Search Results for: oxygen

The phrases “all weather” and “single-engine airplane” belong in the same sentence only for a select few pilots whose tolerance for risk is best described as elastic. What has always been true, remains true: One mans routine trip through cold clouds is another mans (or womans) agita-inducing nightmare. Of late, the industry has made remarkable strides in giving even the most risk-tolerant pilots better tools to detect threatening weather and deal with its consequences. Still, even for many experienced pilots, structural icing represents an exceptional terror. Ice forecasting has improved-even in the last five years-but intensity forecasting is still uncertain at best. And many pilots worry-irrationally in our view-about the FAA-legal definition of known icing. When is it legal to depart? When is it not? Do so-called inadvertent ice protection systems really buy you any risk mitigation? (Short answer: yes.) For some pilots, worrying about these fine details leads to distracting hand wringing. It really shouldnt. Seeing an opportunity in this conundrum, Cirrus Aircraft (formerly Cirrus Design) recently developed and will soon certify and ship what is, in our view, the most sophisticated and possibly effective integrated approach to ice protection for any single-engine piston airplane weve seen. And thats saying a lot, given the excellent TKS-based known-ice package that Mooney has offered for years, not to mention inadvertent and certified systems for Beechcraft and Cessna models, including the composite Bend, Oregon-built Corvallis line. Prior to Cessna buying the then-Columbia Aircraft Company, Columbia had dabbled in electric ice protection systems, but without much success. TKS is now the market leader in new aircraft de-icing systems. By way of definition, “inadvertent” means a system is designed to provide some margin of protection without being certified for flight into known ice.

There are many things to love about the turbocharged Mooney Acclaim, more than 230 of those things, in fact, and the Type S follow-on has a few more to add to the mix, bringing the total, according to Mooney’s accounting, to 242 … knots, that is. The Continental TSIO-550-equipped Acclaim has been around for a […]

Must saw your reply to my e-mail about dead reckoning on the back page of the November issue. Avoiding controversy is one thing, but getting it right is another. What I got out of the etymological research regarding dead reckoning was that before WWII there was no controversy over this term. With only a few abbreviations in ships logs to the contrary, “dead” was widely used in marine navigation (since the 17th century) and in the early days of aviation. The researcher claims to have examined hundreds of old books to come to this conclusion. It was only after the attack of the amateur folk etymologists starting in the 1940s that it even became an issue, and the battle has raged since. (And Barry Schiff has fallen prey to this, too.) The crux of the matter is, of course, the meaning of the word “dead.” The meaning that I had always heard was that “dead” in this case meant “precise,” “exact,” “accurate,” etc., and had nothing to do with death or stillness. (Dead as in “dead right,” or the “dead of winter” (middle or center of), or “dead on,” or “dead ahead,” or the original character of “Deadeye Dick” (the accurate marksman, not Dick Cheney). It is interesting to note that the rest of the English speaking world has not yet come to the height of this controversy. It seems only to be in America that we have fallen for the folk etymology. Consequently, when we navigate without reference to landmarks (or logs in the water) we are navigating by “Precise Calculation” for which many of us use the ancient term, “Dead Reckoning.” Thanks for listening! Shall we tackle the downwind turn canard next?

I once asked a pilot I know whether he considers using oxygen as a precautionary measure; say on a night approach after a long day’s flying. “That’s for [derogatory feline reference],” he said. I like to think he was joking, at least a little. The USAF requires pilots to use oxygen when flying above 5,000 […]

Using a full-motion simulator and the latest in brain-wave imaging technology, a NASA biomedical engineer is studying the effects of stress and overload on pilots. Fifteen volunteer airline pilots are participating in the study, which is conducted at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. It is designed to measure the pilots’ blood-oxygen concentration and its […]

There was a time not so long ago that a single pilot flying hard IFR was considered an accident waiting to happen. There was simply too much going on, conventional wisdom held, for one pilot to handle all alone. Instrument pilots contemplating a flight in actual weather actively sought out others-perhaps an instructor-who could help with the cockpit chores and make sure the dirty side stayed down. Except for the freshest instrument pilots, thats all changed. And good riddance. Ive long been convinced the second most dangerous thing in aviation is two pilots trying to fly the same airplane at the same time (the first is a private pilot with a #2 Phillips screwdriver, but thats a different article). But the idea of single-pilot IFR, or SPIFR, being something to avoid seems to have hung on in some quarters. Sure; theres a time and a place to take along some backup, depending on how comfortable a pilot is with the weather, the airplane and the airspace. But Id argue against making the flight in the first place if the only way youd consider it is with another pilot. Be that as it may, advances in automating the cockpit have paved the way for much more SPIFR than only a decade ago. Thats a good thing, in my opinion, but also means our lone pilot needs to prepare for the flight a bit more than might otherwise be the case.

A few comments regarding reader feedback (“Unicom”) in your September issue: Jim Pipers explanation of O2 partial pressure changing “only slightly” with density altitude is a little misleading. The partial pressure of oxygen is exactly 21 percent of the density altitude air pressure. For example, the absolute air pressure at 10,000-feet density altitude is 21.145 in. Hg; the partial pressure of oxygen is 4.44 in., or 74 percent of PPO2 at sea level. A 26 percent decrease in available oxygen has my attention. Morris Holmes comments are more troubling. In another life, when I regularly flew in a MOA, we were not looking for LBFs (little bitty, etc.). We were working hard learning new combat maneuvers or practicing old ones, at high Gs and often at high Mach numbers. If you were to fly a PC-12 through a hot MOA like that every day at 12,000 to 18,000 feet, you would be dead within a year. You would have had the right to be there, but you would still be dead.

Referring to your September 2008 article, “Batteries Not Required”-a nice review of cross-country basics-I have a question and two comments. The question refers to the flight log: Why is “1.2” in the logs Time box when the block time was 1+35 or 1.6? One comment involves missing a possible teaching opportunity by not discussing MOAs, the planned route and altitude, and the floor of the Lemoore C MOA. The other comment involves the sidebar, “Lifts Horizontal Component,” which discusses steep turns and includes a quote from an FAA publication on the need to create additional lift in a turn. You then add your conclusion that “Increasing angle of attack, of course, increases the stall speed.” This is not the message I would want my students to gain from your article. Your statement is not true in the commonly practiced stall entries from 1G straight and level flight. There the increasing angle of attack doesnt “increase” stall speed. In truth, even in the situation under discussion-stalls while turning-it is the increased load factor that increases the stall speed. It can be argued that increasing angle of attack does often increase load factor (pull ups, turns, etc.) but wouldnt it be preferable to instead conclude that stall speed increases as a result of increasing load factor? That is a true statement always.

As we practice our license to learn, some hazards demand our frequent attention: Traffic, weather and terrain are the top three. They present varying levels of predictability, and a huge amount of brain power and economic investment has been poured into keeping pilots out of the teeth of these hazards. But what about the less predictable living hazards that share the airport-and sky-with us? Plenty of critters live on and around airports, and as for sharing the sky with birds, well, they got there first. Sometime in the 1980s, a Japan Airlines-bound ab initio student at Napa Airport, Calif., (APC) had a rough time understanding the tower controllers by-the-book NOTAM. She warned, “Aircraft in the vicinity, be aware of large waterborne fowl in and around the airport environment.” After several futile rounds of the hapless student pilot requesting that she say again, she finally bellowed, “Birds! We have birds on the runway!” Birds in the aviating environment are far from the cute critters alighting on Cinderellas hand. A brown pelican, for instance, can pack a punch, weighing up to six pounds (and lets hope you never encounter the 33-pound Dalmatian pelican). Turkey vultures weigh up to 10 pounds; however, the mass generated by a closure rate greater than your en route cruising speed can be incredibly destructive. Size doesnt always matter: The tiny starling is a feathered bullet, with a body 27 percent more dense than the herring gull.

Twelve thousand five hundred feet. Fourteen thousand. Fifteen thousand feet. If youre a pilot, you immediately recognize the significance of these altitudes. Each triggers different requirements for supplemental oxygen use. Most of us learn the FARs associated with these requirements early in our primary training so we can spout them back on written exams and in the oral portion of the Practical Tests. After that, we may never think much more about them. But like most FARs, the oxygen rules are a minimum standard of safety. Of what real-world relevance are the oxygen requirements of FAR 91.211? From the standpoint of safety, when should you be using supplemental oxygen? Supplemental oxygen, for those not familiar with the term, is additional oxygen added to ambient air. The goal is to provide enough “added air” to bring the O2 users oxygen intake up to the same level it would be at a target altitude (usually sea level). The need for additional oxygen increases with altitude, since (obviously) the higher you go, the more O2 you have to add to give the breather sea-level air. For example, one aircraft manufacturers automatically regulated oxygen system meters supplemental air at the rate of 0.5 liters/minute/person at 5000 feet, scaling up to 2.8 liters/minute/person at Flight Level 250.