“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free. Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward among the farthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before—and thus was the Empire forged.”
Douglas Adams, from “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”
Let’s face it. Most of us have been around aviation for a while. People high up in both Piper and Cessna Aircraft have told me that the average minimum age of the people who buy their products is 50.
Apparently, younger pilots who normally would be interested in buying a new airplane are busy raising families, worrying about their jobs, driving the kids to soccer practice and trying to keep the van gassed up and insured.
Paying around two hundred grand—minimum—for a new airplane simply isn’t on a young pilot’s radar. Besides, even with the new LSAs, aviation is a convoluted, rule-riddled, expensive proposition.
Given those facts, why is General Aviation doing so well right now and how do we manage to get it to continue? I think it is a matter of world war, the economy, personal priorities, and as always, money.
Baby Boom Pilots
Many thousands of pilots were trained during World War II and when they returned, many of them wanted to continue flying. The postwar world had few airline job openings for veterans, and General Aviation aircraft (unless they had a military application) hadn’t been built since before the conflict. This lead to a postwar aviation boom which lasted into the mid-1960s.
As these World War II pilots got old, retired from flying and died, their progeny took up the reins and flew on. These kids were propelled by memories of their dads’ adventures and the flights he took them on. Many in this younger generation were also ex-military, and were trained by the government through VA flight schools after they returned from “our” war: Vietnam.
Now we are the old guys—and the lucky few of us who can cough up half a million bucks are flying the new GPS-driven aircraft that Piper and Cessna are currently offering.
As we continue to head toward that big tie-down spot in the sky, I think that General Aviation is due for a major shift in focus. I think the shift should be away from providing aircraft with more and more technology and automation back to basic aircraft that are affordable, low-tech and plentiful.
I am referring, of course, to making flying exciting and fun again for young people.
We have to make flying young again
Light sport flying has been a good first step in that direction, but I think that the LSA manufacturers are missing the mark by a wide margin. They are selling their product to the wrong people.
They are still trying to sell to us, the old guys.
Piper Cub look-alikes are being sold. These are soloed from the front seat and have wide doors so we geezers can squeeze our ever-widening bums through the opening into the cockpit.
Once we finally cram our butts into the planes, we are happily boggled with magic GPS boxes, electric starters and ballistic parachutes that will land us softer than a Medicare-provided wheelchair if we screw the pooch.
Some light sport aircraft companies even dress up their salespeople in 1930s and 1940s garb to attract the “geezer pilot” crowd. They are actually dressing airplane sales guys up like our dear old dead daddies—to sell us a copy of a Cub!
This nostalgic marketing ploy isn’t just the domain of the faux Piper crowd. Cessna displayed their first production SkyCatcher at Oshkosh this year—directly in front of an old, but beautifully rebuilt, Cessna 150. Again, we old guys could reminisce about those great days flying the “Commuter”—when we had hair, bell-bottom jeans and could fill up Dad’s car for only 39 cents a gallon.
The trouble I found at the Cessna display was that there were far more old guys like me gathered around the Cessna 150 wondering where we could buy one of those. After all, a new SkyCatcher goes for over a hundred grand, when you can get a good used Cessna 150 for twenty-five.
The kids need a break
The Experimental Aircraft Association’s Young Eagles program is a great way to introduce kids to flying, but won’t get the job done when these eager youngsters run up against the economic realities of aviation life.
While EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh is a great indication of the public’s interest in General Aviation, it is a poor indicator of how many of those people will be willing in the future to plunk down the kind of money necessary to make them aircraft owners. After all, every person spending money to attend Oshkosh on a given summer day is one less person at the local airport spending the same money to fly.
Big fly-ins are great, such as they are, but they are more an industry show than a true reflection of the future generation of pilots that have to be groomed, trained and sold on the idea and magic of flying.
My opinion on the whole thing is this: it isn’t a question of how big Cessna and Piper are going to be in the next generation, it is a question of whether or not there will be a Piper or Cessna extant in the world.
The same goes for the dozens of light sport manufacturers who have sexy products but can’t seem to produce them in sufficient quantity (or in some cases, at all) for the upcoming generation to sink their teeth into. Trust me, when you are in your 20s, plunking down ten grand and then waiting two years for your airplane is not an option.
I may need reading glasses but I still use big words
Being a geezer myself has led to a certain amount of aviation presbyopia, but I think I have a few comments and ideas that might help.
First, we have to ask if General Aviation as we know it now is worth saving. (I think it is, but like I said, I am old.) Newer, younger pilots and consumers will have to decide if a thousand-dollar hamburger is worth pursuing. If people have learned to meet and travel via web conferencing and god knows what else is coming along, they may not see the necessity of owning a Lear or a Caravan to go to business meetings.
Fuel prices and the free market have already cut back on people traveling and flying. At our local field, the people who routinely took their Senecas and Barons out for a Sunday flight are now leaving them in the hangar. There is a thin layer of the very rich who have no problem burning six-dollar-a-gallon Jet-A in their airplanes, but they won’t be enough to keep Piper and Cessna in business.
I think the answer lies in the light sport part of the industry. It is the answer all right, but it is being grievously mishandled.
I have searched diligently in my middle-American location and after looking at over a dozen airports, I only found one place where they train in and rent light sport aircraft. That particular school seemed shocked that I would even ask. They said that they might be able to rent me a light sport for $110 an hour, but scheduling would be a problem.
Other than that sad little clueless flight school, there is nowhere in my area that you can rent or take lessons in an airplane newer than the 1977 model year, or for less than $180 for an hour of dual.
Current flight schools and FBOs find that capitalizing new airplanes is almost impossible. That is why most of them still offer very old and musty Cherokees, 172s and 150s to train in and rent. They are literally offering the younger pilots the exact same airplanes we trained in. Not just the same types—I mean the exact airplanes! A recent search I made of the FAA database led to the discovery that the Cessna 150 I soloed in back in 1971 is still being operated by a flight school. Imagine that.
You can’t move into the future by re-selling the past
The light sport manufacturers must find a way to get their airplanes to the younger public. They need to quit dressing like they are from the Great Depression and appeal to the younger people. This can be done by having inexpensive and most importantly, available light sports offered for a reasonable price.
The way to make the price reasonable is to sell them as fractionals, partnerships, or to flying clubs, and to create flight schools that look less like the run-down, worn out old flight schools we trained in, and more like a Starbucks outlet—with cool little affordable airplanes.
Flying clubs should be more than a dusty T-hangar office or a spare room in the back of an FBO. They should provide child care, have great food, be clean and make flying something an up-and-coming young professional would be eager to take his or her family to for a flight and a fun day out.
The old days were great; I wouldn’t have missed a one of them. But it is time to prepare our handoff of flying to the younger generation. Let’s hand them something better than a million-dollar-a-copy reprint of 1950s technology and thinking.
It was just about the perfect day off for this airline captain. Warm breezes from a portable heater wafted over my body which was lying in a comfortable position in my faux leather recliner. A hot cup of perfectly brewed coffee by my side, I was enjoying a Tivo’ed ® recording of a new Simpson’s episode that I missed last week due to my penchant for earning a living via flying subsonic people movers.
The Spouse was outside doing chores I should have done but haven’t yet. Sure, the gutters needed cleaning – a few months ago – but now that it is almost winter, isn’t it too late for that? More reasonable heads (mine) concluded that to wait for next autumn was the best course of action for that job; A sort of “household maintenance carryover,” if you will.
I generally like our neighbor’s kid, Abby. When she interrupts my mandatory crew rest like she was about to do, she can be a raspberry seed under my wisdom tooth. She saw the TV was on. She saw I was pretending to be asleep in my chair, yet she entered and spoke.
“I was just going through a box of stuff your wife gave me,” she began. “You know, stuff you’re willing to donate to my schools ‘Crap for Culture’ junk sale? Anyway, among and amidst your old pet rocks, about a dozen Ray Ban ® sunglass belt cases, a rubber chicken, a blow-up round donut seat cushion, and at least twelve old cracked oxygen masks with strings super-glued to them, I found this.”
She was waving a computer print out a speech and “Fly Paper” I presented to the national convention of SOHOP (Society of Highly Opinionated Pilots) last year.
Many organizations prepare and present White Papers; SOHOP presents Fly Papers for obvious reasons. My assignment last year was to think of ways to change and improve airliners for the future as well as how to combat terror.
A lot of people don’t know much about SOHOP and we like it that way. The organization got its start in an un-named base city where we used to commiserate over free coffee refills at our local McDonald’s outlet. Seven or eight of us would meet monthly at that fast food joint to discuss issues of the day. You know – important stuff – like which flight surgeon was willing to overlook a few faults, which line check airman was hard to deal with, how to snag a double paying assignment, things like that.
Over the years, we upgraded. We went from McDonalds ® to Denny’s ® and on up to meeting at Applebee’s ® on two-for-one happy hour Tuesdays.
A lot of the ideas in my speech were not adopted by the group or the industry. I attribute this not to the fact that they may have been stupid but that I delivered them right after a two beer lunch buffet.
Abby, as punishment for waking me up and bugging me with questions about my hemorrhoid seat cushion and my old broken 727 oxygen masks, I sentence you to listening to my speech.
“Can’t be worse than Civics class,” she said as she sat on the couch and much like Civics class and my SOHOP audience, feigned sleep.
Applying New Ideas to Old Problems
A Flypaper, presented to the SOHOP at the IHOP January 2006
Ladies and Gentlemen: I think we all can agree that the biggest problem facing the airline as well as the piloting world is the fact that we are addicted to imported oil to fuel our planes and careers.
Without the money from selling us oil the middle-east would dry up as a source of trouble for our companies and our countries. Face it; unless we are in the market for kitty litter, there is little else they have that we need. Without money they may still hate us but they would lack the extra cash to export terrorists to our shores.
The airline industry’s goal, then, should be to eliminate most of the need for oil.
Over the past decade or two, aircraft manufacturers have come up with more efficient jets but they haven’t addressed the root problem. They haven’t come up with an alternate fuel or changed the fundamental way that the aircraft function and perform.
I have a few suggestions to change the airliner and the airline to achieve the goal of totally ignoring those pesky third-worlders who have been acting like a drunken Jed Clampet at a cotillion ever since they came into our money.
The Aircraft
The airliners of tomorrow have to be totally re-thought and re-designed. They will still have jet engines, but I suggest we only use them for approach and landing. Imagine if there was a way to do that – Instead of carrying twenty nine thousand pounds of fuel to fly an MD-88 sized jet from Chicago to New York you’d only need to have about six thousand pounds on board for a little holding, a normal approach and a landing.
How can we do this? The same way that NASA currently handles the problem. Solid rocket boosters. I only have a liberal arts degree, but I am assuming that solid rocket boosters are made out of some sort of chemicals. We have chemicals up the wazoo here in this country and wouldn’t need OPEC oil if we used boosters instead of dead dinosaurs.
How would a normal airline flight profile look? First, the aircraft would all be towed to the active runway via a running chain or cable in the middle of the taxiway. This system has been used for cable cars in SFO for years.
The airliner in question would eventually reach number one in the line for takeoff and the cable would take it all the way to the takeoff point of the runway then automatically unhook. Once cleared for takeoff, the pilots would fire the solid rocket boosters and the airliner would take off, assume the proper trajectory for its journey, and book.
The cruising altitude or “apogee” of the flight would be determined by the leg length. For example, a New York to Los Angeles flight would go much higher than a Palm Beach to Orlando one. The airliner would have to be re-designed to be able to hold pressurization at very high altitudes using fuel cells. Somewhere near top of climb the solid rocket boosters would cut out and the airliner would become a glider.
Our gliding airliner would be coming down from flight levels like 750 or 850 and would not be burning any fuel at all until it descended to around FL 240 or so. Then the pilots would start the engines, leaving them at idle. If the profile is followed they won’t ever use them.
Barring any unforeseen holds, the flight could be vectored to an approach and landing without the use of much extra thrust at all. The space shuttle does this all of the time and it is using 1960s technology. Once on the ground, the airliner would hook up to another cable which would pull it toward the gate area.
No Luggage
The next fundamental change we need to make is to eliminate and outlaw all carryon and checked baggage. A large percentage of the weight carried by our airliners is made up of dirty underwear and tasteless gifts that travelers buy their families. Almost anywhere you go on this planet you can buy underwear and tasteless gifts.
We as a society would have to change to a “James Bond” model for our baggage. You never see James Bond carry anything around but maybe an attaché case with a rifle in it. Do you know why? Because his luggage, tuxedos, scuba diving equipment, and any lubricants, erectile dysfunction medication, and hair dye is already at his destination.
Our new system would have a way for you to rent luggage at your destination. You currently have no problem with the concept of renting a car when you arrive somewhere. This would be no different.
Your clothing sizes, toiletry preferences and the like would be recorded in a central computer. For a small fee, a suitcase containing clothes your size, a kit with shaving and other needed items and any other goodies you ordered online would be waiting at baggage claim at your destination airport. When you prepare to go home just drop the bag off at check-in and go your merry way.
This program will not only reduce the weight of our airliners quite a bit but will eliminate the need for baggage handlers, baggage tugs, lost luggage, and TSA baggage searches. It has the added bonus that you no longer have to face doing laundry when you get home.
Because carryon will be totally eliminated, (whatever pills you might use can be carried in your pockets and there will be a computer in every seat) the new airliners can do away with overhead storage bins. Instead of dinging your head every time you try to get out of your seat, you’ll have lofty aircraft cabin ceilings to enjoy.
Since we will be concerned mostly with reducing the weight of our aircraft, I suggest we charge people by the pound for their fares. This is an equitable and very doable solution. Passengers would be weighed by little scales located under the kiosks where they check-in and their fares would reflect their current heft, or in solid rocket terms, throw weight.
They should be reminded that if they take a poop after check in and before boarding the flight they should get a receipt (that will be automatically provided in all restrooms) to show the agent before boarding so they can get the appropriate credit.
Security
I think you can already see the security improvements my new system will bring. In my new way of doing things passengers can get pre-screened once a year at their local airport. Then they will injected with a small computer chip. Going through security for them will entail just walking down the hall to their gate. Scanners will sense their implant and let them pass without slowing down.
Eventually, we will do away with passenger screening altogether. With terrorists stuck in their sandy countries for lack of money they should be so busy trying to find food that they won’t be a bother to us.
In Closing
There are still some obvious problems to work out if my ideas are to be used. For example, what will we do with all the TSA people we no longer need? How quickly can the solid rocket boosters be changed out at the gate? How many gees can the passengers realistically take during the solid booster burn?
I’m sure that all of these little bothers can be worked out. It is obvious that the airline industry has been doing it wrong for some time. A new way of doing things has to be implemented.
Thank you for your time. Be sure to tip your waiters and waitresses.
Every time I fly from New York to Florida, I witness a miracle. Thirty of the 150 people getting on my jet at LaGuardia Airport do so via wheelchairs. Now, some callous people might say these folks just want to board first. I, however, am certain they really can’t walk -- at least not until they’re miraculously cured somewhere in the skies over America. By the time we touch down in Fort Lauderdale, they can walk--praise the Lord! All of them leap up, crowd the cabin door and want to be the first off the airliner--probably so they can tell their relatives about the miracle.
You see all sorts of strange things when you fly an airliner for a living. For instance, we’ve grown accustomed to the disappearance of silverware and plates, but every so often our fire extinguishers, crash axes, life vests, toilet seats and even portable oxygen tanks disappear as well. Our passengers profess to be too honest to steal our vital safety and hygiene materials, so there must be a miniature Bermuda Triangle that sucks these items into another universe.
Evidently the black hole works in reverse, too, spitting into my airliner visitors from many strange universes--such as a creature of the planet Flush a few years back. Just as the DC-9 was leaving the gate we couldn’t help but notice three inches of blue toilet water seeping onto airplane’s floor and sloshing against the radio rack. The passenger, whom I later nicknamed the “Lady of the Lake,” had apparently taken off one of those June Allison adult urine catchers, stuck in a first-class toilet and flushed.
Unfortunately, if you put an adult diaper and an aircraft toilet, it jams the valve so the toilet doesn’t know when it’s finished flushing. It just keeps pumping out blue water until the tank run dry. This female alien had also spent time on the planet Clueless: After we gently reminded her to never pull that trick again, she repeated the procedure 35,000 ft.--twice. Surf’s up!
Everybody talks about passengers having sex on airline flights.
Passengers who board the “nookie train” when they fly are usually quiet and do it in the bathrooms. I have no idea how, considering the confinement of the lavs. For those of you flying solo, here is another clue: vibrators counts portable electronic devices and must be turned off before takeoff and landing.
It’s the more obnoxious passenger activities to catch a flight crew’s attention--the fistfights, running through the aisles naked, peeing on the beverage cart, things like that. Also, singers bother me. One guy was holding up a can of tomato juice and crooning to it. He loved that tomato juice, so I told him to take it to the lav.
Passengers who are actively weirding everybody out still stake their little claims to bizarreness. Some people wear their headphones with the volume turned up so high that the window shake and I’ve seen passengers change into their jammies for those long all night flights. Others carry around entire shoulders of country ham to “eat later”.
Soon passengers will be setting their ears on fire. A friend sent me a copy of an advertisement sure to catch on with our intergalactic visitors. “Ear coning,” it maintains, “is a safe and simple remedy for relieving pressure in the ears.”
Just follow these instructions:
Place two long tapered cones in your ears.
Light them.
Watch the fun!
I know that some dark and stormy night I’ll peer back from the cockpit and catch sight of 300 smoldering ears. I don’t know whether earwax is flammable, but I sure as Hell know from personal experience that ear hair is (don’t ask). I don’t want to see entire jumbo jets brought down by flaming auditory canals, so please don’t smoke ‘em-- even if you got ‘em.
A recent news item made me feel really good about the progress the TSA people have made in keeping our aircraft secure. They have recently discovered a brand new way of securing our airways from terrorist attacks.
They simply damage the airplanes!
An important TSA discovery was made recently when agents from this air security brain trust decided to inspect over a dozen of a particular airline’s aircraft by climbing on various probes. They used them as hand-holds too. In this fashion, angle of attack vanes, total air temperature probes and even pitot tubes were bent, destroyed and basically taken out of the flying business.
By official TSA estimates, over two dozen terrorist attacks were thwarted using this method of keeping airliners safely on the ramp. President and former Air National Guard pilot, George W Bush, issued a statement praising the TSA, saying: “they were good decisioners” and “what’s a TAT probe anyway?”
Personally, as an airline pilot, I never really knew that TSA people were allowed on the ramp – I assumed their duties kept them confined to terminal buildings where they could happily carry out their body cavity searching and laptop computer confiscating activities. Perhaps they accidentally fell out of one of the many airline terminal emergency exits and while lying like a wet carp on the tarmac decided to do a few aircraft inspections.
It may be days or weeks before the damaged airplanes can once again be threatened by airborne terrorists.
Sleep well America. return to kevincreates
During the past year I have attended three toy extravaganzas for pilots; Sun & Fun, Oshkosh, and the NBAA convention in Atlanta. At each location I found a slightly different version of the same thing. In all three I discovered that I was walking through a toy catalog of goodies and dreams.
How many of us don’t want to navigate our airplanes from outer space? When was the last time we settled for looking out the windows and following highway signs to our destination? When I owned and flew an Aeronca Champ back when I was a lot younger the only navigation instrument I had on board was a whisky compass. My navigational databank was a road atlas that I got for free at a gas station.
No need even for a sectional chart. Since I hardly ever got above a thousand feet in altitude, the road map worked much better than any expensive sectional ever could. Plus, my operating area for the Champ was limited to grass strips and non-towered, small airports.
Now, even the smallest of LSAs offered for sale have at least one GPS unit and some sort of moving map. I am sure that for pilots who don’t have such a thing, a moving map is right up there on their Christmas wish list.
Bigger toys that you can find at fly-ins like Sun & Fun and Oshkosh are those impossibly beautiful aerobatic planes. They have enough horsepower to do a vertical climb all afternoon and can pull enough gees to make even the tightest face-lifted movie star’s jowls sag. You can see these toys in action on the show line where various performers do extremely dangerous looking maneuvers while trailing smoke.
They lose their allure for this heavy jet pilot early in the week at both fly-ins. First, I’ve pulled enough high gees in my life to know that I’m not interested in doing that sort of thing anymore. A simple one gee aileron roll or gentle three-turn spin is just fine with me, thank you. No more internal organ crushing show-off maneuvers for this cowboy.
I wonder how many pilots have spent the extra money on a three television screen avionics system for their airplane that on its best day could only do 100 knots only to realize that they really didn’t need all that technology to go fifty miles for a hamburger on a sunny Saturday.
I have nothing against television screened aircraft. My airline career was fraught with the things. In the latter years of my airline life I couldn’t go from Shreveport to Little Rock without first programming the magenta line and every performance variable into the little gray boxes in the MD-88s I flew.
When I flew the DC-9 with its total lack of televisions and computers we would just start the engines and point it in the direction of Little Rock and book.
The moving map displays are certainly nice and I am sure that soon they will be the only thing you can get for your cockpit’s instrument panel but a good mental picture of your location, in my never to be humble opinion is far better than the best color display.
In December 1968 the Apollo 8 astronauts had a visitor during their pre-mission crew breakfast. Charles Lindbergh dropped in for some steak and eggs with the guys before they blasted off for the first manned round trip to the moon.
During the breakfast conversation Lindbergh mentioned that when he planned his historic mission from New York to Paris he had used a long string and a globe to measure the distance. Using this simple measurement he also calculated how much fuel he would need. It turned out later, according to Lindbergh, that even after all the highly scientific calculations that were done by the Ryan aircraft company and him later to figure out the fuel load they came within a few pounds of what he predicted he’d need using a string.
This talk of low-tech was to have a further effect on the mission. It seems that astronaut Jim Lovell had to re-load the navigation computer by hand and in a hurry during the Apollo 8 mission. Later, on the Apollo 13 mission when he was mission commander, he had to know the “string” basics yet again to reload the computer after power-up so they could re-enter the atmosphere without burning up.
Because we are all currently in love with GPS units and television screens I have a fun and inexpensive holiday activity for you to try. Instead of buying an expensive toy like a hand-held GPS or DVD player for your back seat passengers I suggest you buy a bunch of paper aviation charts, a “whiz-wheel” flight computer, a pencil and an old-style plotter.
Imagine the delight at your next hangar confab as you watch old pilots try to remember how to draw a wind triangle on a chart with that pencil! Giggle at the hilarity that ensues when you have to do simple time-rate-distance problems with no more than a piece of paper and a writing stick!
Seriously, when was the last time you drew a course line on a chart?
I’ll really miss it when the last paper Jeppessen approach plate goes the way of the dinosaur. There is nothing quite like the heft and smell of a leather Jepp binder full of coffee-stained charts.
In the aviation world there is nothing closer to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory than the display floor of the NBAA convention. Everybody has to wear a suit and tie, and the toys are to die for.
Mock-ups and real examples of every kind of expensive gee-gaw, VLJ, high-priced service and shiny new pilot toy is all there to see and touch.
Most of the items on the NBAA floor really are toys. They don’t exist yet. Many of the most popular VLJs and new aircraft haven’t flown, been produced or even have a factory made yet to produce them.
Remember, all the aviation toys in the world can’t out do the simple pleasure of watching the people and the buildings get smaller as you climb out. return to kevincreates.com
