also has controls that handle lighting, fuel flow, and other functions.  The controls in front of him are about the same in quantity and complexity as what you’d see on a Cessna 152.  Not a perfect comparison, mind you, but that’s my sense of it.

I understand that SSgt Bireley has some civilian flight time and that he’s thinking about continuing his pilot training with the possibility in mind of becoming a military pilot at some point.  Regardless, he’s off to a great start running this gas station in the sky.

This was a practice exercise and we only passed about 1,000 pounds of fuel.  It was an important flight in several respects in that one of the C-17 drivers was on his checkride for final certification to fly the aircraft.  But think about the same thing over the Atlantic fueling thirsty aircraft that must successfully refuel or be unable to make it across the pond.  The stakes really go up in that situation.

I’ll post soon about the front of the airplane, where LtCol Pemberton flew the aircraft ably and 2Lt Creel got a great training workout.

When you get into aviation, it creeps into your blood and every part of you is somehow influenced by it. If you’ve ever spelled your name for a restaurant reservation using the phonetic alphabet, you know what I mean.

That constant, lingering aroma of freshly-cut grass and 100LL avgas even runs to really important events. You might think that airshow pilot who also flies the mighty KC-135R Stratotanker for the US Air Force Reserve and Embraer 145 passenger jets would have plenty on his mind in the sky already. But Saturday, June 6, he had another important mission.

After completing his aerobatic routine in the Pitts S-2C, he made a pass down the show line at low altitude and announcer Rob Reider put his radio on the airshow’s public address system. As he shot down the line, he keyed the mic and made a very important request for clearance: “Haley Norwood, will you marry me?”

Haley, who is also the public relations director for Grayout Aerosports (the company that owns and operates the Pitts) was standing on the announcer’s stand at the time and made pretty short work of saying “yes” on the frequency.

After landing, shutting down, and handing the aircraft over to his ground crew, Billy ran to the announcer’s stand and, just to make it official, got down on one knee, repeated the proposal, and delivered the ring.

It just goes to show that there’s all kinds of magic to be found at your local airshow. And that the bonds that we form in aviation come in all kinds, too. Congratulations, Billy and Haley!

So I was out covering the Indianapolis Air Show this weekend.  Friday was media day and I showed up early to roam around and meet people and generally get a whiff of freshly-mown grass and recently combusted avgas and JP-8 jet fuel.

Billy Werth of Grayout Aerosports was there with his Pitts S-2C about to depart on an air-to-air photo shoot that the Indianapolis Star was doing of the aircraft.  The front seat of the Pitts was open and Billy’s PR person (now his fiancée – more on that later) offered the seat to me.  Not being stupid, I immediately said yes and strapped in.

We took off and maneuvered in formation.  The photo ship, a Cherokee Six with the door off, generally flew a pre-arranged heading and altitude and Billy kept the Pitts on-station to the left of, and below, the photo ship.

This was my first experience with formation flight.  We here within about 30 feet of the photo ship most of the time, except when we made passes below it or rolled around it for the camera.  Matt Kryger of the Star sat belted into the seat next to the open door and shot both stills and video of the Pitts.

Like so many of these opportunities, this one inspired a lot of respect for the airmanship of both pilots.  Especially Billy, who had to have excellent control of his airspeed, altitude, and attitude the entire time to not only avoid colliding with the photo ship but stay in good light and adopt exciting-looking attitudes.  I have a tough enough time just keeping the airplane tracking in a general direction when flying inverted.  Billy did it while stationkeeping on the wing of the photo ship and flying uncoordinated to point the nose in a good direction for taking the pictures.

Lastly, I got to see a very special thing at Indy.  At the conclusion of his act, Billy made a pass down the show line and Rob Reider patched Billy’s radio through the public address system.  Billy proposed to Haley, his significant other and PR person, in front of 20-odd thousand people.  She said yes, by the way.  Congratulations to Billy and Haley!

More good stuff from the Indy Air Show soon!  And more experiences from several other upcoming airshows!

It’s been something like 18 months since I completed what I consider to be my “core” training.  By that, I mean the private pilot certificate and the instrument rating.  The certificate and rating that make aviation practical and fun and give you the best initial set of capabilities.

Since then, I’ve decided to seek new opportunities and just have a bunch of fun.  Part of that journey has been to figure out just how high, wide, and deep aviation is and figure out how much there is to explore.  And, man, what a lot of ground there is to cover!

Seriously, you could add a new rating or go after another experience every three or four months and not run out of them for decades!

If you ever doubt whether it’s worthwhile to get through the sometimes difficult parts of primary or instrument training (which, by the way, are wonderful in their own ways), the doors that those skills open will positively amaze you.

A few weeks ago, I went down to Sun ‘N Fun in Lakeland, Florida.  It’s the second-biggest fly-in of the year and it has a vibe all its own.  I usually stick to the main show site, but a friend of mine talked me into stopping at the seaplane splash-in at the Fantasy of Flight Museum.  What the heck, it was on the way to Lakeland from Orlando, where I flew in commercially.

I’m glad we stopped.  I had considered getting a seaplane rating before, but seeing the seaplane operations up close and checking out a lot of cool airplanes sealed the deal.

So, a few weeks after that, I headed back up to Traverse City, Michigan to see Tom Brady at Traverse Air.  I trained with Tom for my multi rating in 2008 and Tom also does seaplane ratings.

I spent five hours or so with Tom in a 1947 Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser on floats before the one-hour checkride and then found myself the world’s newest seaplane pilot.

If you show up having read the materials and reviewed the FAA practical test standards (“PTS”) and with reasonable stick and rudder skills, you can knock out a seaplane rating in a day.  Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate.  You want at least one day with enough wind (at least 5-8 knots) so you don’t have to do glassy-water operations the whole time (see below).  But it’s definitely doable within two days in most cases.

Seaplane operations are, at the same time, much different and very much the same as land plane operations.  The differences obviously have much to do with the fact that you’re operating on water.  The airplane doesn’t stay put when you shut off the engine.  In fact, sometimes, you can’t really turn it in certain directions (after all, you essentially have a boat with a very high center of gravity and a tall vertical surface that acts like a great big weathervane) and you must then actually sail the airplane downwind backward.

It’s very cantankerous in the stall and in steep turns because of all of that junk hanging off the bottom of the aircraft.  And, when you do an engine-out, it comes out of the sky right stinkin’ now!  Not a precipitous descent, mind you, but more than 1,000 feet per minute, which means you want to keep it over the water when you're at low altitude.

And, most interesting to the uninitiated, you have to use specialized procedures to operate from and to glassy water.  Yeah, that’s right.  You’d think that perfectly calm water would be perfect, but it’s not.  On takeoff, it’s hard to break the suction of the water on the floats so you have to pull the right one out of the water first, bring it back down to just off the surface, and then suck the left float off.  A little precarious, especially when you consider that you’re also pitching forward and back for that sweet spot (the “step”) on the floats where the airplane has the least friction and will best accelerate.

The glass-water landing is even more counterintuitive.  You can’t see the surface well enough to judge your height above the water.  Many seaplane pilots have come to grief by flaring early, stalling, and digging a float into the water when the stall breaks and the nose pitches down.  Or flaring too late and essentially doing the same thing. 

So, to avoid that, you bring it in with a little more power and a slightly higher airspeed that, together, give you a 100-foot-per-minute descent rate and you just hold that pitch attitude and airspeed until – surprise! – you touch down.  It’s not as hard or scary as it sounds, but you’ll have a much better time of it if you show up for seaplane training having the ability to fly pitch, power, and airspeed pretty precisely.

And that’s the coolest part of the training, by the way.  There’s just nothing like nailing your numbers, bringing it in with the gauges looking like they’re painted on, and greasing the airplane in.

Which brings be to the similarities.  Newton and Bernoulli don’t care that the airplane is on floats.  It’s still an airplane and all of the control surfaces (with the exception of the water rudders) are the same.  With minor differences in airspeeds, roll rates (again, all that stuff hanging off the bottom), and other characteristics, the airplane flies just about like any other general aviation airplane.  You might find it a little easier if you’ve flown a tailwheel airplane before with a stick instead of a yoke, bit it’s still very intuitive even if you haven’t.

If you go for your seaplane rating (and you should! It’s crazy fun!), take along some Jack London or Robert Service to read at the breaks.  It’s not hard to imagine yourself putting it down on some remote Alaskan lake with snowcaps on the mountains in the background.

The opportunities and challenges in aviation are more than enough to last a lifetime and the seaplane rating is just one of them.  I can’t wait for the next great adventure!