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Going Direct by Robert Goyer

About Robert Goyer

In Going Direct, Robert Goyer airs his thoughts on some of the most controversial aviation issues of the day.

Robert has been with Flying since 1994. During that time he was written and photographed hundreds of feature stories on a wide variety of topics.

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What if Apple iPhone 4S virtual assistant Siri was a pilot?

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I was watching a commercial for Apple's new iPhone 4S between innings of the World Series last night and it occurred to me to wonder, "What if Siri," the new virtual assistant you get with the Apple iPhone 4S, "was a pilot?" That would change everything.

Piper's Jet Review: What does it mean?
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The news yesterday that Piper was undertaking a review of its Altaire single-engine jet program raised eyebrows because it is unusual, to say the least, to announce such reviews—they are most often conducted behind the scenes and very quietly. In fact, we seldom learn about the existence of such reviews until after the company has decided to axe the program in question, such as when Cessna decided to discontinue its large-cabin Columbus program a few years back.

Curmudgeons, Listen Up
Rockwell Collins scaled Pro Line Fusion Deck
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The conventional wisdom behind the evolution of aviation technology is this: if it's not what we're doing now, it won't work because we've thought of everything before and if it's not what we're doing, then it was proven at some point by somebody smarter than you not to work. I hate to say how many times I've heard that hoary logic applied to anything that had even a whiff of new car smell to it.

7 Reasons Not to Build Bizjets/7 Reasons to Build Bizjets
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With the approach of the National Business Aviation Association Convention in Las Vegas next week, the one subject of conversation on everyone’s lips is the economy. Things are still, much to everyone’s dismay, painfully slow.

I got to thinking about what must being on in the minds of the leaders of business jet manufacturers right now, so I compiled a list of pros and cons to see if one really does have to be crazy to be in this business right now, or not.

Cons

The iPad App Pilots Don't Want Passengers to Have
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Generally speaking, information is a good thing. There are, however, exceptions to that rule. Big exceptions.

Sometimes a little information can be a bad thing, especially when it upsets the people flying with you in your airplane.

This came up yesterday in the most interesting context.

I was up at Cessna touring the new Cessna Citation M2, the latest iteration of Cessna’s remarkable CJ series. Sitting in the cabin of the mockup, I got the chance to talk with a couple members of the smart and talented team that put the finishing touches on this latest CJ.

Reno Crash: Is Air Racing Done?

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In the wake of the horrifying crash at the National Championship Air Races at Reno Stead Field on Friday evening, in which nine people lost their lives and many more were critically or seriously injured, a deep sense of grief has descended upon the aviation community.

Stream Your Flight Data to the FAA?
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Photo: illustration by Robert Goyer

A team headed by an award-winning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at the school as well as a 5,600-hour pilot, has come up with a really cool idea: mining data from flight data recorders to identify anomalies. Check out our news story on the subject here.

King Airs and Class Warfare
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Though it was sometimes hard to tell while reading the article, Wednesday's New York Times piece by Christopher Drew addressed an interesting topic: the Air Force's King Air program that uses GA airplanes as a launching point and then installs sophisticated electronic gadgets to create a spy platform that gets the job done when other options aren't available. It's a surprisingly entrepreneurial approach to battlefield needs.

September 11th, Timothy McVeigh and the Small Airplane Threat
Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, 1995
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On Friday the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned us all to be on the alert for terrorists trying to use small airplanes as weapons of mass destruction in the days leading up to the solemn 10-year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

That horrific day almost 10 years ago now wasn't the first terrorist attack against the United States on our own soil, not even the first in recent memory.

Pilots and Automation: Is there a Problem?
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A recent Associated Press story by Joan Lowy entitled "Automation in the Air Dulls Pilot Skill" looked to highlight what must have seemed to the author like a critical safety concern that people in high places were missing, namely that technology is causing many airline accidents and that nobody's paying attention to this glaring problem.

Lowy's piece, however, managed to entirely miss what should have been the main point of the story: airline accidents today are almost non-existent, and like it or not, that is a result of the emergence of technology.

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