Safety

As the pilot population ages, one medical condition afflicts everyone and a second afflicts many. Presbyopia-the inability of the eye to accommodate for close-in focus-is a curse of middle age, setting in for most people between the ages of 40 and 50. The second condition-cataracts-afflicts most of the population, but not everyone requires treatment for it. In our October 2008 issue, we covered the leading choices for pilots facing cataract surgery. Generally, the FAA has no problem with cataract surgery, although the procedure must be reported. Longtime reader, eye surgeon and AME Dr. Steven Siepser wrote us recently to note that our October article overlooked some options for pilots facing cataract procedures. “The fourth option for cataract surgery,” he writes, “is the use of an accommodating intraocular lens combined with laser vision correction for unencumbered maximum visual performance.” Laser vision correction isn’t a treatment for cataracts, but it does reshape and change the focusing power of the cornea, usually resulting in improved vision without glasses. As with cataract surgery, the procedure passes FAA muster, requiring a report to the FAA to explain the outcome. Barring any complications, it has no impact on medical issuance. The most common form of laser correction is laser in-situ keratomileusis or LASIK. The surgeon uses a microkeratome to lift a thin flap of corneal tissue, then an excimer laser is used to reshape the underlying corneal tissue. Cataract patients can also be candidates for laser correction, according to Siepser.

Test your knowledge of aviation insurance practices. Which of the following statements is true? If you take off 250 pounds over gross, youre in violation of the FARs and your insurer wont pay any claim resulting from an accident related to the overgross condition. On a long cross country, you blithely forget a weather briefing and fly straight into the icing layer from hell. You end the flight (alive and scared) in a farmers muddy cornfield. Your insurer wont pay. Last, you forgot that your annual was due last week, but only after you landed gear up. Your insurer wont pay. The answers? Probably false, even though the fine print in your insurance contract clearly allows the insurer to deny a claim, in many circumstances-perhaps the majority-they pay the claim anyway. Why? Several reasons. One is that laws governing contracts like insurance policies from state to state and some regulators take a more customer friendly stance than do others. Second, the aviation insurance business is a small (and shrinking) segment. A company with a habit of denying claims will soon find its business going elsewhere.

Task one in looking at logbook software is figuring out what you want to log and why. If youre not detail-oriented and only care about when your last BFR or IPC was, then anything more than a Post-It on the corner of your computer monitor is probably a waste. If you need to track duty time, watch the numbers for pilots and aircraft in a school or business, track time for tax reasons or are in the grind of pursuing higher ratings, logbook software can be a godsend. We reviewed over a dozen systems to keep the numbers in the right columns. Here are our top picks to meet the variety of needs out there. This website is geared mostly to corporate users and flight departments, but has a lot of utility for private aircraft owners as well. Its strength is in tracking aircraft time as it meets all the FAA requirements for electronic logbooks for aircraft-including electronic signatures. Why is this useful? First, if your shop is willing, they can access any of your aircraft records at a glance and cut down their admin time by signing you off electronically. Second, part of the service is scanning in all your aircraft documents and backing them up (you can also upload more on your own at any time). Also, ADs and Service Bulletins are automatically retrieved by the system, warnings flags for time-limited parts and inspections pop up automatically … the list goes on.

The depressing drone of bad economic news yielded one little nugget that especially caught the attention of many owners last month: AIG, the insurance giant, was overleveraged and on the ropes. Deemed too big to allow to fail, the federal government engineered a hasty bailout package that has since ballooned in cost. What does this have to do with the AIG policy on your Skyhawk? Or your USAIG policy on your Bonanza? Is the insurance business about to tank along with the stock market? Not exactly, but thats not the same as saying AIGs well-regarded aviation insurance division hasnt been nicked by the credit crisis. It has, but only as a result of a general loss of confidence in certain businesses in general. For a detailed report on this, click on the podcast link at right, which appears on our sister publication, www.avweb.com. In that audio segment-no MP3 player required, by the way-you can hear an explanation from our aviation insurance guru, Jon Doolittle.

Emergency locator transmitters (ELTs) are one piece of equipment airplane owners love to hate. They don’t work very we’ll and they always seem to need replacement batteries. Beginning next year, the government will cease satellite monitoring of 121.5 MHz ELTs, making what didnt work that we’ll to begin with instantly all but useless. Rather than invest as much as $4000 in a new 406 MHz ELT, one option owners have asked us about is carrying one of the new 406 MHz, GPS-enhanced portable locator beacons or PLBs. Theyre relatively inexpensive, have a good record thus far and can do double duty as an ELT and a rescue-me beacon for the car, the boat or outdoor activities of all kinds. While this makes sense, there are some limitations. Read on.

The long-awaited age of the VLJ has begun. The Eclipse 500 and the Cessna 510 Mustang are the vanguard of the new movement. Eclipse is now building almost one new jet airplane each work day. Cessna delivered 45 airplanes in 2007 and is ramping up to build two Mustangs a week. There are already close to 200 VLJs out there. By this time next year that number will have more than doubled, and soon other manufacturers will be swelling the ranks of Jet-A consumers. One of the looming worries for VLJ builders and potential owner-pilots is what the cost of insuring these jets will be, or if it will be available at all for budding jet pilots.

We sometimes think that another word for hypoxia ought to be denial or, at the very least, the phrase “false sense of well-being” should morph to “self-delusion.” In the aviation press, we have beaten the hypoxia topic to a pink pulp, because it lends itself so readily to the pointing of a boney finger at the profoundly stupid things pilots sometimes do. In this regard, hypoxia is the multi-headed beast-we can be dumb about ignoring its dangers, dumb about ignoring training meant to mitigate the risk and really dumb when it actually happens. And how often is that? We don’t really know, because even if an accident is caused by hypoxia, the post-mortem may offer only speculative conclusions. In many GA accidents, the true cause may drift downwind with the smoke from the wreckage simply because light aircraft forensics are so inadequate.

For aviation insurers, its the best of times and the worst of times. In many traditional parts of the aircraft insurance market, an overabundance of capital and new insurers is forcing premiums-especially those for corporate airplanes-down to new lows. At the same time, buyers are snapping up new airplanes of all sizes faster than manufacturers can build them. And the two new market areas of the decade, Very Light Jets and Light Sport Aircraft, are beginning to take off.In some ways, Light Sport Airplanes are an insurers dream. If the glass-half-full guys are even remotely right, there will be shoals of them. And from an underwriters viewpoint, theyre attractive because they have what insurers call “low severity.” Severity is essentially the average cost of an accident.

Heres a surprising statistic: Of the just under 600,000 pilots listed on the FAAs records 90,000-or about one in six-are flight instructors. How many actually actively teach? Probably under 50 percent, but instructor certificates are perishable items and the poor slugs who own them must renew them every 24 months. There are various ways to do this, but the most popular seems to be the flight instructor refresher clinic, or FIRC. For decades, these courses meant a three-day weekend sitting in a stuffy conference room with a bunch of other renewing CFIs in a ritual butt-numbing marathon. The dawn of the internet brought the option of grinding through 16 hours of online training sitting alone in front of a computer. All the drudgery without the camaraderie. Aint technology grand? But are these courses any good? Are they even tolerable? We looked at courses offered by American Flyers, Gleim Publications and a collaboration between Jeppesen and AOPA. Each approaches the online challenge differently, but they can be compared in three key areas: content, organization and price.

In the days before even modest sedans had six airbags, vehicle sniffing radar and kiddie seats that could double as nuclear containment devices, car guy Lee Iacocca once famously said safety doesnt sell, style does. Four decades later, in the airplane realm, safety apparently does sell, given the success of Cirrus with its full-airplane parachute system.

If you fly for fun or for a living and you have shopped for life insurance, you probably heard the agent draw a breath when he learned you were a pilot. If you fly, you pay more for life insurance. A lot more. My own experience in buying life insurance is typical. After asking my age, weight, whether I smoked and a number of other health-related questions, the agent quoted me the companys most attractive rates, with all the appropriate disclaimers.

Like everyone else in general aviation, we often pine for the technology thats standard equipment in cars. But for reasons related to economics and the federal government, these take their time trickling down to little airplanes. One of these technologies is airbag restraint systems.