Teaching, Learning, and Navigation

Motion

It’s not getting there, it's the journey. The saying is so hackneyed we tune it out. It's so 60's, so hippy. But think of how we perceive motion.

I am looking out a motel window. It is raining. If I hold my head still the frame doesn't change but I am aware that the leaves in the trees across the street are moving and that rings are coming and going on the puddles as the raindrops hit. My brain does the differentiation, the time-lapse photography, the video recording. I'm not aware of all that. I am only aware of movement, of change, in the leaves and the puddles. They are alive.

Learning

I recently watched a video of an interview with Elon Musk, the man behind PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX. He was asked how he learned rocket science. He thought for a second or two, and answered with a complete absence of irony. He said he read a lot of books on the subject. He said he sought out and hired many people who had experience in the field. He said together they worked on and solved many problems.

Then he paused, and said, You know, that's how I hire people.

How so? asked the interviewer.

Elon Musk said he would ask the candidate to describe some difficult problem he or she had solved. He said someone who had worked the problem through could discuss it to any depth; those who were on the periphery or along for the ride could not.

Check out this wonderful short video from Sal Khan: You Can Learn Anything. Knowing something is not a state. It is a history of struggle and failure. It is experience in the most alive sense of the word.

I recently met a young man new to teaching. His field is transportation, and has years of experience, much of it driving big rigs. I asked him how he was enjoying teaching. I love it, he said. But sometimes I go home frustrated. How so? I asked. Well, he said hesitantly, some of the teachers, they're good people, but they went from grade school to high school to teachers college and then right into the classroom. They've never been anywhere but a classroom.

We were both silent for a while. I thought about how that applies to my trade, flying airplanes. About the pilot shortage that is upon us. About how a lot can be learned in the classroom and on the internet (look at the Khan Academy!) and in simulators and even in airplanes. But something is missing: the struggle and failure of flying a real airplane in real weather and wind.

How can I even speak of failure in the same breath as flying?

Because I had the luxury of learning by doing and stumbling and failing under the guidance of vastly more experienced captains who had flown Sabres or Starfighters or Clunks. I was an apprentice. I learned from masters of the trade. Their lessons stayed with me because we solved problems together. I learned judgment. I learned to respect the airplane's limits and my own. I learned that sometimes you just don't go.

I also thought of how the world changes. I thought of how I flew the fly-by-wire Airbus for nine years and even instructed on it. It was a state-of-the-art machine. And yet we never did a GPS approach. They weren't ready yet in 2004. Now I have been retired for a decade and I am seventy years old, I am flying mostly GPS approaches. These approaches did not exist when I was flying the line.

Navigation

When I was a First Officer on the DC-8 in 1979, INS had just replaced the Navigators. INS (and later, IRS) imitates the human body, specifically the semi-circular canals in our ears. They are miniature accelerometers (one in each of three axes) and among other things they help us to walk upright. INS uses the Calculus and integrates acceleration: what is the sum of all these accelerations over time? GPS does the opposite: with its ability to rapidly calculate positions to within a few meters, it goes  the other way with Calculus: differentiation. It asks, if I look at how my position has changed over time, what does that say about my velocity? About my acceleration?

In essence, navigation is describing dS/dt.

What does all that have to do with learning?

Well, learning is change of ideas. Remember the video, You Can Learn Anything? “Because the most beautiful, complex concepts in the whole universe are built on basic ideas that anyone can learn; anyone, anywhere, can understand.”

Learning is change. Change of mindset, change of assumptions, changes in your idea of yourself. It is a journey of struggle. It is navigation. It is hard work.

But the destination is not static. It is a moving, living thing: the apprehension of a beautiful concept. It becomes a beautiful tool you can now use to bring your talents to bear on the problems facing humanity. It is joy.

Teaching

What does all that say about teaching?

How shall we teach? How shall we pass on what we know?

How shall we learn as a people, a civilization, a species? Will each generation have to learn anew how to rub two dry sticks together? Or will Galileo read Aristotle, and Newton read Galileo, and Einstein adapt Newton to the scale of the galaxy?

That is not for me to say. But having in small measure experienced the joy of understanding and the joy of helping others understand, and having experienced the joy of change in myself over years and decades, I will not willingly let it go.

How Does an Airplane Fly?

document.write(" serif;">Lift

An airplane stays up in the air because the wing pushes air down. It moves forward because the propellor or the jet engine pushes air back. We know when we drop something it falls to earth. We know that it is harder to ride a bike against the wind. So the wing and the propellor are acting against those natural forces. How does it all work?

Isaac Newton lived in the 18th Century. One day he was sitting under a tree, thinking about things. An apple fell from the tree and bonked him on the head. Rather than just curse, he thought harder. Something got that apple moving fast enough to make him want to say a bad word.

Newton wasn't starting from scratch. He was born in 1642, the same year Galileo died. Galileo, in his observations of the heavens, had come up with the idea that a moving body tends to keep moving – that it takes a force to stop it or make it change direction. He called this property inertia.

Inertia was a radical idea. Nineteen centuries before, Aristotle had described how a force was required to make an object move. If the force was removed the object would stop. Galileo's observations of the planets disagreed with Aristotle. Trying to make sense of what he saw, Galileo did experiments, dropping things from the Tower of Pisa and sliding blocks down inclined planes. He observed that if he made the inclined plane slippery, the blocks would slide further before stopping. Then he used the technique Einstein called a thought experiment, and what Aristotle called a reductio ad absurdum. If there is friction between the block and the inclined plane, and if that friction can be made less (by oiling the plane, for example), what would happen if the friction could be eliminated entirely? If it were zero?

Equilibrium

Here's the part that's counter-intuitive: a flying airplane is in a state of equilibrium. Cruising along, climbing or descending – all the forces acting on the airplane are in balance. The wings are pushing air down, creating lift; this exactly counterbalances the weight of the airplane, the pull of gravity which attracts the mass of the airplane to the much larger mass of the earth. Similarly the propellor (or fanjet) is pushing air back, exactly countering the drag caused by pushing the airplane through the air at speed.

Don't be concerned if this doesn't make sense to you. Making sense of it takes time, as is evidenced by history. Aristotle made a good start, back in 330 BC or so. He knew that you had to push on a mass to make it move. He also deduced that the force required was proportional to the movement. But he didn't make that next deductive leap to inertia – that took Galileo observing the motions of the planets through his telescope. The leap is a big one, because we have to think for awhile to come up with an example from our everyday lives. But they are there nonetheless: how about a curling stone, gliding with very little friction on an alley of ice? (The weight of the stone momentarily melts the ice; the stone is gliding on a temporary film of water). That stone keeps moving for a long time. With it in mind we can almost imagine Galileo's inertia and what Newton made of it – his first law of motion.

A body in uniform motion tends to remain in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.

Again, though, it takes a curious mind, building on the achievements of others, to take that extra step: Newton asked himself, in effect, what would happen to the curling stone if the resistance of the water/ice were not just small, but zero? The curling stone would just keep moving until it hit something!

Turning

A turning aircraft is not in equilibrium. Its flight path is not a straight line, but a curve. Looking at Newton's first law, we see that there must be another force involved, being applied so as to curve the flight path. In a car, we get that force by turning the steering wheel. If we turn hard enough we are pushed toward the door or the person next to us. We can feel it in the seat of our pants or our shoulder. There is a pull against the seat belt/shoulder harness. The lateral force is generated by the tires on the asphalt. On a bicycle or motorcycle we countersteer to make the bike lean into the corner. This is more closely analogous to an airplane. But still, an airplane has no asphalt to push against. Whence cometh this force?

The largest force generated by an aircraft is the lift from the wing. Remember: in equilibrium (steady flight) lift has to be equal to the aircraft's weight. So the pilot uses lift. He tilts the lift vector by banking the airplane like a bicycle or motorcycle. The horizontal component of lift is the force that curves the flight path.

IMG_0111

The airplane is blue. The white arrow is the wing's lift. The orange arrows are the lift divided into components so you can see how it all works. The vertical orange arrow holds the airplane up. The shorter horizontal arrow is the force causing the airplane to turn. The curving yellow arrow is the airplane's flight path.

Galileo observed the curved path of the planets and began to understand that there was a force causing the curve. Newton, still sore at the apple, saw that the force accelerating it into his head was the same force that curved the path of the planets. He proposed that masses (apple, planet earth, sun) attracted each other, and further, that the attraction was proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them (F = mM/d2). It turns out Newton was right, but it was another century before Cavendish measured the force of gravity experimentally.

Lift, Again

We said that lift is produced when the wing pushes air down. Imagine that in an unthinking moment you jump from the stern of your rowboat (which you have just managed to land stern-to) to the dock. You instantly think better of it (although you are grateful you pushed off hard enough not to get wet) and look behind you. The boat is twelve feet away and still moving. That's action and reaction, Newton's third law of motion.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Wings and propellors depend on this law. They push air down or back, and the reaction of the aircraft is to move up or forward.

How do wings push air down?

If you stick your hand out the car window at speed, you'll feel the force of the air against it. If you hold your hand flat, palm forward, your hand and arm will be pushed back. That's drag. Holding your hand palm down will produce less drag. You have made your hand into a more streamlined shape relative to the wind. Now try tilting your hand a little, holding the thumb side (leading edge) higher. You'll feel a force lifting your hand and arm up. That's lift. You could stick a one-by-six board out there and tilt it in the same way. If it wasn't ripped out of your hands, it would pull itself and your arms up to the top of the window.

The Bernoulli Digression

Stick your hand out of the window again, palm down and thumb into the wind. Now cup your hand slightly, moving your thumb down. (Your thumb is still pointing straight out, like your fingers, but your thumb, including the fleshy part in your palm where the first thumb bone is, has moved lower.) Now you will feel some lift, even without tilting your hand. By cupping your hand, you have made an airfoil shape. If you look at your hand you can see how an airfoil works. The oncoming air divides, somewhere on your thumb. It comes together again on the outside of your little finger. You can see that the air flowing over your hand follows a curve, and the air flowing under follows almost a straight line. The air flowing over your hand has further to go.

You can think of the air as 'stretching out' as it goes over the top of your hand. Many textbooks have pictures of this. The idea is that if two air particles start out together but divide at the wing leading edge, they stay above each other as they go their separate ways. Then they rejoin, arriving at the trailing edge of the wing at the same time. It is instinctive to imagine particles going over the top 'stretching out'. But if we move on to the the venturi (how a carburettor works – remember those?) the phenomenon is harder to imagine: air streaming through a tube which is constricted in the middle. The pressure in the constricted part is lower than the pressure at either end, just as the pressure on the top of the wing is lower.

Daniel Bernoulli (two generations after Newton) figured it out. He was a mathematician and described this process with equations. The equations invoked the Law of Conservation of Energy.

But we digress. It is not necessary to understand fluid mechanics to understand how an airplane flies. The Bernoulli Principle does help us make a flat board into an efficient wing. But remember that most aerobatic aircraft have symmetrical airfoils so they can fly just as well upside down. With these Bernoulli plays an even smaller part.

Basically, the wing pushes air down. That's really all you need to know.

Control

Where are we? We know the basics of why an airplane stays in the air and what makes it go. We have looked briefly at what makes it turn – we said that the pilot uses lift. But what else does the pilot do? How can he make the airplane climb and descend? Takeoff and land? Speed up and slow down?

Let's start with what makes it go straight: tail feathers. Like a bird or a dart, an airplane has weight up front and fins at the back. In the air (but not in outer space) all of these things move beak first. The heavy end of the dart with its sharp point will hit the target first (unless you're really new to the game). For slo-mo, think of a badminton bird falling with its nose toward the ground. The bottom line is that the nose points forward along the flight path (or nearly so). This is an inherent stability that kicks in before the pilot does anything.

Now imagine a small airplane. The engine, pilot and passengers are in the middle, near the front. This is where the weight is concentrated: the center of gravity. On each side the wings stick out; behind is the light aft end of the fuselage which holds the tail feathers: usually a vertical fin pointing up and a horizontal stabilizer sticking out each side. On the trailing edge of each of these surfaces are control surfaces – think of them as small wings hinged to the larger surfaces. The pilot moves these control surfaces using the stick and rudder.

In doing so he changes where the airplane points relative to the flight path. Remember “or nearly so” from two paragraphs ago? It is the pilot who chooses to point the airplane somewhere slightly different from forward along the flight path.

With the rudder pedals the pilot yaws the nose left or right. By pulling or pushing on the stick (or wheel or yoke) he pitches the nose up or down. And by moving the stick sideways (or turning the wheel or yoke) he moves the ailerons (on the trailing edge of the wing tips) and rolls the airplane left or right, banking like a motorcycle.

There is a fourth basic control: the throttle or thrust lever. With this the pilot controls how much air the propellor or fanjet pushes back. You can think of this as how much energy is being added to the system. That is the basics of it. Yes, when you push the throttle forward you are producing more thrust, so the airplane will climb or go faster until the increasing drag equals the thrust. If you pull the throttle back there will be less thrust and the airplane will slow down or descend, or both. But in each case you are adding more or less energy to the system.

Gliders

Wait, you say. How can a glider fly without an engine? Where does the energy come from?

The short answer is: from the winch, the tow plane, or the rising air in thermals. But if we want to think this through, we might also want to ask, where does the energy go?

Like most objects, an airplane can have kinetic energy, the energy arising from movement. Also like other objects it can have potential energy, which depends on its position in space. To simplify and make it more intuitive, we can limit the argument to its position relative to the earth. Is it on the ground or in the air? Like a ball or a case of beer, it takes energy to lift an airplane, to separate it from the surface of the earth. That energy is still there, as it is in a roller coaster rolling slowly over the top of the high point of the track.

Drop the ball and it will bounce. Drop the beer and you might have to go buy some more. But the roller coaster rolls over the top and down, accelerating as it descends, trading potential energy for kinetic energy. So it is with a glider or an airplane. Altitude above ground is potential energy. If the pilot uses the controls to select a descending flight path, that energy can be used as both lift and thrust – just enough thrust to keep the airplane at a good flying speed. That's a glide, and both airplanes and gliders can do it.

Some of you bright stars might say, waitwhat about the Law of Conservation of Energy? If the airplane glides down and lands and rolls to a stop, it has no more energy. Where did it go?

The answer is: into thin air. Remember drag? Riding a bicycle into the wind? There is a lot of air out there so you don't notice it, but when you ride or run or even walk through the air you are expending energy to overcome the resistance of the wind and in doing so you are heating up the air! Friction, drag: they generate heat. Think of rubbing two dry sticks together.

Navigation

Imagine you are lazily watching a twig drifting down a placid stream. It is a peaceful scene. You are relaxed and your perception does its work. You sense the twig's slow movement from right to left.

Now imagine taking a movie (OK, a video) of the same scene. You take your camera home and open up the video in your editor. You look at it frame by frame. All the frames look exactly the same, except . . . yes! If you look closely the twig changes position. Not much from one frame to the next, but after say, a minute, it has moved almost across the frame. The twig is moving! It is changing position. It is drifting lazily downstream, moving with the water. It is moving slowly, at least relative to us on shore. We say it has a speed. But we also know it is moving downstream, from our right to our left. So it has not only a speed but also a direction, right to left . That combination of speed and direction is called velocity. Mathematically it is known as a vector.

Why are we talking about twigs?

Well, our airplane is a twig. It moves through the air that drifts over the surface of the earth. It was the same in the days of the square-rigged ships. Out of sight of land for months at a time, they moved by grace of the wind through currents and tides that had their own movement. To figure out where they were sailors used a sextant to find the elevation of the sun, moon and stars. They also used Dead Reckoning to calculate a new position from a known position (fix). We could do that with our twig if we knew the speed of the current in the stream. If the current flowed at one mph, for example, we could figure that if the twig is here now, then in an hour from now (barring mishaps) it will be a mile downstream.

Newton, Again

Isaac Newton developed the mathematics we still use for navigation today. (Leibniz did the same thing independently). It is called the calculus and is every math student's nightmare. I made it through second-year calculus with a D average. Nevertheless the elementary calculus that relates to airplanes (and ships and space-ships) has remained with me and been of enormous usefulness.

Basically Newton found a way to precisely quantify motion, even though speeds and directions might change. If he knew where the stream flowed, and at what speeds and directions through the rapids, over the falls, and eddying through the pond below the falls, he could calculate precisely where the twig would be at any moment. He did this by a process analogous to our video of the twig: if you shot the video in slow motion (many frames per second) you could analyze the motion of the twig with great accuracy. In effect, what Newton and Leibniz did was the ultimate slow motion: an infinite number of frames per second.

GPS and INS and IRS

At the end of the last century, GPS suddenly became a reality. A tiny receiver can listen to signals from satellites circling the globe and calculate a position on (or above) the surface of the earth to within a few meters. Here is a photo of the GPS Receiver I use with my iPad in the Bonanza:

IMG_0109

You can see how small it is – that's my pen next to it.

The GPS stores these positions (this is like the frames of our twig video) and then uses the calculus to find speed and direction. The process is called differentiation and is what our perception does as we lie on the bank of the stream watching the twig. It is how we perceive motion.

When I retired from airline flying (2004) only a few of the airplanes had GPS, and we flew no GPS approaches to find airports on cloudy days. Instead we used ADF and VOR and ILS, which send signals from ground-based stations.

Here is what my GPS was seeing while I stood on my back porch:

IMG_0110

I was standing still, so my speed was zero and I had no heading. (Actually I was looking south, but the GPS can't tell that until I start to move.)

Today in the Bonanza I use almost nothing but GPS. Using it I can fly an approach in cloud down to 300 feet above the runway.

When I was still flying airliners we used INS (and later the more accurate IRS) for our enroute navigation. These use Newton's calculus going backwards: they sense accelerations in three dimensions and calculate speed and position from there. Imagine riding a roller coaster with your eyes closed. (Those with delicate constitutions are excused). First you feel heavy, then you feel light. You know you are speeding up and slowing down. (It helps if you don't move your head.)

Your perception is recording those accelerations and correctly deducing that your speed is changing. This is the reverse of differentiation: it is called integration. Newton's mathematics lets us go back and forth from position to velocity to acceleration.

GPS Differentiation -->

Position

Velocity

Acceleration

Frames of Twig Video

Roller Coaster

<-- Integration INS, IRS

 Summing Up

An airplane flies because it has a wing that pushes air down and a propellor that pushes air back. The pilot has controls that can change how the airplane points relative to the flight path. That in turn influences the flight path itself – for example, the pilot makes the airplane turn by rolling into a bank, aiming the lift of the wings so that some of it is pulling toward the inside of the turn, curving the flight path. He can also add more energy to the system by pushing the throttle forward. Or he can throttle back and glide.

To navigate the pilot can look out the window for landmarks and use the compass and clock. Or she can use GPS. The best answer is to do both, because batteries can go dead.

The Future

If it makes you feel good to think about this stuff, I have great news: there's lots more! In fact it seems that the more interested you get, the more there is to discover. And if aviation turns out to be your thing, have no doubt that you will be needed. Because if flying through the air uses too much fuel some day, we will still need to get into orbit and fly around from there.

Flying in space will take even more mathematics (orbital mechanics, for a start). And here's another problem: Newton's laws (and his calculus) are deterministic. That means you can go back and forth, as we did in the table above. And if you take his equations to their logical conclusion, you can go back and forth in time, and everything that was and will be has already been determined.

But we no know that's no so, or not quite. If things get very small, so small they can't be divided – for example, a photon of light – they behave differently from the objects we know. Then we use another math: quantum theory. (Stand by, because you young people will see quantum computers in your lifetimes). If things get very big, like galaxies, or if we try to accelerate a space-ship to the speed of light, then we have to use Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

And don't let anyone tell you pilots won't be needed. Remember Chewbacca, the Wookie pilot from Star Wars? He took the Millennium Falcon to warp speed by hand. Computers are going to be a big help, but in a way they give us more to learn. So if you love to fly you'll have to learn flying and math and computers and navigation in space and . . .

But that's just more fun!

The Lost Apprentice

Despite our words of concern for education and training, our workforce is racing toward the cliff of incompetence. Even though innovation and specialization have brought us marvelous new tools, basic skills are vanishing, collateral damage from a squeeze on labour. How? In a word, the apprentice has gone missing.

One company (BMW in South Carolina), experiencing first-hand the dearth of skilled labour, has set up an apprenticeship system. But there is resistance. After all, from skilled labour flows empowered labour and unions. From there a slippery slope leads to socialism and communism. Or so goes political thought.

Yes, we are on a slope, but the destination is not an 'ism'. It is incompetence.

My trade is flying airplanes, so I'll stick to what I know. But look around in your own trade or profession and you may see examples of what I'm talking about. Are you passing on your knowledge? Are there barriers to doing so? Will the young people taking up your mantle be able to learn from your mistakes and those of your teachers? Or will they repeat those mistakes? Will they master the new tools that arrive, it seems, every day? Or will they hide behind them, shirking responsibility simply because they are afraid, deep in their gut, that they can't do the job?

I was lucky. I joined the airline in the right seat of the DC-9 and learned fast. I flew with captains who took their teaching responsibilities seriously. I particularly remember Ike Jones, a great, generous, good-natured Newfoundlander. He was Master to my Apprentice. He taught me and I have never forgotten.

Learn By Doing

Lee Kang Kuk (the Asiana 214 Trainee Captain) was not so lucky. He was an “experienced” pilot, a captain on Airbus aircraft transitioning to the B-777. I put experienced in quotes because although he had thousands of hours of flying, he found the prospect of doing a visual approach “very stressful.” To me this seemed nonsensical until I began to think about it. I thought about the Asiana First Officer who told the investigation he had been flying the A320 for three years and had never landed the airplane manually.

I thought of myself. After retirement from the airline I didn't fly for 6½ years. I had to get training, pass exams and tests, and retrain myself. This year I have been working with Andrew Boyd, a Class I instructor, trying to get my skills up to where I can get my Class II instructor rating back. It has been a lot of joyful work. But I see even more than I did six months ago that we all learn by doing. Practice, practice, practice. Lee's airline recommends that its pilots fly their planes manually as little as possible.

Lee didn't have a chance. He said, “(it is) very difficult to perform a visual approach with a heavy airplane.” Horsefeathers. It is actually harder with a very light airplane. What is difficult (if not impossible) is to fly any maneuver without practice.

History Repeats Itself

Fifty years ago last month an Air Canada DC-8 crashed at Ste.Thérèse, Québec. Last month a Boeing 737 crashed at Kazan, Russia. The DC-8 hit the ground at 55° nose down. The B-737 hit the ground at 75° nose down.

It is unlikely that the young pilots in Russia knew of the DC-8 accident. After all, it happened before they were born. What possible relevance could it have for them?

Well, we know from the evidence so far that they were not prepared for the missed approach they tried to execute. They did make the decision to go around. They did select TOGA (Takeoff/Go Around) mode. The engines did spool up to takeoff thrust. They did retract flap from 30° to 15°.

Then comes the part that is difficult to explain. They disengaged the autopilot but did not fly the airplane.

On its own the B-737, trimmed for approach, will pitch nose-up with both takeoff power and flap retraction. The accident aircraft did just that, achieving 25° nose-up, about 10° higher than the target for this maneuver. Like the DC-8 fifty years before, it was accelerating, at least until it passed the 15° target attitude.

Instrument pilots know that acceleration can produce the sensation of pitching nose-up. That might explain the Ste. Thérèse accident. It surely played an important part at Kazan.

It would have helped if the Russian pilots had been trained to expect the missed approach. Pilots call it being spring-loaded for the Go-Around. It would have helped if they knew of and expected the illusions they were about to experience from the acceleration. But most important by far are the basics, and the foundation of any emergency, indeed of any maneuver, is fly the airplane. Somehow they omitted this crucial step.

How Did We Get Here?

It would be convenient if we could put the finger on one factor, one guilty party. But there are many: deregulation; lazy captains; automation; feeder airlines, merger, and bankruptcy as tools to reduce costs; regulatory impotence. Mark H. Goodrich explores all of these in depth on his website. His unique experience (engineer, pilot, teacher, lawyer, more airplane type ratings than anyone) give him an invaluable perspective. I will summarize from my own experience.

Lazy Captains

In my younger days there were captains who grumbled it was not their duty to teach flying. Their interpretation of the adage Learn, Earn, and Return stopped with the money.

Automation

I confess I am a technophile. I love new tools. Flying my Bonanza with its Aspen Primary Flight Display fed by the Garmin GTN650 is a delight. But there are changes. My instrument scan still covers the basic 'T', but there are new items in it, and the order is different. From the airplane symbol (attitude) my eye moves an inch to the right to see if there is any pink fuzz on the altitude tape (trend) and an inch and a half down to the aqua diamond (aircraft track). If there is no fuzz and the diamond is on the arrow (desired track), no further action is necessary for the moment. I can look further out, and think for a second or two about other issues.

And here, in front of the MacBook Pro, I can think about the wider implications. How I enjoyed teaching technology on the A320, and how much flying skill I lost in my nine years on the airplane. Yes, I would make sure each of us did an “everything off” visual approach at least once per cycle (trip, 2-4 day sequence of flights). But in the Airbus such an approach is a bit of a parlor trick, chiefly because there is no trim feel.

In the Bonanza I have the best of both worlds. There is no autopilot. You fly it every second you're airborne, and then some. And the tools I have at hand are better than I had on the Airbus. ForeFlight in my iPad, fed by a tiny GPS and a satellite weather receiver. New capability arrives every few months with a software change. Flying in IMC I no longer have to request permission to leave the ATC frequency, call the FSS, and copy weather with one hand while flying with the other. Instead, my right forefinger taps the iPad over the airport of interest, and the last METAR appears. Another tap brings the forecast or the winds aloft or the airport information. One more tap and the approach I have chosen is drawn over the map in scale. Using two fingers I zoom and pan as I brief for the approach. I am still flying with my left hand.

I love it all. But is it easier than the old way?

Yes and no. In the old days you started with heading and guessed at the track made good. You integrated (looked at change over time) the localizer or VOR needle to see how good your guess was. Now you just glance at the little diamond. That's a huge improvement. But you have to learn the system, to understand what is going on. The diamond is of no use whatever if you don't know what it is. And once you do you have to retrain your eye so it knows where to look. So I am solidly with Mark Goodrich when he says that automation requires more pilot training, not less.

Airline Management Strategies

Since deregulation (1978) airline management has focused on reducing costs. Robert Crandall (American Airlines) spoke out against deregulation, but once it was law he led the way, inventing one strategy after another for his airline's survival. The first of these was hub and spoke. As I young man I flew the DC-9 across Canada on many long, thin, multiple-stop routes. By the time I was captain on the same airplane (1987) hub and spoke had arrived and there were feeder airlines flying turboprops, bringing passengers from the smaller cities into the hubs where the jets flew. This not only made economic sense – it also provided the opportunity to set up a two-tier pay scale and reduce the power of the pilot unions. But there was a casualty: apprenticeship. Young pilots starting out at the feeder had no contact with the old guys (still mostly men, even then) nearing the end of their career. Instead, they flew with captains near their own age whose only concern was getting a job with the main line. Seniority and career trumped teaching and learning. The wisdom of the old farts retired with them.

Then, as Robert Crandall so accurately predicted (in the Senate hearings on Deregulation), the airlines started losing money. There was a frenzy of merger and acquisition, and then bankruptcy. Collateral damage to pilots came in training, salary, and pension.

When I joined the airline training on a new type included two hours at the controls of a real airplane, doing takeoffs and landings. Now a pilot's first landing on a new type is on a line flight with passengers. That can be interesting. I know because I spent my last eight years as a Line Indoctrination Training Captain. For more about reliance on simulators and airline training in general, see Mark Goodrich's Simulating Reality and The Training Paradox.

Regulatory Impotence

The FAA recently changed the regulations to require that First Officers on transport aircraft have 1500 hours total time and an Airline Transport Rating. This was largely a response to the Colgan Air crash at Buffalo, NY in February, 2009. There are not enough pilots with these qualifications, and airlines are beginning to cancel flights in the smaller markets such as Grand Forks, ND.

The FAA now requires some Asian airlines to fly GPS approaches instead of visual approaches if the ILS is unserviceable. Note that aircraft “land themselves” only if an ILS is available on the landing runway. Note also that GPS approaches with vertical guidance, although they allow an autopilot to fly the airplane down a glideslope, themselves require training.

So which is better? Apprenticeship, or regulations which say only masters can fly? Training pilots in the fundamentals so they have the confidence they can fly, or regulating the level of automation they must use?

Conclusion

We have come full circle. Laziness interacts with automation, cost cutting with simulator training, loss of apprenticeship with pilot confidence and competence. The emperor has no clothes. But again, why?

The answer, I'm afraid, is simple. We can't see that the emperor has no clothes because we don't want to look. Deregulation opened airline financial decisions to the market, which means you and I, the bargain-seeking traveler, push prices down to where flight operations can no longer be safely undertaken. It has taken a generation, but that is where we have arrived.

Instrument Flying: Behind the Basics – 3

INTEGRATING the ILS

We’ll start with a new image today – the megaphone. Put the small end at the touchdown point, line it up with the runway, and tilt it up three degrees. This is the ILS, or at least a useful image of it.

The picture helps because it gives an instinctive feeling for what we have to do to fly an ILS:

  • Maneuver into the big end of the cone
  • Fly down its axis
  • Make smaller corrections as we get closer to the runway

Last time we talked about how to stay on the localizer – maintain the published track – and how we were using integration. Looking closer, we can take the integration back several levels:

Bank --> Heading Change (and thus Track Change) --> Lateral Displacement

A shallow turn for a short time means a small heading change, changing the track. Imagine the new track drawing an arrow – this is your velocity vector. The longer you stay on the track, the longer the arrow. Visualize (I'll add diagrams when I learn the software) the arrow: if you are correcting back to the on-course you'll want to return to your tracking heading when the tip of the arrow gets there.

The same method – integrate and visualize – works for the vertical axis:

Power + Pitch --> Vertical Speed

Use V/S as you would track to manage vertical displacement – to track the glideslope, if you will. The same method works in both axes:

  • Before you start the approach, have targets in mind – the published track,  and a target vertical speed you calculate from your planned airspeed on approach: airspeed/2 X 10 = 600 fpm for 120 knots (if you have GPS, use your groundspeed).
  • Fly into the big end of the cone and center the localizer.
  • Fly the target heading and see what happens. Now you know something about the wind. Adjust your target. (If you have GPS, flying the published track will keep you on the localizer.)
  • Correct back on, then fly the new target. Repeat and get it nailed (at least for this altitude).
  • As the glideslope comes down to meet you, do what you need to get your target V/S. (It should be as little as possible and preferably only one thing: reduce RPM or MP a certain amount; put the gear down.)
  • See what happens. Adjust your target. (If you have GPS, glance at the groundspeed. If it's only 100 knots, your new target is 500 fpm.)
  • Correct back onto the glideslope by adjusting V/S, visualizing the arrow (your velocity vector in the vertical axis) intercepting the G/S. When you're back on, fly the new target.
  • Continue as above, visualizing the megaphone as it gets smaller, guiding you to that window 200 feet above the approach lights. (Your corrections are getting smaller and smaller.)
  • KEEP YOUR TARGETS IN YOUR HEAD RIGHT DOWN TO MINIMUMS. (They are now accurate to a degree or two of heading and 50-100 fpm.)

That's it! Simple, right?

Actually, it is, and it works, but it does take some thinking about. For example: if the needles are centered, are you flying down the axis of the megaphone?

We'll look at that next time.

Instrument Flying: Behind the Basics – 2

INTEGRATION

Maintain the published track and you’ll stay on the localizer.

Sounds simple. Makes sense. But it’s not instinctive. You have to think about it.

Here’s a thought experiment. You are running a train down a straight track. You can’t see outside. You have a stopwatch, a remote paintgun, and an accurate speedometer. Your task is to make two marks on the track a mile apart.

Simple, right? You accelerate to 60 mph, hit the paintgun remote and the stopwatch at the same time. Exactly 60 seconds later you hit the paintgun remote again. Mission accomplished!

But what if you are flying an airplane doing 120 knots? You are on (over) the track and you hit the paintgun. You wait 30 seconds and hit it again. Where is the second blob of paint? Sure, it's 1 nautical mile ahead, but is it on the track?

Yes, if your track hasn't changed. That's easy for a train but a big IF for an airplane. The wind could change. Your heading could change. Then the second blob of paint will not be on the track. It will be off to one side. Your localizer needle will be off to one side.

In math this is an example of integration. You are adding up what happens to your position as a result of your velocity vector. The INS or IRS in an airliner does it. Experienced pilots do something like it in their heads.

If you have a Garmin 430 in your airplane you can go to NAV page 1 and fly so TRK is the same as DTK. If you don't you'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, flying heading to compensate for drift. Either way, try to have the picture in your head.

We'll speak more about integration in future blogs. It's a great help if you want to fly IFR with precision.

Instrument Flying: Behind the Basics

P + P = PP

Power + Pitch = Predictable Performance. That is how an old friend, mentor, and instructor puts it. We were speaking of it recently in relation to the AF447 crash.

But sometimes we don't even have attitude available. If, for example, we were to blunder into cloud in a J-3 Cub with only the most rudimentary instruments, we might still pull it out of the hat using the turn and bank: don't touch the power or trim; roll into a coordinated rate one turn and hold it for one minute. With luck we will have maintained level flight and turned 180 degrees. (Of course without attitude, altitude, or vertical speed available our nose has dropped slightly in the turn to maintain 1G flight and during the turn we have been in a gentle descent.)

The point of the formula is that control can be maintained in cloud with very little information. In the J-3 Cub example, the natural longitudinal stability of the airplane, the needle and ball, and a timepiece are almost sufficient.

But not quite! What is missing?

It is the pilot: specifically the pilot's brain with its ability to visualize and integrate. The visualization is often referred to as situational awareness and is recognized as an essential component of the instrument pilot's skills. The integration is equally essential and will be the subject of this mini-series: Behind the Basics.