As is reported in the Safety Trends story in the December 2021 issue of Plane & Pilot Magazine, looking back, what can be learned from the accident record?

The good news, GA flying is getting safer. Is there any bad news? Well, the accident rate has not changed or improved much lately. Is that bad? Well, it’s not getting any better. It’s basically been flat for several years. The reports cover the years up through 2020. It’s too soon to know anything about last year. And there was the terrible accident literally at years end on December 31, when a medivac Learjet, crashed while maneuvering to land, at night, in marginal conditions, at San Diego’s Gillespie Field. All onboard perished.

In the Safety Trends story, is there a typical accident? While accident reports vary widely, it generally comes down to pilot error, or a mechanical problem. After that, its’ weather, which could be continued flight into IMC conditions, with a pilot who is not instrument rated. The results of this are usually fatal. According to statistics, 66% of accidents are related to pilot error, 18% are mechanical, and the remaining 16% are something else.

There’s really nothing new here. We continue to make the same mistakes. Complacency sets in and we see the same mistakes being made over and over. It’s cycle that repeats itself, with alarming regularity. What can be done about that? Hard to say.

Some pilots are simply more safety conscious than others. This is just human nature. And some people are more conscientious than others. Many pilots will only do the minimum to stay current, if that. Egos get in the way: “I don’t need this!’. This mindset is hard to change. So, with that said, our challenge is to find a way to change this way of thinking, if possible.

What are your thoughts on any of this? This is not rocket science. What can be done to make a change in the thought process of some, who will likely be the culprits that cause an accident?

How long since you’ve done any cross-country flight planning?

Maybe your flying is local in nature, less than 50 miles from your home airport for the $100 burger, so it’s been a while. Well, there are common problems that some pilots encounter with cross-country flight planning, among them, basically; not understanding weather well enough; inadequate fuel planning, and not checking the weather again while en route. Add to this, being overly confident the weather will improve. Overflying fuel stops, and fatigue. And the 180° turnback.

An aviation magazine, “Plane & Pilot”, published a list of common mistakes with cross- country flight planning a while back.

Here they are again:

• Not checking the weather or getting a good wx briefing
• Flying too low and CFIT.
• Inadequate preflight inspections
• Inadequate preflight planning
• Failure to use IMSAFE checklist
• Running out of fuel. Thinking Distance, not Time!
• Distractions with technology in the cockpit

My approach to cross-country flight planning

I have not flown a long cross-country in many years. Most of my flying in recent years, in my airplane, which has bare-bones avionics, and just a basic ‘6-pack’ for flight instruments, has been limited to local flying in the LA basin, for breakfast or lunch with friends. Always for fun. Seldom was any flight planning required. Just a check of the local weather, TFR’s and NOTAMs, though I would call 1-800-WXBRIEF just to avoid surprises and make sure I covered my bases. I was reluctant to take it a long distance simply because it is not well equipped for that kind of flying. Flight planning for long cross-country flights is different. Of course, it’s more involved, depending how far you go. I’ve done it, but many years ago when flying for an airline. Not recently.

But, after buying my 1970 Cessna 150, almost 2 years ago now, in October 2019, that started to change. Suddenly, I started to branch out and fly to a few more distant places, and then with friends, I was flying farther for lunches, up and down the California coast, from San Diego to Santa Barbara, for example. Then, fast forward to this year. Because of the pandemic, many activities and events had been put on hold. Then, as this year progressed, various organizations started to plan activities and events, including AirVenture, in Oshkosh. With that in mind, I began to think seriously about flying my 150 back to Oshkosh and AirVenture!

This was a BIG step for me! I had never considered this before. But I had flown enough cross-country flights to enough places in Southern California, that my confidence had grown to where flying back to Oshkosh was doable!! So, with that in mind, I started planning.

So, how to approach this? My approach? Carefully, and conservatively. I’m flying a Cessna 150, which has very limited capability. Basically, low and slow with limited range/endurance. It’s just a two-seat trainer. First, consider the airplane you are flying, and its’ capabilities. How much speed, altitude capability (turbo-charged?), and what kind of range/endurance does it have? And what is your comfort level? Seriously. How long can your bladder comfortably last? 2 hours, more or less? Depends how much coffee or water you drink.

For the 150, with about a 95-knot cruise speed, and a 22.5-gallon usable fuel capacity (~5 gal/hour), it is limited to about a 2 hour/200-mile range, give or take. And then depending on the winds, headwinds, or tailwinds, that will obviously make a BIG difference. And, in a smaller, slower airplane like a Cessna 150, headwinds or tailwinds will make more of a difference.

I don’t want to push it. The general rule of flight planning: land with at least 1 hour of fuel onboard. The FAA only requires 30 minutes for Day VFR, 45 minutes for night VFR. Ref. FAR 91.151, VFR fuel requirements. Remember, these are minimums! Again, FAA regulations are minimums. You want to exceed these. So, plan to arrive with at LEAST 1 hour of fuel on board. You will think much better with adequate fuel reserves, and you will have more options available to you if you land with more reserve fuel. That’s always a good thing!

Also, very important for this kind of flying, especially in the summertime when afternoon thunderstorms are likely, is to leave early in the morning, at daybreak, if possible (weather permitting), well before the heat of the day and convective activity, and then plan to be on the ground by mid-day, somewhere, before the afternoon thunderstorms begin.

For flight planning, I primarily used ForeFlight (FF). And for this trip back to Oshkosh, I also purchased paper charts/Sectionals (yes, you can still get them), covering the expected route of flight, as a backup. I also used the website, www.airnav.com, which is a great resource, for checking FBO’s, and local fuel prices, and can also be used to check lodging for an overnight stop.  And I also used the www.1800wxbrief.com website. So, generally speaking, I would use FF and open the flight-planning window at the top, then input my 150 and start inserting airport identifiers and navigational fixes in the flight-planning box. FF then tells me the distance, time and fuel required for each leg. So, it’s easy to see how long a given flight will take. I would plan conservatively, limiting each leg to about 1 ½ – 2 hours, or less depending on the availability of airports with fuel and services.

Using social media and more

And I actually decided to use social media for this as well. I posted the question on a Facebook airplane group: what route(s) do you recommend from the LA basin across AZ and NM on the way to AirVenture? And the answers I got were, basically from the Phoenix area, head southeast and then follow the 10 freeway across southern AZ and NM and then head north to Albuquerque, and from there It’s east to Texas, then north and east across the plain’s states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa to Wisconsin. Good information!

With that in mind, I worked out a tentative flight plan, with as many as 15 or 16 ‘legs’, that would take about 3 days, depending on the weather. I tentatively planned on 4, 2 hours legs each day, including fuel stops. I would be waiting out any bad weather in my 150, safely on the ground. I also watched the weather very closely, and decided to plan a northerly route also, just in case.

Then, as luck would have it, and as I have mentioned in a previous blog post, my 150 suddenly developed a bad cylinder (#3), and was grounded, and could not be repaired in time. So, I reached out to another pilot friend who was also planning to fly to AirVenture. He readily agreed to have me fly with him. I simply modified my flight plan for a Cessna 170 performance numbers instead, which is slightly faster, and has twice the fuel capacity. It worked out well. We decided on flying 90-minute legs, and then we stopped for fuel, food and a pit stop, as needed.

And because I had not flown this route before, I would self-brief using my iPad and ForeFlight, and would then back that up with a call to Leidos (1-800-992-7433), and talk to the weather briefer, to see what they could tell me. The idea being to avoid surprises!

We kind of followed the plan I had made, except that instead of going south and following the 10 freeway, we took a more northerly route, following US 40 instead, over northern AZ, and NM, before reaching Albuquerque, NM, (KAEG) then onto Santa Fe (KSAF) for lunch. Then we headed east, stopping in Tucumcari, NM, (KTCC) on the way to Amarillo, TX (KTDW) for the night. Then it was north and east across the plain’s states, stopping at Liberal (KLBL) and then Hays, KS, (KHYS) then Lincoln, NE, (KLNK) and then east across Iowa. It took us 2 days to get to Clinton, IA, (KCWI) and the Cessna 150 fly-in. We had a short but fun 1 ½ days there, and then a short flight northeast to Juneau/Dodge County, WI (KUNU) for the mass arrival into Oshkosh on Saturday.

 

 

 

 

On the return trip, due to frontal activity, and thunderstorms to the south of Oshkosh, we decided to delay our departure by one day. So, we left on a Sunday morning. The weather had improved considerably by then. After taking off from Oshkosh, we flew about 45 minutes to the small town of Portage, WI, (C47) and landed there for a quick fuel stop. Then onto Des Moines, IA (KDSM) for fuel and lunch, then onto Manhattan, KS, (KMHK) for the night. The next day we left early and pressed onto Dodge City, KS, (KDDC) then to Dalhart, TX, (KDHT) for lunch, and fuel, then onto Santa Fe, NM (KSAF) for the night. Finally, the 3^rd day, we departed Santa Fe, early, then onto Gallup, NM, (KGUP) for fuel, Flagstaff, AZ (KFLG) for fuel, then Lake Havasu, AZ, (KHII) where it was a sultry 109°, for lunch, then Twenty-Nine Palms (KTNP) for fuel, and finally, El Monte, CA, (KEMT) and home!

What a trip! Lots of fun, lessons learned, seeing small town America at each stop. It was fascinating to me as well as I watched the terrain changing below us on our way south and west across the country. You don’t see this when you’re in the flight levels on the airlines. I still enjoy this!

Any questions or comments on any of this? Reach me at johnmahanycfi@gmail.com

Fly safely,

John

After a yummy breakfast at the Airport Café, with my training Captain and Instructor, Bob, and his brother Tim, both of whom are retired airline captains and are now DC-3 pilots, flying Flabob Express, we went out and inspected the airplane. We did a ‘preflight’ or ‘walkaround’ as we call it. They actually kidded me about my smart decision not to wear a white ‘T’ shirt, (who knew?) under my blue Chambray sport shirt, (I was wearing a grey T shirt) because with all of the oil, grease and grime in and around the wheel wells and the engines, some of it was bound to get on my T shirt.

Aircraft with ‘radial’ engines, like the DC-3, are well known for leaking oil, not in flight, but rather on the ground, when parked. It’s just the way radial engines are. There’s usually an empty oil pan below each engine to catch the oil. And the DC-3 holds 29 gallons of oil. Remember, this airplane was designed and built back in the 1930’s. It’s pre-WWII. A much different time. So, a white ‘T’ shirt would quickly get dirty and show all the grease and oil stains! They told me I ‘passed’ the first test, not wearing a white T shirt! Yeah!!

You actually have to duck down and then carefully walk into the wheel wells, where there is a lot of stand-up headroom, and avoid bumping your head ‘ouch!’ on the oil cooler (which is directly in front of the wheel well, and is below the engine, in the slipstream) to accomplish some of the pre-flight tasks.

After this, we went back inside to an air-conditioned conference room and Bob used a PowerPoint presentation about the airplane as a point of reference, to discuss the systems. We also of course discussed flying the DC-3, various power-settings, configurations, how it handled, and how things generally work, for about 2 hours. They had sent me a manual in advance, which I had read through.

The airport we are flying out of is called Flabob Airport (KRIR), and is about 40 miles east of Long Beach, in Riverside, CA, aka the ‘inland empire’ in SoCal. It was renamed ‘Flabob’ Airport in 1943 by Flavio Madariaga and Bob Bogan, so as to avoid any confusion with the other airport in Riverside. The name of the airport was derived by combining the first three letters of their first names.

Flabob is a small airport, with one hard-surfaced runway, 3,200’ long, and is typically not very busy, thus no need for a control tower. It also has a nicely maintained grass runway, which is rare anymore, parallel to the hard-surfaced runway, for use by single engine airplanes if they so desire. Their insurance requires that they have 2 qualified pilots in the pilot’s seats when flying into or out of Flabob.

Since I’m being trained, and am not yet ‘qualified’, I was standing right behind them, in the cockpit, where a small ‘jumpseat’ would normally be, typically for training, or a ‘deadheading’ pilot or FAA Inspector, except that this DC-3 does not have a jumpseat. So I was holding on, watching them, with my headset plugged in so I can hear their communications via the intercom, and know what’s going on.

The plan was for us to takeoff out of Flabob, and then, when at a safe altitude, above say, 2,500’ feet, the co-pilot, Tim, and I would change places. Simple. He’d get out of the co-pilot seat and go take a seat back in the cabin, and I’d get in the co-pilot seat…buckle up, and FLY!! We’d then go through all of the required maneuvers, takeoffs and landings, for me to become qualified as a DC-3 co-pilot!

We finally got around to starting engines, and with radial engines, this is quite a busy process! It’s a 2-man (person?) process. This is old technology. Typical of many airliners, on an overhead panel, there are toggle switches for turning various components on/off, and among them are spring-loaded starter switches.

During the process of starting engines, one of the pilots is looking out of the open left or right-side cockpit windows and watching and counting OUTLOUD the propeller blades (1,2,3,4,5,6 etc.) as they pass by the window, so the other pilot can hear him, as the 3 bladed propellers start slowly turning through their arcs.

As your count reaches ‘6’ blades you turn on the primer switch, adding fuel, and shortly after that, at ‘9’ blades, you turn on the magneto switch, to get ‘ignition’, then combustion, and as it starts, then on the center ‘quadrant’, move the mixture lever out of ‘idle cut-off’ to the auto-rich position, and advance the throttle slightly, as needed, and hopefully it starts. Radial engines can be cantankerous. They don’t always start on cue. Then the Pratt & Whitney 1830 (2 rows of 7 cylinders), each capable of producing 1,200Hp, loudly rumbles to life, belching blue exhaust smoke and making quite a ruckus!! Then checking the other engine instruments for proper after-start indications; oil, fuel, hydraulic and vacuum pressures on their respective gauges, and then repeat for the other side.

After the engines have warmed up enough, with the oil temperatures reaching 40° and cylinder head temperatures reaching 100°, and the ‘after- start’ checklist is completed, and the crew is ready to taxi, the parking brake is released, power is slowly applied, and we start to taxi. Carefully.

This can be tricky, as the brakes must be used, but sparingly because they can heat up quickly, and the tail wheel is ‘free-castering’, meaning it can swivel 360°, or it can be locked straight (for takeoff and landing). The wings on a DC-3 are 95’, very long! They are 30’ longer than the fuselage, which is only about 65’ long. With such a wide wingspan, you have to be very careful when maneuvering on the ground to make sure the wingtips are clear of any obstacles.

It took several minutes slowly taxiing down a narrow taxiway to get to the run-up area adjacent to runway 24 at Flabob. After finally completing the run-up, and announcing our intentions on the Unicom frequency, we finally got lined up on the runway.  Bob added power for takeoff, and we were just starting to roll, when the right engine suddenly started to act up. Strangely, it did not develop full power, and the right tachometer (RPM) began fluctuating. This is not good. Hmm. So, Bob, who was in the left seat, immediately pulled the throttles back to idle and applied the brakes, and ‘rejected’ the takeoff. It was the only thing to do. No time for analysis. Just ‘abort’ the takeoff.

Just like airline ‘standard operating procedures/SOP’s’. We then taxied the remaining length of the runway, turned right, and taxied clear of the runway, and then turned right again, onto another taxiway, and then shut down, and secured the aircraft. A small ground crew came out to meet us, including the mechanic. And much discussion ensued.

We were of course surprised, because we had no reason to expect anything, but we had ‘briefed’ or discussed this possibility beforehand (every takeoff is briefed), and they handled it in a professional manner. We are not sure yet what happened. They will inspect the engine. I will have to return at later date to do the flying…and complete the training.

Of course, I am disappointed that we did not takeoff and I did not get to fly, but from a professional standpoint, I have learned long ago to take these things in stride. ‘Stuff happens’ as we say. Today, it happened, they handled it appropriately, and we go from there. I learned a lot, and I have a much better understanding of the DC-3, and technology from the 1930’s. “it’s all good’, as we say. Lessons learned. Bob and his brother, Tim, were excellent to work with. I’m looking forward to my next training flight in the DC-3!

Fly safely,

John