Category: Aviation

Lately there’s been an email circulating that purports to be from someone on the Wildfire Air Racing team who had a long talk with race pilot Matt Jackson about Jimmy Leeward’s crash last month at the Reno Air Races. The email says that Jackson was racing at the time in his own Unlimited-category plane and witnessed firsthand the trouble that Jimmy Leeward was having as he rounded the course. According to the email,

There is a video of the entire last lap of the Ghost before the crash which Matt showed me. As Leeward was coming around pylon #8 at about 480 mph after passing Rare Bear, he hit turbulence which pitched his left wing down, Leeward corrected with hard right rudder and aileron. Just as the aircraft was straightening out, he hit a second mountain of turbulence which caused the tail to ‘dig in’ resulting in a 10+ G climb rendering Leeward unconscious instantly and resulted in the tail wheel falling out. (broken tail wheel support structure was found on the course). As the Ghost shot upward the LH aileron trim tab broke loose. This can be heard on the tape, so the trim tab did not cause the accident.

This is conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion that I (and many others) reached, based on the information available—namely, that the failure of the trim tab caused the steep climb, not vice versa. As the email was forwarded to me by a trusted and experienced member of the aircraft community, I was surprised and concerned by its assertions. Continue reading What Didn’t Cause the Reno Air Race Crash

Yesterday afternoon an airplane crashed horrifically at the National Air Races in Reno, Nevada, impacting the viewing stands and killing at least three people. Many more were injured. The aircraft involved was a heavily modified P-51 Mustang, arguably the most famous and best-loved fighter plane of WWII, at least on the American side. Built around a huge and supremely powerful Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang was designed to accompany Allied bombers on the long journey from England to Germany and back, and fight off the best that the Luftwaffe could throw at them. Later, they became popular among air racers competing in the heavyweight “Unlimited” class of races at Reno. Wealthy owners spend millions to purchase the planes and heavily modify them, changing wings, lengthening the fuselage, swapping in even more powerful engines. According to racers I’ve talked to, there are two categories of Mustang pilots at Reno: those who fly to win, putting extreme wear and tear on the airplane and its engine, and those who are content just to take part, flying the plane gently enough to save themselves the expense of frequent engine overhauls.

As something of an airplane nut myself, I considered the opportunity to fly in a Mustang for a Popular Mechanics story to be one of the high points of my lifetime. In the interests of those who might wonder what it’s like to fly one of these machines, or who want to know why people fall in love with a potentially dangerous sport, I’m reprinting it below.

FLYING A LEGEND

You’re never going to forget your first 60 seconds airborne in a P-51 Mustang.

I’m strapped into the back seat of Crazy Horse II, a vintage World War II fighter plane, as pilot Lee Lauderbeck lines it up on the end of the runway at Kissimmee, Florida. I’ve got a parachute cinched around my torso and a five-point harness securing me to the airframe. Just in case worse comes to worst, I’ve been briefed in how to pop the top of the canopy and bail out.

Lauderbeck opens the throttle on the huge 1700-horsepower, Rolls Royce-built Merlin engines. The 12 cylinders rise to a throaty roar and we start to roll. As we gain speed, the tail lifts, and then we float off the runway. We hold steady, roaring along no more than 25 feet above the ground, as the airspeed indicator passes 150 mph. Then Lauderbeck pulls the stick sharply back and the nose swings up into the blue yonder. We climb like a rocket to 1000 feet.

Leveling off, we barrel along beneath the base of the clouds at 200 mph, the sun-dappled Florida flatlands sweeping past below us. “Okay,” Lauderbeck says, “Your controls.” He lifts both hands above his shoulders, open-palmed.

I tighten my hand around the control stick and nudge it to the right, just enough to feel the wing dip, then bring the plane back to level. I’ve been a pilot for seven years, but I’ve never felt a tingle on my spine like this. I’m actually flying a P-51. Continue reading What’s It Like to Fly a Mustang?

Something very cool happened last month. Early in the morning of August 2, a student at the University of Toronto took the control’s of the world’s first successful ornithopter — an aircraft that propels itself by flapping its wings like a bird — and flew for 19 seconds. As a lover of strange aircraft and impossible engineering challenges, I applaud the daring and stick-to-itevness of the University of Toronto team, which spent four years creating an incredibly beautiful machine. Here’s the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E77j1imdhQ&feature=player_embedded#!]

As is obvious from even a cursory viewing, flapping one’s wings is a very difficult way to generate lift. (That birds are so good at it should only renew our respect for the astonishing engineering feats of natural selection.) So the team deserves heartfelt kudos for managing to keep the craft in the air for even a short span of time. But did they really achieve, as a Canadian newspaper reported, “sustained and continuous flight”? Continue reading World's First Ornithopter Just Flew. Or Did It?

I’m in Anchorage airport right now, waiting for my plane to take me home after a week spent reporting a bush flying story for Popular Mechanics. What, you ask, is bush flying? Well, I think this video explains better than any mere words:

 

I made this yesterday, shooting over the shoulder of veteran bush pilot Terry Holiday as he sets down his Super Cub on a tiny patch of gravel near the Knik Glacier north of Anchorage. As we were coming in, I was thinking: “Where exactly are you planning to put this thing down, Terry?” Yet oddly the experience didn’t feel that scary; Terry has such a natural feel for the airplane that I sensed that it would do exactly what he wanted. Having said that, the take off was even more extraordinary, as we bounced into the air and scrabbled for altitude as Terry guided the plane between a large hillock and the face of a cliff. Alaska — it’s always an adventure.

For those following the John Graybill story, two well-reported stories about John and his final flight are now available online. In the Anchorage Daily News, Kyle Hopkins has fuller details of what happened in the runup to his fatal crash, including quotes from his daughter. And over at Alaska Dispatch, Craig Medred has an account of the controversy that swirled around the John Graybill legend.

Popular Mechanics has just put up a story I wrote as a follow-up to the John Graybill and Ted Stevens crashes, about how the technology exists to make bush flying much safer, but that for cultural reasons many pilots will not use it. I write:

The major killer in bush flying is what aviation pros call “VFR into IMC,” short for “visual flight rules into instrument meteorological conditions”—in other words, a pilot who is navigating by looking out the window suddenly finds himself in clouds. A pilot who isn’t trained to fly in a white-out can quickly become disoriented or crash into an unseen mountain or other obstacle (this nasty outcome has its own acronym, CFIT, for “controlled flight into terrain.”)

Ironically, Ted Stevens was a leading advocate for a new technology that might well have saved his life. Called ADS-B, for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, it relies on GPS receivers in each aircraft that broadcast their location to ground controllers and to other aircraft. When a precursor of the nationwide system, called Capstone, was rolled out in Alaska back in 1999, it was in great part due to the influence of Stevens, who was himself a pilot. The FAA spent hundreds of millions to build a network of ground stations and to buy ADS-B gear for both private and publicly owned airplanes. Inside the cockpit, the equipment displays uplinked vital information. “It gives them a cockpit display showing where they are in relation to bad weather and terrain,” says FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto. “Having that situational awareness cut the fatal accident rate for that type of aircraft almost in half.”

Yet Stevens’s plane was not equipped with ADS-B gear. And while it did have an alternate form of terrain-avoidance system, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says that it doesn’t know whether it was turned on or working. According to a recent Wall Street Journal profile, pilots that knew Theron Smith, Stevens’s pilot, said that he was an Alaskan pilot of the old school, liable to take risks that pilots in more civilized climes would look askance at, such as repeatedly flying the same approach to a socked-in airport over and over, below minimum prescribed altitudes, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the runway. One has to wonder how much attention old-school pilots would pay to a machine warning that he was flying too low.

Smith’s do-or-die attitude remains incredibly common in Alaska, where vast distances, rugged terrain, and a lack of detailed weather information mean that pilots still need to rely on their skills and savvy above all else. In a 1995 report on the hazards of flying in Alaska (pdf), the NTSB identified what it termed “bush syndrome,” or the willingness of pilots to take risks that would generally be considered unacceptable anywhere else. The report’s authors noted that 85 percent of the pilots they talked to admitted to flying VFR into IMC, and 85 percent said that they had done so intentionally, due to operational pressure.

You can read the whole thing here.

Since I put up my last post I’ve received several emails asking for the text of my 2001 article about John Graybill in National Geographic Adventure, since the link to that magazine’s website does not include the full text, I’m posting it here Continue reading John Graybill's National Geographic Adventure Profile

By the darkest of dark coincidences, I have just learned that the very evening I happened to put up a post about John Graybill he died, along with his wife Dolly, in a crash in bad weather near McGrath, Alaska. As I write this I have just found out the news and am in a state of shock. John was a controversial figure in his day but friend and foe alike were in awe of his flying abilities. When I met him in 2000 his outlaw days were behind him, and even his old sparring partners at Fish and Game seemed to think of him as a favorite uncle. I found him to be a natural-born storyteller and a kind, gentle soul. He and Dolly welcomed me into their lives with the warmth of family.

And yes, John was an amazing pilot. Spending a week with him, zipping over the Alaskan landscape at 30 feet, inspired me to get my own pilot’s license, and that in turn has changed my life in ways I can’t begin to tally.

Above is a map that passengers arriving at New York’s LaGuardia airport encounter upon first stepping out of the baggage claim area in the central terminal area. (I took it early this morning after arriving on a delayed flight from Toronto that had left me feeling dazed and unsure whether I might be mildly hallucinating.) Savvy airport users will recognize that it is in fact completely backwards — the correct map, from the Port Authority’s website, looks like this:

Presumably the Port Authority’s intention is to immediately disorient visitors, so that they can be more easily preyed upon by cunning locals. Or perhaps the maps were simply the work of the same people who designed the star map on the ceiling of Grand Central Station, which is also famously ass-backwards. Either way, it’s good to see that New York traditions are going strong.

The news out of Alaska over the last few days, about the air crash near Dillingham that killed former senator Ted Stevens, is sad but not entirely surprising. Flying bush planes in the north country is by far the most dangerous kind of aviation in the United States. The details of the crash have yet to emerge, but one thing is clear: the flight ended amid weather conditions that were marginal at best, with low clouds and rain obscuring rough terrain. These are all elements in a type of dangerous flying that has killed many, many Alaskan pilots over the years: scud running.

Scud running, simply put, is flying by visual flight rules through weather conditions that could close in around you at any time. A few years ago, I traveled to Alaska to spend a week with a legendary bush pilot named John Graybill. Every other bush pilot I spoke to was in awe of John’s stick-and-rudder skill. At the time, in 2000, he was 70 years old, and had survived no fewer than five potentially fatal crashes. He was quite blunt in assessing the reason for his repeated survival: he was, he said, simply very lucky.

Scud running is particularly dangerous in Alaska because it is so common. In the Lower 48, most pilots fly to destinations that have sophisticated radar navigation systems. In Alaska, a good percentage of flights are bound for airstrips that are little more than patches of dirt, or a strip of sand or quiet patch of river. The only way to get is by eyeballing it. So if you fly into a cloud, and find yourself unable to see the ground, you’re really screwed. Once you’re disoriented, you could easily fly into a mountain, or a tree, or what have you.

The problem is that flying in the Alaskan bush inevitably involves some kind of scud running. For one thing, you never know when the weather might change on you halfway through the flight. For another, bush pilots inevitably feel pressure from clients or their bosses to take their load where it needs to go. Ceiling low? Pass obscured by clouds? You’ll be able to pick your way through. With enough experience, pilots may begin to feel they have an intuitive understanding of when such gambits will work and when they won’t. In reality, they’re counting on luck, as Graybill said. Every flight into marginal weather conditions is a game of Russian Roulette.

Graybill told me that when he first arrived in Alaska in the 1950s, he took advice from an old-timer, Glenn Gregory, who drummed into him the first rule of bush flying: “He told me, ‘Don’t lose ground contact flying in Alaska. Don’t do it.’ I had grounds to remember those words later on.”

Later Graybill told me the full story, which provided a vivid understanding of how a pilot can be lured into scud running, and why it can be so dangerous: Continue reading At Play in Ted Stevens Crash, A Familiar Culprit