Safety

Your 45th birthday is a memory. You caught yourself squinting at the gauges on a recent approach to minimums. The near-vision test on your last medical? You passed it-barely. You have presbyopia, or old eyes. This term probably made sense 120 years ago, when 40 was old, but the term persists. Its the result of the loss of elasticity in the crystalline lens in the eye, which allows us to zoom focus on near objects. Because its the lens getting stiffer, not the focusing muscles getting weak, no amount of exercise will resolve the problem. The problem gets worse with age, no matter what you do. To better understand your options for progressive lenes, take a look at your vision in general. If youre nearsighted and wearing distance-only glasses, you may have excellent near vision without your glasses and be more comfortable without glasses for reading than with progressives. That works fine at home, but not in the cockpit, so progressives are still a necessity.

Insurance rates for most general aviation aircraft are lower than they have been in many years and some industry insiders believe that we are on the brink of a sea change. Even in this wildly cyclical business, old timers agree that this “soft” market is the deepest and longest lasting that theyve ever seen. With prices as low as they are, this is a challenging time for underwriters. Predictions about where the market will go, how far and how quickly run the gamut.

If youre absolutely determined to kill yourself in an airplane, you’ll have to find a better way to do it than gassing yourself with carbon monoxide. The world is so awash with CO detectors across a range of prices and capabilities that we cant imagine many owners havent at least considered these gadgets. And the good news is that all of them work quite well, even, you might be surprised to know, the $4 cheapie stick-on detectors that all your friends tell you are a joke. (They arent.) How real is the risk of your exhaust or a perforated heater doing you in? Its real enough, although not the level of risk that should keep you awake at night. On the other hand, given the choices in detector technology, there’s no reason you cant eliminate the risk entirely or at least tamp it down.

Its easy to pick out a couple of pilots talking: Look for the folks bending their hands through the air trying to recreate a visual for that death-defying turn to final immediately followed by three consecutive touchdowns from one landing attempt. Technology can now put more fact into these fish stories or offer a better way to debrief exactly what happened right before the CFI hollered, “My airplane!” These three solutions hit different, but overlapping, missions. None are cheap, but all do the job they set out for. The NFlightCam is small and to-the-point, so we will be too: The thing works great. The camera is actually a ContourHD 1080 wearable camcorder thats less than four inches long and weighs about five ounces. NFlightCam replaces the standard mic with a circuit and cable to record cabin audio from the intercom. Thats plugged into any headset jack and can be connected inline so you can use a headset in the same outlet.

If the basic idea behind the ELT-you crash, it tells the world where you are-was laudable, the performance of this technology has been anything but. Even the new-generation of 406 MHz ELTs havent proved much better and are hardly flying off the shelves. From this conundrum emerges a niche market for portable satellite vehicle tracking devices and personal messengers. This technology has been around for awhile in the transportation industry, but lately it has made inroads into the sporting and outdoor markets with a device called the Spot Satellite GPS Messenger, which recently introduced its second generation model. Another company, the New Zealand-based Spidertracks, has been marketing its own satellite tracker called the Spider S3.

Denial can be a useful thing when it comes to getting the job done. Ive done my fair share of flying overwater and out of gliding distance to land, and just rationalized that the odds were slim of ditching and Id figure it out when it happened. The reality was that I didnt have a clue what being immersed in an aircraft would be like. I had no plan, and that meant that if the aircraft did anything other than stop upright and floating, I probably was going to the bottom wearing a 3000-pound aluminum suit.The point of egress training like we sampled at Survival Systems Inc. is to give you that plan.

Part of the grand promise of Light Sport aircraft and the Sport Pilot license was it would reinvigorate flight training, bringing busloads of new pilot starts attracted to cheaper flying with fewer requirements (like a medical certificate). Soon after the dream of LSAs in the hands of students made some hard landings in reality we started seeing complaints that light sport designs were too lightly built for the rigors of flight training. Now that were several years into the process and have some real numbers to work with, weve decided to give this a closer look.

From our perch, we see high-priced 406-MHz ELT interest bottoming out. Maybe its because Transport Canada has backed off on an initial threat of mandating 406 MHz beacons for any aircraft operating in Canadian airspace-at least for now. This mandate was a driving, if shallow, motivation for U.S. operators to drop a couple of grand on new ELT technology. But even without the Canadian mandate, going 406 is something we all should plan for at some point. Many owners are in denial that distress signals from old 121.50 MHz beacons arent satellite-monitored anymore, cant be tied with on-board GPS for transmitting wreckage coordinates or even that the device in the tail might be over 40 years old. There are a handful of good reasons to invest in a 406 ELT and some well-worn excuses not to. Maybe you always fly IFR, or never in the sticks, or always in earshot of a listening control tower. But given the improvements in 406 technology, we think the investment is worthy.

In a 2007 study going back more than 50 years, a Boeing safety group identified inflight loss of control as the number one source of airline fatalities. The 2008 Nall Report tells a similar story for general aviation. Loss of control inflight, or LOC-I in the argot of those who study aircraft accidents, includes a host of hazards ranging from garden-variety stalls to control surface hardovers and encounters with wake turbulence. LOC- I accidents happen to the spectrum of civilian pilots, from students to airline veterans. The stubbornness of LOC-I as the single largest cause of fatal accidents has a great deal to do with the way that we train. While the airlines have incorporated a number of loss-of-control scenarios in their training, general aviation hasnt really addressed the issue.

The good news about aircraft insurance is that for most owners, insurance has never been more affordable or more available. The bad news is that most people in the business think that the pendulum is about to swing back the other way. What got us here? Ironically, the 911 attacks had something to do with it as does the current economic malaise. Demand is slack, there are more providers than ever and companies are willing to deal. But, as always, it wont last. Following the 9/11 attacks, insurance rates for most aircraft increased dramatically. The amount of the increases depended upon the market segment, with many big iron operators seeing their rates double overnight. Most light aircraft owners saw less of an impact, but as a result, 2002 and 2003 were some of the most profitable years for the industry in recent history.

The first iterations of Fltplan.com had a clunky, Web 0.5 interface, but it was fast, flight plan filing was reliable and it sported a couple of unique features, such as seeing recently-assigned ATC routing between the airports. It quickly became a favorite of corporate flight departments and freight dogs. The user interface has improved (somewhat). While it still caters somewhat to the corporate flight world, we think Fltplan.com is the best all-in-one website to create and file a flight plan and grab FAA-legal weather. To really use the website, you’ll need to create a (free) login name, and appropriate aircraft and pilot profiles. This is a quick process where you can select from a long list of existing aircraft profiles or customize your own. With that done, you can either create a quick airport-to-airport plan or enter something with custom routing. Seeing recent ATC routes is a great plus, but if youre traveling far you’ll likely see jet routes rather than Victor airways. Once youve built a quick plan, you can see headwind/tailwind factors and times at different altitudes. That data also appears in a nav log if you print one, so you can refigure times we’ll if your planned altitude doesnt work out in the real world. Additional slick features include tight integration with departure and approach charts, a Takeoff and Landing Data (TOLD) card, a system to fax the destination FBO directly and a well-organized weather page. Flight plans can also be saved in a format for upload into your G1000 or GNS 430. The site will also do flight tracking and offers some fee-based services such as eAPIS filings.

At a Wall Street analysts forum in 2007, the CEO of Ballistic Recovery Systems, Larry Williams, told the audience why he thought the all-plane parachute made sense: “In 2005, there were just over 1600 [accidents] involving general aviation airplanes in this country that resulted in 556 deaths. Now, if you offset that with the fact that were saving 199 people, all of the sudden, parachutes start to make sense.” Except that its not that simple. As of this writing, BRS has claimed to having saved 233 lives, but thats counting every occupant on every successful parachute deployment as a saved life. A quick look at the record shows that death was far from a certainty in many of the parachute deployments. A subtler knot in the logic that BRS has saved 233 people is that having a parachute installed affects the delicate balance of risk versus utility in aircraft. We know from experience and interviews that there are pilots who will take on conditions such as rough weather with the chute that they wouldnt take on otherwise. We can only guess that some of the CFIT accidents in the Cirrus were influenced by the faulty assumption that the pilot will always have enough time to pop the bddn chute before auguring in. But the risk equation is more complex than that. Situations such as single-engine at night over mountains or low-visibility takeoffs are risky only because the consequences of an emergency are high, even though the likelihood of failure is extremely low. Having an ace-in-the-hole to cover that unlikely event will shift the go/no-go call for some pilots. We believe those pilots will get more out of their airplane with a negligible increase in real risk. So BRS may be overstating its positive impact on lifesaving, but also understating its positive impact on aircraft utility.