I waited all year for my two weeks of home leave. But things got truly toxic at the office, many folks were off fishing or cruising, and I had to go back to work. Meetings abroad on Christmas week, conference calls on New Year’s Eve.
I did fly for two days, with friends. In the first week of 2012, I called Carlo and told him I was tired of flying with passengers. I wanted my copilot.
On the ground, Carlo is not the most graceful person (some of his university students may dispute that). I tease him about being the second clumsiest person I know.
In the airplane, Carlo morphs into an artist. He starts as a conductor — meticulously procedural as he tunes the airplane for flight. At takeoff, Carlo slips past the curtain of ground haze and ascends to an aerial stage, bands of light and shadow wheeling around the cockpit.
Responding to his fingertips, the airplane pirouettes, the engine sings, the instruments wind through orchestrated scales and bars. The horizon dips, leans and rolls. Straight and level is for train drivers; Carlo and I FLY.
In past years we pushed north to the Cordilleras and tracked coast-to-coast across Luzon. This year we performed our repertoire at home. Polishing, not exploring. Stalls, over and over until they became pitch-perfect poetry. Arcing chandelles, twisting 400 feet higher in a single 180-degree turn.
For two days we exercised the airplane vigorously, getting 720 kilograms of aluminum, fuel and father-son airborne from just half the runway. An hour of aerobatic adagios and petite allegros specially choreographed for the Cessna 152 followed. Then, as an encore, we touched down softly on the threshold, wingtip vortices applauding.
All too soon, the flying days were over. It was time to go back to the crush of email, conference calls, lesson plans and research papers.
Memories of our flights are starting to fade as I return to Bangkok. They will never leap off these pages as intensely memorable flights, laced with glamour or punctuated with drama.
Instead, our aerial art, nearly a month ago now, was a tapestry of emerald green rice fields, friendly radio calls from pilot friends and readers who recognized our voices on 118.70 Mhz, and our own giddy laughter as we banked into 2G turns 1,500 feet high, a million miles above Earth.
“I’ll do the next one, Dad.” ”I have it, Carl.” ”Dad, I’m already on it.” ”My airplane.” ”I have control, Dad.” ”Let go, Carl … .“
So I thought I would honor the memories of those flying days as healing days. Father and son days. The medicine will wear away, in the years to come.
“I’ll take the left seat, Carl.” ”Dad, we’ll put you in the right seat.” ”Left seat. And call me ‘Captain.” ”Here you go, Dad, right seat, don’t kick the wheelchair.” ”This is the copilot’s seat, this is for wimps!” ”Yes, Dad.“
Posted from Bangkok, January 22, 2012 Chinese New Year! Gong Xi Fa Cai 恭禧發財
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Our English Professor Pilot writer has a new camera. Clearly, he has been enjoying it. This is the guy who looked at airplane books all day at the age of 1, and who learned to say “SR-71 Blackbird” before he could say “bookswagen”.
Somewhere in this city, there is a brilliant artist whose name nobody knows.
He may be rich or poor. He may be one person or a whole group. He may be a she. All that we know is that his artwork adorns jeepneys across Manila.
One hardly expects to find artistry among the noisy, notoriously polluting, and haphazardly driven avatars of Manila’s road scene. But it is there if you care to look. We’re used to thinking of jeepney art as slapdash and ramshackle, but the decorations on the sides of our jeepneys have changed. Some time in the past ten years, somebody decided to put some professionalism into it – the art is surprisingly well done in many cases.
There are the usual religious figures and scantily clad women, often hilariously side by side, but increasingly, there are replicas of art from movies, scenes from nature, and even images from video games. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the provocatively dressed vixen on the jeepney beside me was a World of Warcraft night elf.
Because it is a visual medium intended for the masses, and people tend to think visually, jeepney art is a reflection of what urban Filipinos are thinking about. So it’s a heartwarming experience for me to see, between the mynxes and madonnas, the occasional airplane.
Posted from Manila, Friday the 13th, January, 2012.
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Carlo and I flew our brains out in the last two days of my home leave. People would ask, “Where are you going?” We would say, “Up.”
We worked the airplane hard. Short/soft field takeoffs and landings, mild aerobatic workouts in strong winds, stall series.
Woodland airfield. Home of the Angeles City Flying Club. Magical Never-Never Land. A friend, Hagee, said it best: “Ah, Woodland – chock full o’ pilots and nary a Captain among them, blessed be.”
Counting the extensions and overrun, Woodland has about 670 meters of grass runway, right up to the concrete wall that could rudely end anyone’s day.
It’s the combination that student pilots often theorize about in flying school –- Short and soft field. A Real Man’s takeoff. Special techniques, and all that. We are taught the theory in school, practiced it once or twice. Then the instructor checks that box, and we never think about it for years. Until one day we are on wet grass with a tailwind.
One day, Carlo and I loaded ourselves (170 kg of father and son), 98 liters of avgas, plus books, laptops and flight bags into the airplane.
Tailwind, of course. And wet grass, like Medusa’s tresses – clutching, clinging, dragging wet grass.
The airplane never got to flying speed. Near the end of the runway, Carlo and I inhaled deeply and sucked the airplane into the air. We missed the concrete wall only because the earth’s rotation and the moon’s gravity, plus clean living and a good heart, shrank the wall as we staggered by.
Carlo and I reviewed our short/soft field procedures with Jay, the resident pessimist at Woodland. (Pessimism is good in aviation, cynicism even better.) Carlo and I worked the technique until we could get the airplane airborne at max gross with a ground run of just 360 meters.
That exactly matches what the Cessna 152 Pilot’s Operating Handbook says for our density altitude, no wind and a dry grass runway.
Cessna did that book right. Not bad for a 33-year old airplane.
Yesterday, solo with full fuel, I was off in 250 meters. I surprised myself, the airplane, and Jenny the hangar dog, who was waiting for me to lift off abeam Hangar 3. That’s how good looks like – 250 meters.
“Note 1: Short Field technique as specified in Section 4.”
We’ve cracked that code.
Full throttle as we roll onto the runway. There are birds here that nest in humps and burrows on the grass. So we lift the fragile nose wheel right at the start.
At Vx, 55 knots, the airplane lifts off by itself. Magic.
Airborne. But there’s more work to do! The airplane is in ‘ground effect’. There is extra lift and less induced drag here, due to the fluid dynamics between the wing and the ground.
If we climb now, we will lose the extra cushion of lift and settle back to the ground. Think about it. It’s like landing again, but at the far end of the runway. Remember the concrete wall.
So when the airplane levitates into the seductive lift of ground effect, we lower the nose and skim the runway. We flash by Jenny, the village idiot who asserts her canine territory by running to the runway when an airplane goes by.
We accelerate in the embrace of the ground effect, pushing hard for Vy – best rate of climb speed.
At Vy, 67 knots in this airplane, we pull back to climb.
And boy, do we climb! We can sustain 700 feet per minute to 300 feet. Flaps up, and voila! We are flying.
Posted from Manila, Jan 6, 2012.
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That is the real danger: this faulty reaction to the stall, rather than the stall itself. It is quite rare that a pilot is killed simply because he stalled. But it happens with tragic monotony that a pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.
– Wolfgang Langewiesche
I am disappointed at how pilots get very defensive over Air France 447. Pilots who have never flown a stall even in primary training insist they are well-trained, and that this could never happen to them.
It’s like we are talking about different accidents altogether.
AF447 stalled and fell, truly out of control, for nearly 4 minutes. During nearly all of those 4 minutes, the stall warning alarms never stopped. A synthetic voice called out “Stall, Stall, Stall!” and an irritating ‘cricket’ rattled loudly. The pilots inexplicably ignored those warnings the entire time, and experimented with various control inputs with increasing befuddlement.
An Airbus pilot wrote on PPRUNE that the A330 is not certified for stalls, so they don’t practice stalls. And simulators don’t replicate stalls well, so pilots train only up to stick-shaker, the initial onset of a stall. They train for prevention, not recovery. It’s like training to ski by standing at the top of the slope, then going home.
A friend sent an article to me that reconstructs the last few minutes in the cockpit. That gripping narrative paints a distressing tale of what went on in the cockpit, based on the recovered CVR.
Two key facts stand out:
1. The pitot ice lasted less than a minute. After that, the crew had all the information they needed to fly the airplane normally.
2. The airplane was flying normally when the autopilot disconnected. The airplane flew normally until the crew intervened with aft stick.
Yes, there was an initial instrument fault. But an airplane flying at a normal 500 knots is still flying at 500 knots even if the airspeed indicator stops. If the pilots sat on their hands and reflected for a few moments, they would be alive today.
But the youngest of the pilots pulled the airplane into a steep climb. He held the stick back nearly the entire time. He never mentioned what he was doing.
The article calls out a key point:
3. The A330′s control systems are asynchronous.
The side sticks on an Airbus are “asynchronous”— they move independently. “If the person in the right seat is pulling back on the joystick, the person in the left seat doesn’t feel it,” says Dr. David Esser, a professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Robert [the PNF] has no idea that Bonin [the PF] has continued to pull back on the side stick.
From his [jump]seat, Dubois [the Captain] is unable to infer from the instrument displays in front of him why the plane is behaving as it is. The critical missing piece of information: someone has been holding the controls all the way back for virtually the entire time. No one has told Dubois, and he hasn’t thought to ask.
The article leaves no doubt as to what the immediate cause of the crash was.
02:10:55 (Robert)Putain!
The cockpit’s avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error.
If Bonin were to let go of the controls, the nose would fall and the plane would regain forward speed. But because he is holding the stick all the way back, the nose remains high and the plane has barely enough forward speed for the controls to be effective. As turbulence continues to buffet the plane, it is nearly impossible to keep the wings level.
It is not until 3 minutes and 33 seconds after the stall warning that the pilot flying, Bonin, finally reveals what he has been doing:
02:13:40 (Bonin)Mais je suis à fond à cabrer depuis tout à l’heure! But I’ve had the stick back the whole time!
At last, Bonin tells the others the crucial fact whose import he has so grievously failed to understand himself.
02:13:42 (Captain)Non, non, non… Ne remonte pas… non, non. No, no, no… Don’t climb… no, no.
Just 48 seconds after the Captain finally realized what Bonin was doing, the aircraft hit the South Atlantic, and everyone died.
Third on my list of illustrative accidents was the fatal crash of a flying school’s Cessna 152. The instructor and his student made a low pass over my home airfield. Fellow members at Angeles City Flying Club told me that the airplane flew a low approach over runway 08, then pitched up steeply at the departure end. The left wing dropped, and the airplane yawed and rolled left to a vertical dive, just as power came back on.
The crash, a few meters north of the runway fence, was catastrophic and non-survivable. The instructor pilot was well-liked and respected by his peers.
I don’t know where the investigation is on that one. The crash site, beside our runway, is a macabre reminder to me that lessons are yet to be learned to give some meaning to that loss.
Then there was another crash. This one was captured on video.
Posted from Manila, December 30, 2011.
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We can’t believe it either – it’s the night before Christmas Eve. Where did time go? It’s been three months since our last post! And there I was promising myself to do at least one a week.
A hopeless task.
Carlo is teaching more classes at the Ateneo de Manila University. Research writing, English poetry and drama, 120 freshmen in all. He is also in his last semester of course work for his master’s degree in literary and cultural studies.
Me? These past four months have been the most taxing, most grinding months of my 33-year career. A double-hatted role covering 12 time zones, the occasional crisis (or six), and very little time to fly.
We did get the airplane in fine shape this year. A brand new propeller, a sparkling new avionics fit, new instrument panel. Our stories have outstripped the time available to write about them. I still owe you stories from last year!
We’ll catch up, we promise. In the meantime, our best wishes to all for a truly Merry Christmas, and a New Year full of joyful journeys and happy homecomings!
Posted on December 24, 2011, from Manila
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It is one of the most compelling mysteries of modern aviation. An airliner and 228 people vanished in the South Atlantic. This isn’t Agatha Christie stuff. The killer is not the Professor with a lead pipe in the conservatory of a 19th century Nile river schooner.
The technology on an Airbus A330 is so advanced that the airplane itself streamed digital messages to a maintenance center in France, a continent away. The airplane, in distress, was robotically reporting its death.
We have surveillance and weather satellites patrolling the sky, instant global communications and radar coverage of all but the most remote parts of the world. Airliners like the big A330 shouldn’t disappear into thin air. With all the digital dandruff in the ether, there is no ‘thin air’ anymore.
Actually, ‘thin air’ was part of the problem.
After two years the mystery seemed destined to stay unsolved forever. But in a stunning turn last May, the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders were found and recovered from the ocean floor. After two years on an abyssal plain four kilometers deep, the ‘black box’ data was intact.
The technical hairs are still being split by aviation voyeurs in PPRuNE and similar street forums. But the basic story is straightforward.
The airplane was cruising at 35,000 feet in mild turbulence, over 10 kilometers above the earth. A discrepancy among the three airspeed indicators occurred. The autopilot’s mechanical brain could not tell which airspeed was correct, so it automatically disconnected to prevent harm.
“Human Pilot, you have superior intelligence, you fly the airplane!”
The airplane continued to fly normally. The airplane did not care whether airspeed was correctly reported or not. Its wings were fat with lift and quite happy with what the actual airspeed was.
The pilot flying, the most junior member of the flight crew, took control and pulled back on his side stick, sending the airplane into a zoom climb at 7.000 feet per minute, twice the climb rate on takeoff.
We don’t know why the pilot climbed. (In Death by Ignorance, we had a diagram of a Spitfire climbing steeply to attack a Messerschmitt. But that was war.)
As it climbed, the wings’ angle of attack (shown at 11 degrees above) neared the critical angle where the wing stops flying as drag overcomes lift. Also, at those altitudes the air is very thin. The A330 was surfing a thinning airstream.
But an airplane does not care how close it is to stalling. It just either flies or does not fly.
At 38,000 feet the airplane ran out of momentum, the airflow across the wings diminished, and the airplane wanted to descend. If the pilots had let it, the airplane would have simply nosed down and flown downward. This is not a problem. Flying downward is not the same as falling downward.
But the pilots kept the nose up. As the airplane mushed down nose high, the angle of attack between the steeply inclined wings and the oncoming airflow instantly became 35 degrees or more. As we have seen, the wings cannot fly like this. The wings stalled, and the airplane fell.
They were not doomed. They just had to lower the nose, let the wings fly again, and then recover.
With the stall horn blaring for over 50 seconds, the pilots never verbally noted or acknowledged the stall warning horn.
Later, the pilots’ union attacked the airspeed indication fault that caused the autopilot to disconnect in the first place. As the union, Air France and Airbus hardened their positions, no one noticed the union was whining about pilots having to fly the airplane.
I thought that is what pilots do. Fly the airplane.
The original airspeed ‘disagree’ fault lasted just 54 seconds. But the pilots kept the airplane stalled all the way to the ocean, three and a half minutes and 38,000 feet down. The angle of attack was always 35 to 60 degrees. Except for brief, tentative stabs, the pilots held the controls full nose-up.
But all they had to do was lower the nose.
They hit the Atlantic ocean at nearly 11,000 feet per minute. Normally airliners touch down on a runway at less than 600 feet per minute. The impact was catastrophic and unsurvivable.
Peter Garrison, a respected technical writer in FLYING magazine, provided insight even as he asked a question, in last month’s issue.
Reactions ran a predictable gamut from incredulity about the crew’s actions (for stalling the airplane in the first place and then failing to recognize the stall and recover) to sympathy with the crew (darkness, turbulence, bafflement, a cacophony of incomprehensible and contradictory warnings), and then to the controversy over automation, human-machine interfaces and the devaluation of basic airmanship among line pilots. Pending the release of the full CVR transcript, however, the one great question that loomed over the discussion could not be answered: “What were they thinking?”
The Cockpit Voice Recorder transcript has since been released.* The crew’s final minutes are distressing to dwell on now, since I am writing this aboard an airliner over Germany at that very same altitude of 38,000 feet.
In the next and last article on this series on three accidents, we will see what they were thinking.
Posted from Bruxelles, Belgium.
September 17, 2011
References – fascinating reading
The “New Findings” update which summarized first findings from the recovered ‘black boxes.’ An eye-opener, it was the first real data from on board the airplane. It’s only 4 pages, and the key points are on page 3, repeated as a comment below this post. Released May 27, 2011.
I wanted to re-post this, to clean up some typos and to add a couple of stories. Today is another gift.
I’ve often wondered how magical it would have been to take my Dad flying. He is long gone, so I will never find out.
He only ever took one trip by airplane. I would have wanted to pay him back for all the airplane stories he told me when I was a boy. Sons crave their fathers’ pride.
I’m an only son, third in a line of eldest sons. I have three sisters. Brothers were a big mystery. I envied my Ateneo classmates who had brothers. When my third sister was born, I ran upstairs so no one would see me.
But I did grow up with three remarkable men, all great storytellers!
My Dad had one brother, Carlos. When I was young, Uncle Carlos, affable and easygoing, would come to our house and raid our refrigerator. He paid for his meals with tales about James Bond and hand grenades. I was wide-eyed.
Uncle Carlos left the Philippines on a passenger ship. My family stood on the pier, and he tossed us paper ribbons from the deck of the ship. He held his ends of the ribbons, and we held our ends. As the ship left the pier, the ribbons parted. I watched the ship sail past the breakwater at Manila Bay.
My grandfather was an accountant — obsessive and disciplined. Worked for decades at Tabacalera and never learned to smoke. In retirement, he raised chickens and turkeys. I once watched him ink onto his ledger, in painstakingly precise script,
Two chickens killed by rat.
In the same precise writing, on stark white cards, he wrote stories. Some were stories about how to torture grandma. But most were stories about my Dad. He once wrote me a jewel about how my Dad used to recite the Our Father backwards at the Ateneo. “Amen. Evil from us deliver and, temptation into not us lead, … .”
“Hoy, Rivera! What are you doing? Two hours of ‘post’!”
His best story was about my Dad’s graduation at the Ateneo High School, after the war ended. They were still recovering from the devastation. My Dad had to walk to the Ateneo. My grandfather could not go, because he had to work.
At the graduation, my Dad received his diploma, and a medal. In those days, a boy scout waited at the foot of the stage with a tray on which the medal lay. The boy scout would escort the graduate to his proud parents, who would take the medal from the tray and pin it on their son’s chest. (This tradition continues to this day.)
My Dad went down the stage, grabbed his medal from the tray, pocketed it, and told the shocked boy scout to “Get lost!” A Jesuit priest saw this and told him in tough Jesuit terms to get his blankety-blank butt over to his parents with the medal. My Dad was about to protest that his father was at work, then there appeared his father! My grandfather had walked all the way from Tabacalera, where he worked, to be at my Dad’s graduation.
My Dad told me lots of stories. During World War II, he saw airplanes diving down from the sky to attack ships in Manila Bay. It was not like the movies, he said. Not like beads falling off a string. No, they poured down en masse, and some were hit, fluttering down like leaves.
He told me of a P-38 Lightning fighter that flashed past, just 20 feet above the rice fields at Pagbilao, Quezon, looking for enemy soldiers. The pilot — a real pilot! — waved at my Dad.
My Dad died suddenly when I was 19. He was 50. The first storyteller to go.
Heartbroken, my grandfather lived but a few more years. He never wrote me another story again, on those stark white cards. The second storyteller to go.
In America, Uncle Carlos’ daughter Karla overheard him tell a visitor about some risky surgery. Uncle Carlos didn’t realize that his daughter, born in the US, understood their Filipino language.
Later that week, that same visitor came to see Karla at school. Her father, my affable, easygoing Uncle Carlos, had died on an operating table. Carlos did not tell her about his open heart surgery.
The last storyteller was gone.
I was the only paternal grandson. If I had no sons, my family name would die with me. But I have three sons!
I tell them that if my Dad had lived long enough to retire, he would have waited for them at school everyday, to buy them ice cream and tell them stories while taking them home.
Thirty years after my Dad died, I earned my pilot’s license. My biggest regret was that I could never take my Dad flying. I wondered how magical that would have been.
I also wondered if I would live longer than my Dad. I was 46. If I lived past 50, the age my Dad died, I would take every day as a gift.
I knew then exactly what my Dad would have felt, if he could have flown with me. The magic overflowed in my heart.
When Carlo flew me as his first passenger, a Dad flew with his son. The circle closed.
Carlo’s first passenger, Father’s Day, 2007
Look at me in the picture. My Dad died when he was that age. What a short life he lived. Every year, every day, is a gift.
Stories are important. After our years run out, the stories are all that are left. Without an oral history, everything that was us is a flash in the universe.
As I watch my three sons grow up as tightly-knit brothers, my cup runneth over with stories.
Imagine the stories the grandsons would have! I can’t wait.
Stall. A fundamental flight fail, yet so shrouded in myth that few pilots can describe it correctly. It takes but a few seconds to recover from a stall. But it is now apparent that many pilots out there cannot even recognize a stall.
The airplane doesn’t care if you don’t understand. It will just kill you.
This is a scary story.
Aside from the nutcase conspiracies about aliens abducting airliners, there is little disagreement about the Colgan Air crash in February, 2009.
The Captain failed five previous performance and proficiency checks. The First Officer, paid “food stamp wages,” lived with her parents in Seattle, Washington. She hitchhiked on airliners across the entire United States to report for work in Newark, New Jersey, the night before the crash.
The pilots squatted in the airline crew lounge the whole night and day before the flight, a violation of airline policy. Hotels and ‘crash pads’ were expensive.
At 10:10pm local time on February 12, 2011, Colgan Air flight 3407 was descending past 5,000 feet on approach to its destination, Buffalo, NY. The one-hour hop from Newark was punctuated by the Captain’s one-sided chit-chat about jobs, pay, air traffic control.
They were landing in 10 minutes.
Cockpit voice recorder transcript. “Hot-1” = Captain’s hot mic, “Hot-2” = First Officer’s hot mic, * and # = expletives deleted. CAM = cockpit area mic.
22:10:22.6 HOT-2 is that ice on our windshield?
22:10:25.6 HOT-1 got it on [the wings on] my side. you don’t have yours?
22:10:28.7 HOT-1 * [sound of whistle]
22:10:30.5 CAM [sound of click]
22:10:32.3 HOT-2 oh yeah oh it’s lots of ice.
22:10:47.5 HOT-1 oh yeah that’s the most I’ve seen — most ice I’ve seen on the leading edges in a long time. in a while anyway I should say.
22:10:51.4 HOT-2 oh *.
22:10:57.7 HOT-2 yeah that’s another thing. all the guys— @ came in to our when we interviewed and he said oh yeah you’ll all be upgraded in six months into the Saab and blah ba blah ba blah and I’m thinking you know what. flying in the northeast I’ve sixteen hundred hours. all of that in Phoenix how much time do you think actual I had or any in in ice. I had more actual time on my first day of IOE than I did in the sixteen hundred hours I had when I came here.
22:11:21.0 HOT-1 [sound of laughter]
The First Officer had never had ice before. Ice changes the shape of the wing.
22:11:31.5 HOT-1 but uh as a matter of fact I got hired with about six hundred and twenty five hours here.
22:11:37.6 HOT-2 oh wow.
22:11:39.4 HOT-1 uh.
22:11:39.9 HOT-2 that’s not much for uh back when you got hired.
22:11:42.5 HOT-1 no but uh out of that six and a quarter two hundred fifty hours was uh part one twenty one turbine. multi engine turbine.
22:11:50.0 HOT-2 oh that’s right yeah.
22:11:54.3 HOT-2 no but all these guys are complaining they’re saying you know how we were supposed to upgrade by now and they’re complaining I’m thinking you know what? I really wouldn’t mind going through a a winter in the northeast before I have to upgrade to captain.
Just 45 seconds later, on final approach, the First Officer said,
22:12:05.0 HOT-2 I’ve never seen icing conditions. I’ve never de-iced. I’ve never seen any— I’ve never experienced any of that. I don’t want to have to experience that and make those kinds of calls. you know I’dve freaked out. I’dve have like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash.
Less than five minutes later they were dead.
What happened?
The National Transportation Safety Board made a video based on data from the flight data recorder, or ‘black box’. Remember our last article, Death by Ignorance.
When the wing is inclined too steeply against the airflow, it no longer rides the oncoming air.
With the wing dragging in the airflow, flight becomes impossible, the wing stalls, and the airplane starts to fall.
Do the right thing –-> point the airplane down. Lower the nose, reduce the angle of attack, restore the airflow over the wings, and fly again.
Then there is Langewiesche, in 1944.
A pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.
They had the autopilot on, with ‘Altitude Hold’ engaged, 2,300 feet selected. The autopilot would hold the airplane at 2,300 feet, no matter what. That was their last clearance from Air Traffic Control – maintain 2,300 feet until lined up with the runway, still several miles away.
APP = Approach Control, RDO-2 = First Officer radio mic
22:15:13.5 APP Colgan thirty four zero seven three miles from KLUMP turn left heading two six zero maintain two thousand three hundred until established localizer. cleared ILS approach runway two three.
22:15:22.2 RDO-2 left two sixty two thousand three hundred ’til established and cleared ILS two three approach Colgan thirty four zero seven.
The autopilot does not fly an airplane. All the autopilot can do is point the airplane – left, right, up, down – to hold altitude and heading. The Dash-8 has no auto throttles. Power management is up to the human pilot.
At 22:16:00 they were at 185 knots (nautical miles per hour) of airspeed, level at 2,310 feet. Six seconds later they lowered the landing gear. The drag of the wheels reduced airspeed. The pilots did not add power.
From this point until they hit the ground, just 47 seconds elapsed.
Just 10 seconds later their speed had dropped to 157 knots.
From our last article:
If the airplane slows, the oncoming airflow weakens, and the wing descends. It wants to fly. It was designed to fly. If it gets very slow, it will fly downward.
Unless a pilot tries to make it do the impossible.
The pilots had set the autopilot to hold altitude at 2,300 feet. As the airplane slowed, the autopilot pointed the wings higher to keep the airplane from descending. The pilots still did not add power.
Ten seconds later the speed was down to 134 knots, the low speed warning ‘barber pole’ came out, the wing was running out of airflow, and the autopilot pulled the nose up even higher to try to maintain altitude. The wings were dragging through the air at an increasing angle of attack.
Incredibly, the Captain called for “Flaps Fifteen” and the First Officer deployed the big flaps. This further increased drag and reduced the speed.
One second later the stall horn blared, and the stick shaker activated. Aptly named, this safety device shakes the control wheel violently, telling the pilot, “Let go! Let the nose drop!”
The autopilot automatically disconnected so that the pilot could manually lower the nose, reduce the angle of attack and prevent the stall. So far the safety systems were working.
But the Captain did the exact opposite.
He pulled the control wheel all the way back. The airplane’s nose pitched way up, and the angle of attack went sky high, literally.
The wings, pointed at an impossible angle, were barely flying. The airplane wallowed, rolled hard left, then hard right as the Captain overcorrected,.
Then the stick pusher activated. This was a more drastic safety feature – the airplane tried to take the wheel away from the Captain and push it forward, to lower the nose and get the wings flying again.
The airplane was fighting to save itself from the Captain.
22:16:26.6 HOT-2 uhhh.
22:16:27.4 CAM [sound similar to stick shaker lasting 6.7 seconds]
22:16:27.7 HOT [sound similar to autopilot disconnect horn repeats until end of recording]
22:16:27.9 CAM [sound of click]
22:16:31.1 CAM [sound similar to increase in engine power]
22:16:34.8 HOT-1 Jesus Christ.
22:16:35.4 CAM [sound similar to stick shaker lasting until end of recording]
Without a command from the Captain (a procedure violation), the First Officer retracted the flaps. This reduced drag but made the wings less efficient at low speeds. It didn’t matter. They were 20 seconds away from the end.
22:16:37.1 HOT-2 I put the flaps up.
22:16:40.2 CAM [sound of two clicks]
22:16:42.2 HOT-1 [sound of grunt] *ther bear.
22:16:45.8 HOT-2 should the gear up?
22:16:46.8 HOT-1 gear up oh #.
The Captain struggled to keep the airplane upright. In the end he put in a hard left input, and the right aileron went full down, increasing that wing’s angle of attack even more.
The right wing gave up and stalled completely. The left wing, still flying, rolled the airplane upside down to the right. “Over-the-top” spin entry. The final dive began.
22:16:50.1 CAM [increase in ambient noise]
22:16:51.9 HOT-1 we’re down.
22:16:51.9 CAM [sound of thump]
22:16:52.0 HOT-2 we’re [sound of scream]
22:16:53.9 END OF TRANSCRIPT
END OF RECORDING
One person on the ground and all 48 people in the airplane died.
Here’s the video:
Colgan Air 3407 De Havilland Dash 8 Q400
The NTSB report is 285 pages long. I read it all, often astounded, sometimes horrified. The report thoroughly and minutely dissected the crew’s last two days, phone calls, sleep and awake times, spouse interviews, injury chart, aircraft history, etc. It explored crew monitoring failures (nobody noticed airspeed decay), fatigue (commuting, crew lounges, ‘crash pads’), airspeed selection (an eye-opener!), stall training, use of cellphones (the First Officer was texting 2 minutes before takeoff), weather (e.g.. icing).
The NTSB concluded that the probable cause of the accident was
the captain’s inappropriate response to the activation of the stick shaker, which led to an aerodynamic stall from which the airplane did not recover. Contributing to the accident were
(1) the flight crew’s failure to monitor airspeed [despite] the low speed cue
(2) the flight crew’s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures
(3) the captain’s failure to effectively manage the flight
(4) Colgan Air’s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection and management during approaches in icing conditions.
There are 46 detailed findings, including
#5. This accident was not survivable.
#29. The captain had not established a good foundation of attitude instrument flying, and his continued weaknesses in basic aircraft control and instrument flying were not identified and adequately addressed.
#6. The captain’s inappropriate aft control column inputs in response to the stick shaker caused the airplane’s wing to stall.
Number 6 above is precisely and carefully worded. When the stall warning and stick shaker activated, the airplane was not yet stalled (in fact the ref speed switch was set to give an earlier warning of stall). It was not the autopilot, or ice, or low speed that stalled the airplane.
It was the Captain.
When the stick shaker activated, there was a 25-pound pull force on the control column, followed by an up elevator deflection and increase in pitch, angle of attack, and G force. The data indicate a likely separation of the airflow over the wing and ensuing roll two seconds after the stick shaker activated.
Twenty-five pounds of pull on the control wheel overcame the stick shaker and pusher. If The Captain had been a less powerful man, they might all have lived.
The entire NTSB report here, 285 pages, facts, data, analysis, conclusions, recommendations. This is a public document and is available on the internet.
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We take a short break from our series on stalls and stall-related accidents. I want to give way to a time-sensitive story. To my deepest regret, there are no pictures.
1996. Carlo and I were to have dinner to celebrate his 10th birthday.
A new resort had opened in Cebu. – Plantation Bay. It was water-themed, and built to evoke the architectural styles of famous plantation estates in the world.
I wanted it to be a surprise.
So how does one fly a 10-year old son to a surprise birthday dinner 600 kilometers away, an hour by airliner, without clueing him in too early?
I was determined to try.
He arrived at my apartment in Manila that afternoon, asking where dinner was going to be. A bag had been packed for him, with his mother’s kind permission.
“At the airport,” I said. There was a Boeing 707 there that used to be Elvis Presley’s. They had turned it into a restaurant.
Carlo, who was born the year Top Gun premiered, was a nut about airplanes. (I wonder where that came from?) He thought it cool, even if he didn’t know who Elvis Presley was.
I brought my snorkel gear. I told him a friend was borrowing my gear, and we were to meet him at the airport, because my friend was flying to Cebu. We would check the gear in for my friend.
I was making this up as I went.
We arrived at the airport. After checking in “my friend”, and armed with “my friend’s” boarding pass, we then settled in a large room to wait for him. This, of course, was the pre-departure lounge.
An hour went by.
“Dad, your friend is about to miss his flight!” Carlo was concerned. “What does he look like?”
“Small guy, black hat,” I said. Carlo was wearing a “Men in Black” hat. That movie was showing in Manila. Carlo looked around and declared that my friend was not there.
I persuaded him that the best strategy was to proceed to the airplane to look for my friend. Carlo was dubious. We weren’t supposed to be in that airliner.
On board the BAC-111 jet, we chose a vacant seat and waited for my friend. Carlo was fidgeting. Then, a desperate suggestion: “Dad, ask the stewardess to page your friend.”
I beckoned a flight attendant over, and asked her quietly for a newspaper. She replied, “Yes sir, of course!” Carlo heard her reply. Yes, my friend was about to be paged.
Minutes went by. Carlo was anxiously looking out the window.
“Dad, they just closed the airplane door!!”
I then confessed that I didn’t know my friend’s name. “What?! You lent him your snorkel gear and you don’t know his name?”
Then, it occurred to both of us that my friend’s name would be on the boarding pass. Carlo scrambled for it, and saw his own name.
He giggled and laughed all the way to Cebu. Relaxed, he read the entire safety card, asked for a headset, gleefully accepted his snack tray and looked outside at the stars.
An hour later, we were on the ground in Cebu. Carlo was still giggling. He pointed to the sign, “Welcome to Mactan International Airport”.
There was a special van waiting for us, with a driver and a girl in Hawaiian shirts. We arrived at Plantation Bay and there was a small banner,
Happy Birthday Carlo Rivera
August 28, 1996
and a small birthday cake. He blew out the candles right there. In our room, he gleefully called his brothers on my Motorola flip phone and told them, “Dad and I went to have dinner, it’s only an hour away, but I don’t think I will be home after dinner. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be home after breakfast!”
It was a weekend, so we had two days together. He took an introductory SCUBA dive (two years later we went to SCUBA school together). He remembers to this day what he had for dinner that first night.
Today the resort is passé’, there are no more snack trays on flights to Cebu, Motorola is about to become a part of a new company called Google, and few BAC-111s still fly. The pictures I took that weekend are lost forever, drowned in the great flood of 2009.
Fifteen years later, Carlo remembers every detail. And it’s a weekend again. And yes, we will fly together. But not as passengers.
Happy Birthday, Carlo. My blog partner, fellow pilot, good friend, teacher and inspiration, my son.
Posted from Manila, August 28, 2011
Postscript: A year later, I took my sons to Houston, Texas. They thought they were going to Baguio, a mountain city in the Philippines. I got them as far as the Northwest check-in counter in Manila before they smelled a rat. But that’s another story.
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That is the real danger: this faulty reaction to the stall, rather than the stall itself. It is quite rare that a pilot is killed simply because he stalled. But it happens with tragic monotony that a pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.
– Wolfgang Langewiesche
This was a tough article to write. It took me days.
Carlo, my English teacher son, always starts class with a quiz. So, Pop Quiz for all pilots out there. (Watch this.)
True of False?
Langewiesche is lead investigator for the Air France 447 crash.
An airplane stalls when it gets too slow to fly.
Speed is irrelevant. Instead, an airplane “stalls” when its wings are angled up too steeply.
Bonus question:
How does an airplane fly?
We’ll take the last one first. Ask three pilots and you might get four answers. Embarrassing. So let’s avoid three-syllable words like ‘Bernoulli’ and ‘laminar’ and keep it intuitive. Newly-hatched birds learn this stuff right out of the nest. Every time someone is called a “bird brain”, it’s very insulting. To the birds.
It is easiest to think of the wing as an inclined plane, trying to climb the oncoming airflow. The wing deflects the airflow down and thus keeps itself aloft. The drawing below shows a concept that is over 60 years old. Cross-section of a wing flying left to right.
A surfboard is an inclined plane that surfs the waves. A wing is an inclined plane that surfs the oncoming air. That, Langewiesche explains, is why we call the magical machine an
air-plane.
Not only does the wing ride the airflow beneath it, but it also gets sucked up by the pocket of near-vacuum above it.
If you are still with me, you now know more than many pilots do. Seriously.
If the airplane slows, the oncoming airflow weakens, and the wing descends. Think about a waterski or surfboard settling as the speed diminishes. The airplane is still flying – but it is flying downward. Nothing wrong with that. You have to descend to land, after all.
So #2 above is False. An airplane never gets “too slow to fly”.
Watch an airliner land – as it slows down, it descends until it gently touches down on the runway.
If it gets very slow, it will fly downward. It wants to fly. It was designed to fly.
Unless a pilot fools around with it and tries to make it do the impossible.
So what does make an airplane stop flying and fall out of the sky?
When the wing is inclined too steeply against the airflow, it no longer rides the oncoming air. Instead, it plows through the air like a bully through a crowd, leaving a riot of confused and disturbed air in its wake.
The image below shows a flying wing on top, and a stalled wing at the bottom.
With the wing dragging in the airflow, flight becomes impossible, the wing stalls, and the airplane starts to fall.
#3 above is False. An airplane doesn’t stall because the wing is angled up too steeply. It can stall even with the wing pointed down.
At left, a wing diving down, in flight. At right, a stalled wing falling down.
The culprit is Angle of Attack, the angle at which the airflow hits the wings. At an excessive angle of attack, the wing doesn’t ride the airflow, but batters it aside.
So, how much angle is excessive? Anything over 16-18 degrees will destroy the airflow. At that angle, drag simply overcomes all upward lift.
This isn’t theoretical. In wind tunnel tests with smoke streaming against a real wing, the angle of attack at which the wing stops surfing and starts dragging against the airflow becomes very visible.
Once the airflow is disrupted, the wing is stalled. It gives up flying, and the airplane begins to fall.
The human instinct is to pull the nose higher, away from the looming ground. Nothing could be more fatal.
It takes only 3-5 seconds to recover from a stall. It takes longer to read this paragraph. But it takes a lot of faith to do the right thing –-> point the airplane down. Lower the nose, reduce the angle of attack, restore the airflow over the wings, and fly again.
The key is to let the nose fall, and the wings will start flying again. Do it once, twice, and we become believers. Practice it often, and we keep the faith. But many pilots have never flown stalls! Not once.
I was lucky. Enlightened instructors made me a believer. Pull the nose high, feel the wing give up flying. Let the nose drop, there’s the ground, filling the windshield. But we are flying again! Gently pull out of the dive, done.
Done, really.
Later, in aerobatic training, Meynard ordained belief into faith. He pushed me deeper into the monster’s belly, then taught me the way out, every time.
Spins. One wing completely stalled. The opposite wing, still bravely flying, rolls the airplane inverted into a dive, corkscrewing around itself.
Recover. Later, recover on a specific heading! That’s real man stuff.
In World War II, 18- and 19-year old kids used advanced stalls to carve the edge of controlled flight into masterpieces of technique. Combat maneuvers are the samurai cousins of civilian aerobatics. Fighter aces had maneuvers named after them. Max Immelman. Jimmy Thatch. Saburo Sakai’s favorite evasive maneuver was the snap roll.
Snap rolls. Snap the nose high and deliberately stall one wing. The opposite wing, still flying, twists the airplane into violent corkscrew. A horizontal spin!
Recover.
Breathe. Awed that I could stall a wing at high speed. Sure. Speed has very little to do with it. It’s all about angle of attack.
In flying schools, the theory looks fiercely boring. Bernoulli and laminar flow and L=CL ½r S V²yada-yada, right? Those of us who are professionally curious dive deeper into stalls through books and websites. They want to get it. Bravo!
Those who choose to stay ignorant, or who are ignorant about their ignorance, are potential mass murderers.
We now know about stalls. It’s time to study three catastrophic accidents.
It is worth repeating the quote that started this whole article.
That is the real danger: this faulty reaction to the stall. A pilot is killed because he either fails to recognize the stall for what it is, or fails to control that impulsive desire to haul back on the stick.
– Wolfgang Langewiesche
#1 in the quiz is False. Langewiesche, the Yoda of aerodynamics, published his wonderful book, Stick and Rudder, in 1944.
AOPA Online: If you don’t fully understand angle of attack, you are a candidate for joining the more than 100 pilots [last year] who crashed in their attempt to make an aircraft do the impossible. Accidents are the ultimate manifestation of confusion.
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It was one of the most horrifying mysteries of modern aviation. An airliner and 228 people vanished over the South Atlantic. This wasn’t Agatha Christie stuff. The killer was not the Professor with a lead pipe in the conservatory of a 19th century Nile river schooner.
No, this was the 21st century. The technology on an Airbus A330 is so advanced that the airplane itself streamed a cascade of digital messages to a maintenance center a continent away. The airplane, under attack, was crying for help.
An aviator who isn’t even curious about this could be the next cold-blooded killer.
There’s been a terrible accident; no survivors. The details were sketchy. Calm winds, an engine failure after take-off. The airplane stalled, lost the hundred feet or so it had gained since lift-off, and became a crumpled pile of parts on the ground.
In April 2007 I read Julie’s article in AOPA Pilot magazine. About a killer of pilots and aviators. It scared me. I photocopied it for Carlo and some other pilot friends. Then I forgot about it.
Two years later an airliner crashed in Buffalo, New York. Colgan Air 3407’s Captain had failed a commercial check ride and proficiency checks before the accident. The First Officer earned $15,000 a year. Food-stamp wages. She had commuted from her parents’ house in Seattle across the entire US to New York, when she had to go to work. She couldn’t afford an apartment closer to her regional job.
They spent an entire night and day at the airport, waiting for their duty flight.
Together they killed 50 people, including themselves. Speculations spread about crew fatigue, weather and icing, underpaid pilots, the usual conspiracies.
Then the National Transportation Safety Board report came out.
The pilots had committed a fundamental error. The worst a pilot can make.
I couldn’t understand it. Every pilot learns about this killer early in primary flight school. Colgan Air’s pilots had to be fatally incompetent, the bottom of the skills barrel, to make such a basic mistake, right?
Wrong.
Because four months later Air France Flight 447, this time with three highly experienced pilots, disappeared over the South Atlantic. 228 lives lost to the same stalking killer.
The speculation over this new crash was intense and wide-ranging. Weather imagery showed huge thunderstorms where the flight disappeared. The airplane itself bleated for help with a deluge of messages automatically sent to its maintenance center.
Air France, Airbus and the pilot unions bickered over hypotheses. A criminal case for manslaughter was filed.
Incredibly, the ‘black boxes’ were found two years later. Last May, robot submarines found the Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder, 4,000 meters deep in the Atlantic Ocean.
The data recorder, recovered from a two-year bath four kilometers deep, was readable. The final report was issued last week. The mystery was solved.
The Air France flight crew had committed the same basic error as the Colgan Air pilots.
They say accidents come in threes. I held my breath.
Even as the Air France black boxes were found last May, FLYING magazine published aviation writer Tom Benenson’s “Don’t Quit Stalling”. The article bewailed the decline of stall proficiency among pilots and urged renewed training on stalls.
Also in May, the Experimental Aircraft Association sent me the results of a survey on spin proficiency.
Intrigued, I ran my own informal poll on stalls. Four turboprop pilots and at least one A320 Captain told me they had never experienced actual stalls, not even in flying school. They didn’t know what a stall feels like, never mind how to recover from one. They are all airline or corporate aviation pilots now.
I was stunned.
On the other hand my former flight instructors, who taught me slow flight and stalls, are now A320 Captains and First Officers. Another general aviation pilot who taught me oscillation stalls years ago is also an A320 Captain now.
During my aerobatic training, Meynard and I flew stalls all the time, nearly every flight. Aerobatic and fighter pilots routinely stall their airplanes in competitions and combat.
You can recover from a stall in less time than it takes to read this sentence. I thought every pilot in the world knew how to do that!
Christine is a pilot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She posted a comment here, also last May.
I’ll never forget kicking the rudder hard in a full power off stall in the Super Decathlon. Equal parts anticipation (here comes the spin, finally!!!), sheer terror and exhilaration as the wing tilts over and the ground comes into view, filling out the windshield and ROTATING!!! What BETTER way to understand the physics behind your flight control input. Adverse effects of rudder, here they are in their pure form.
Then my CFI (former military test pilot, … my medicine man) demonstrated wing wash-out while the stall horn was screaming bloody murder (see, Christina, ailerons are still working)…ha ha…. Awesome sauce!
These days, if I get too slow on the approach and the stick becomes mushy, the hairs on my neck rise up. Stall horn on approach/take-off – won’t sound when I’m PIC. Pitching up in a stall? Not me. You’re absolutely right there, it’s a huge safety factor, not just b/c you learn how to recover from a spin, but once you’ve been in one and checked your altimeter before/after 1.5 rotations, you’ll do your very best not to get into one inadvertently.
So my poll numbers began to even out. Some pilots do get it. Maybe Colgan and Air France were bizarre exceptions. Maybe I was just paranoid.
Norman Surplus survived cancer. Given less than a 50% chance of survival, he beat the odds. Then he was infected by the flying bug. After learning to fly an autogyro, he prepared to become the first pilot to fly it around the world. A celebration of life.
When I first met him, I was strangely inspired by a man who flies alone to embrace the world, and who is loved by the world in return.
Norman has now flown halfway around that world. Thousands of friends follow his every adventure online, including an unintentional ditching in a lake in Thailand.
I saw that lake from the air. As I banked a Cessna 172 over Nongprue airfield at Pattaya, my friend Neil pointed to the lake and spoke of the brave British pilot who made a splash in Thailand’s general aviation community.
Norman was very grateful to the residents who helped him recover and push on. Yet those who knew him here in Thailand speak of their pride over being part of Norman’s adventure.
This intrepid Irishman and his amazing autogyro! G-YROX is so small that you not so much sit in it, but on it.
Unlike a helicopter, an autogyro’s rotor blades are unpowered. They turn freely in the wind. The magic that allows a sailboat to tack against the wind similarly lifts the autogyro’s rotary wing in the very wind that blows against it.
A single aviator is flying alone around the world, in an open cockpit hanging from what is essentially a rotating metal sail.
Norman, a careful pilot, has GPS guidance, a Spot Tracker in the aircraft, a voice recorder, a Personal Locator Beacon, a life raft.
He is a crewman of a Royal National Lifeboat Institution rescue boat. He knows what it takes to survive an unscheduled landing in the Pacific or Atlantic oceans, both of which are on his route. He flies in a custom-made exposure suit.
In March, 2010, Norman left his hometown of Larne, Northern Ireland, on his yellow autogyro. He traversed to England, then flew down France to Italy and Greece. Crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt, then hopped the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman. Skirted the Indian Ocean to Pakistan and India, thence to Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia.
Then a Gordian knot of bureaucratic frustrations trapped him. He had a small weather window last summer to transit the Bering Strait from northern Russia to Alaska. He couldn’t get clearances from the next countries on his route, and the summer window closed.
Norman left G-YROX at my home base, Woodland Airpark in the Philippines. And he went home to Ireland for the winter.
Every time I walked a friend through Woodland’s hangars, I always pointed out the brave little autogyro waiting to conquer the northern Pacific.
Nine months later, in May, 2011, Norman returned to the Philippines to resume his around-the-world record attempt. But the clearance to transit Japan remained elusive for two more frustrating months.
Negotiations, and a Facebook campaign for friends to directly appeal to Japanese embassies worldwide, finally secured the precious clearance.
On July 18, 2011, Norman Surplus and G-YROX left Woodland Airfield for the last time, staging north to Laoag.
Al Jazeera features Norman at Woodland airfield in the Philippines!
When I began writing this – July 20 – Norman departed Laoag in the Philippines for Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa. This overwater leg is one of the longest of the entire voyage. Tropical storm “Ma-on” was transiting southern Japan, but was not a major factor.
Hundreds of people around the world followed on Norman’s GPS Spot Tracker website as he flew for 9 hours over water to Okinawa.
Today, just 3 days after he left the Philippines, Norman has already flown the length of Japan. Next is the long, 450-mile overwater leg across to Vladivostok, Russia. Two months to get clearance, three days to clear the country.
For most people, flying is incarceration, crammed into a tight aluminum tube flown by uniformed strangers sealed behind locked cockpit doors.
I wondered how many airliner pilots flying over the route that day were totally clueless that down below, just above the Pacific Ocean, a solitary man with a surplus of courage was hand-flying a tiny aircraft on an enormous endeavor, watched by thousands of people around the world.
Every aircraft has a navigational beacon. G-YROX’s beacon sits in the cockpit. That man’s smile and heart shines a light seen clear around the world.
Good luck and Bon Voyage to Norman Surplus!
Posted from Bangkok, July 23, 2011
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Norman’s Facebook page, now at the maximum 5,000 friends
August 21. Ninoy Aquino, youngest governor of Tarlac, senator and opposition leader, was assassinated in 1983 at the airport now named for him.
Twenty-seven years later Carlo and I were approaching Concepcion, Ninoy’s birthplace. We were flying over a Philippine history lesson, near the old Hacienda Luisita airstrip.
A burst of brogue warbled over the radio – an Irish pilot, over Tarlac? I forgot about Ninoy. Who could it be? The Irish Wild Geese? Pierce Brosnan? Liam Neeson? I began to hum Enya’s “Only Time”.
Whoever he was, he was reporting his position as 20 DME on CIA’s 020 radial, altitude 2,500 feet.
Carlo and I looked at each other. That was our exact position and altitude. Damnúair!! Another airplane was about to violate our patootsie.
My hair rising, I pulled into a maximum performance climb, broadcasting our own position, “ Clark Tower, one five one three Cessna one five two is two-zero DME on the zero-two-three radial, leaving two thousand five hundred feet, climbing.” Carlo searched for the bogey under an apocalyptic overcast.
Air Traffic Control called the other pilot.
Clark Tower: “Station calling Clark, say again your call sign?”
G-YROX: “This is Golf Yankee Romeo Oscar X-ray.”
G-YROX! A unique aircraft on a unique flight. This was the British pilot from Northern Ireland in an around-the-world record attempt, in an autogyro!
It’s tough to circumnavigate an airport ramp in an autogyro, never mind the world. But this pioneer had already crossed half the earth – Europe, North Africa, the Arabian desert, the Indian subcontinent, the Far East.
I’m getting ahead of the story.
On August 21, 2010, Carlo and I hadn’t defected yet to Woodland. We reconnoitered the airfield again now, to taunt the Hun.
Nothing. No scrambling schwarm of Fokkers. Perhaps Herr Hauptmann was still leafing through his Fliegen für Idioten
We left him to his advanced studies and flew to the Charlie 2 training area.
Carlo and I always sneak exercises into our flights – stalls, slips, engine out, sick bag emergencies. Today we did oscillating stalls and competition turns – sky to the right, earth to the left, pull! “C’mon Mav, do some of that pilot sh*t!”.
Carlo practiced stalls – airspeed pegged at the bottom, yoke all the way back, throttle and carb heat out to the stops, ailerons neutral, dropping 15 feet per second. You’ll be surprised how many commercial pilots have never done this. Air France 447 and Colgan Air 3407 both crashed because the pilots couldn’t recover from simple stalls.
Then we headed for Nampicuan airfield, where Rolf kept his staffel of German gliders and his sexy Dallach Fascination.
Nothing. We swept low but saw only cows on the runways. Clearly, all was quiet on the Western Front.
We flew south to our own base, dodging rain showers. That wavy black band outside Carlo’s window is the bottom of a thunderstorm. Cockpit lights to maximum.
Then we heard the call.
“This is Golf Yankee Romeo Oscar X-ray.” An Irish accent over Central Luzon!
I leveled out from our maximum climb at 3,000 feet, just under the scud. We heard the Irish pilot report his destination as Woodland. Carlo and I overflew Woodland, on the way home. It’s hard it to intercept another airplane, even with the ‘bogey dope’: position, altitude (“angels”), and destination. We marveled at Battle of Britain pilots in 1940.
Then Carlo saw … it. A hybrid, not an airplane, not a helicopter.
It flew an overhead break and spiraled steeply down to final. Little did I know that I would fly that combat approach in the autogyro, 10 months later.
Nor did I know that those hangars would be home to both my airplane and the strange aircraft for the next year.
I didn’t meet the pilot, Norman Surplus, until 10 months later. And what a magnificent pilot he turned out to be!
Carlo and I made one of our last landings at Omni, and shut down.
Posted from Woodland, July 16, 2011
Next: G-YROX, and one of the most exhilarating flights I have ever had!
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D-Day, 6th of June, 1944. The Allies invaded Normandy and started the 11-month drive to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Just after midnight on June 6, thousands of paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines to secure the flanks of the invasion beaches.
Over 45 years ago I read Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day and saw the movie. John Wayne’s airborne landing at Sainte-Mère-Église captivated me and fired up my young imagination.
Like every boy, I played with plastic toy soldiers. I collected eight good soldiers. I used toy cowboys and pirates for the enemy. I learned to shoot the enemy with rubber bands. They would be hiding behind chair legs or dominos and, BANG! My rubber bands sent them flying. I became a dead-shot rubber band sniper. I provided my own sound effects, which, unknown to me, resonated through our house. “Pow-pow-kapow, KABOOM!”
There was a day that I especially trained my soldiers for.
Every year on the night of June 5, I took my brave soldiers and threw them out the window onto the garden plants in our front yard. They landed among the trees and hedgerows of Normandy and hunkered down all night, avoiding German patrols.
On D-Day morning I would wake up, gather my tireless troops, and capture the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, just like in The Longest Day.
“Cover me, open fire!”
“ Covering fire!” BANG! CRACK-CRACK! POW!
One year, the dog chewed off a grenadier’s head! But it was ok — he stood tall even without a head. Another year the maid picked up the toy soldiers strewn about the garden and put them back in my cardboard toy box before I woke up! Aaarghh! Captured before the war even started.
Another year, the dog laid land mines all around the garden. My soldiers landed in, uh, merde. A bad year.
Unfortunately for my squad, I grew up. My soldiers retired from these mishaps. Girls and ‘growing up’ ambushed me, and the righteous gunfire faded away.
I don’t know where those loyal, undying troops are now.
Today, D-Day is immortalized in books, websites, movies. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan portrays the horrific carnage at Omaha Beach. HBO’s Band of Brothers (also Spielberg) captures the confusion of the drop zones in Normandy, during the deadly darkness of D-Day.
D-Day is even in the comics. In the 1990s, Charles Shultz marked every D-Day anniversary with a special Snoopy cartoon.
Some 40 years after my toy soldiers ended their D-Day campaigns, I took my sons to the real Normandy. We stood enthralled on Omaha beach. We stuffed historic sand in our pockets. And rocks from the ill-fated cliffs of Point du Hoc.
We drove and hiked all the airborne drop zones. Scouted the hedgerow at Brecourt Manor where Dick Winters’ Band of Brothers destroyed a German gun battery, earning a DSC, three Silver Stars, nine Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts in three adrenaline-laced hours.
We gawked at the bullet-holed church in Sainte-Mère-Église, where paratrooper John Steele’s parachute snagged on the steeple.
We took dozens of ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos. Normandy is mostly unchanged in 67 years. Well, actually for hundreds of years.
We toured the British sector also, running across Pegasus Bridge from the glider landing field.
How lucky I’ve been! Over 45 years since The Longest Day, my memory overflows with sights I’ve seen, places I’ve been. My toy soldiers fought here when I was a boy, but I never thought I would see the real beaches, hedgerows and towns of Normandy.
Nor did I ever foresee flying a real airplane.
Last month, Carlo and I flew our Cessna 152 on a flour bombing mission at Woodland. We missed the target on all three of our bomb runs, but that’s not the real story.
Carlo was packing 12 plastic toy soldiers, each with a working parachute.
To my amusement, my son studiously threw toy soldiers out the cockpit window on every pass. His paratroopers drifted down among exploding flour bombs.
There was even a hangar dog down there somewhere.
Full circle.
After we landed, Carlo tramped up and down the grass runway, assembling his plastic paratroopers. Then he went to the airfield’s fence and gave them away to the watching children.
My lost squad from 45 years ago would have approved.
Posted from Bangkok, June 9, 2011, D plus 3.
Poignant links:
There are thousands of very good, very rich and very nostalgic books and websites about D-Day. Here are three links, just for remembrance. Click on the green links.
Carlo, who also turns 25 this year, has his own thoughts about TOP GUN. The toddler who learned to load the TOP GUN cassette into the VCR before he learned to walk is now an English teacher and a pilot. In short, he’s doing what he always wanted to do.
TOP GUN was quite possibly the first movie I ever watched. Well, it was either that or STAR WARS. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
I was caught by surprise when Dad told me about TOP GUN’s 25th anniversary last month. Even more surprising was the realization that I would be turning 25 soon. I am now older than Tom Cruise was when he filmed the movie. It’s amazing how time flies when you’re having fun!
This prompted some reflective thought on what I’ve gone through in that time. Apparently even English teachers get cliché sometimes. In the past twenty-five years, I’ve survived the usual young nerd’s gauntlet of bullying and academic trial, been in two relationships, only one of which made me cynical, won a bunch of trophies at school, watched them disappear along with my house in the floodwaters of Typhoon Ondoy, and landed my dream job of teaching college English at my alma mater.
Oh yeah, I’ve also become a pilot! There are some romantic youthful experiences that typhoons can’t wash away.
I’m pretty sure that Dad was hoping that my flight training would be a growing-up sort of experience for me. I can’t make any definitive claims for its success in that area, but I have picked up a few things.
In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a book which remains a favorite of mine long after AB Literature revealed its imperfections, one of the protagonist’s friends tells him that "the gull who flies highest sees farthest." True. Flying over the Philippines has made me keenly aware of what a beautiful country we live in.
Watching the sunrise in La Union and the sunset in Baler offer perspective. It’s not all about Manila, with its smog and traffic and inefficiencies. This place is awesome. People want to come here!
Having grown up in a country infamous for its colonial mentality, I still feel a little thrill of pride whenever I meet a foreigner who decided to come here because of the invariably friendly people, the lovely scenery, and the subtlety-free onslaught of Filipino cuisine. Add to that the fact that Philippine skies are the friendliest on earth if you know where to look, and I can say that, poor flood-prevention aside, I am proud of my country.
One of the things I’m particularly proud of is our hosting of the Woodstock of aviation, the Philippine International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta! Aircraft and aviators of all varieties from dozens of countries come here year after year to play to a crowd that gets bigger every time.
We have exotically-shaped hot air balloons, skydivers, paragliders, marching bands, kite stunt teams, aerobatics, and me and Dad at the eye of the storm. I feel really luck to have fallen in with this bunch. Over the course of the fiesta, I’ve learned to coordinate aircraft operations, facilitate outlandish wedding proposal schemes, and survive attacks by man-eating kites, all while wearing aviator sunglasses.
Another thing I’ve taken to heart is the importance of having a good wingman. But I knew that long before I became a pilot; I learned it from Top Gun.
Posted from Koh Chang, Thailand, June 3, 2011
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May 18, 1986. TOP GUN launched its first weekend in US theaters and catapulted to iconic status.
The winning strategy? Tom Cruise, locker room hunks, high-octane action, a kick-ass soundtrack, plus the Mach-2-with-your-hair-on-fire undisputed top dog muscle machine of US naval aviation.
The movie cost $15,000,000 to make. It made $31,000,000 in sales in the first two weekends alone. Total revenue: $345,000,000, a gross margin of 2,300%.
Sales of Kawasaki Ninjas, bomber jackets and Ray-Ban Aviators went ballistic, too.
Tom Cruise and the F-14 Tomcat were escorted by completely unknown actors. Meg Ryan (later Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail). Anthony Edwards (ER). Kelly McGillis (Witness). Val Kilmer (Heat, Doors, Batman Forever). Tim Robbins (Shawshank Redemption, Bull Durham).
Tim Robbins?!
It’s hard to remember 25 years later, but there were other actors in TOP GUN. It was a cast of stars, but we didn’t know it back then.
Has it really been 25 years?! Twenty-five years ago, my son and now co-pilot Carlo was just learning to walk.
I imagine that those who criticize this movie also look upon the Three Stooges with disgust for not exploring the depth of Moe’s antagonistic relationship with Curly. The fact is that only about 10% of films have the depth of a Citizen Kane or Godfather. Among the other 90%, Top Gun is the best of the best.
— Brandon Toy, Amazon.com
There were so many half-naked male beefcake scenes that Quentin Tarantino deemed TOP GUN the ultimate gay movie (there’s a YouTube video…).
Tom Cruise was 23 and dyslexic. He went on to became a real pilot, learned to fly in 1994, six years after TOP GUN.
Today he owns an aerobatic Pitts Special S2B, a P-51 Mustang and a Gulfstream jet. Commercial license, multi-engine and instrument ratings.
Headin’ into twilight Spreadin’ out her wings tonight She got you jumpin’ off the deck And shovin’ into overdrive Highway to the Danger Zone I’ll take you right into the Danger Zone
– Kenny Loggins
Tom Cruise (and his computer-designed face) was the star, but the F-14 Tomcat was best supporting actor. “Tomcat” because it ruled the neighborhood, had cat’s eyes and many lives, and, even if it lost an ear or tail, always got home.
Grumman “Ironworks,” famed builder of Navy fighter aircraft from World War II onwards, designed the F-14 with sweeping switchblade wings that could re-shape the airplane into an arrowhead at 2.5 times the speed of sound, 1,400+ miles per hour!
Its radar detected ‘bandits’ out to 100+ miles, tracking up to 24 targets while scanning for more. No known technology beats that even today.
Match that with the baddest missile ever. No air-to-air weapon competes with the Tomcat’s AIM-54 Phoenix missile – 100-mile range, Mach 5, launch and leave, its own radar to track the target. At $500,000 a pop, not for shooting Cessnas.
The flying scenes are the heart of the movie. No Hollywood computer graphics here — noted Hollywood aerial choreographer Clay Lacy filmed real dogfights among Topgun instructors from his Learjet.
Maverick’s rolling scissors against Viper or Iceman’s F-14 in a fur ball with five swirling F-5s impress me even more now that I am a real pilot.
Last May 18, TOP GUN’s 25th Anniversary, I discovered a book in Singapore, Topgun Days. A 25-year old photo shows author Dave “Bio” Baranek and actor Anthony “Goose” Edwards. Like identical twins.
In 1985 the author (right, above) was an instructor at Topgun (the Fighter Weapons School’s correct nickname is a single word). He flew F-5s in the movie. Anecdotes about the filmripple through the later chapters.
The Navy allowed filming at Topgun, and aboard aircraft carriers USS Enterprise and the USS Ranger were used in the film (the USS Carl Vinson, Bin Laden’s hearse, contributed F-14s).
In post-production, author Baranek reviewed the dogfight scenes and spontaneously added lines for increased authenticity.
“Two A-4’s, left 10 o’clock level, continue left turn.”
“Watch the mountains!”
“C’mon, do some of that pilot shit!”
The screenwriters eagerly recorded and loved it all! Real pilot talk.
It was also author Baranek who suggested voice-over lines to help Director Tony Scott portray the passage of time in Topgun’s 5-week training course.
“Gentlemen, this is Hop nineteen, multiple aircraft, multiple bogies. Your training is half over.”
Topgun instructors “Viper” Pettigrew and “Heater” Heatley had cameo roles. Renowned aerobatic pilot Art Scholl crashed while filming a flat spin for the movie. The movie was dedicated to his memory.
Twenty-five years ago.
Today, Miramar is no longer a Naval Air Station. Topgun, the US Navy Fighter Weapons School, closed in 2003.
Grumman is extinct. And the F-14 Tomcat, the most famous jet fighter in the world, retired in 2006. Not a single one flies today.
Turning and returning to some secret place to hide Watching in slow motion as you turn to me and say Take my breath away.
– Berlin
Academy Award, Best Original Song
Anthony “Goose” Edwards has lost nearly all his hair, and Val “Iceman” Kilmer looks heavier than an F-14. Tom “Viper” Skerritt is now 78.
Maverick, you big stud. Take me to bed or lose me forever!”
— Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood
Posted from Bangkok, May 25, 2011
Other neatTOP GUN websites – click on the links!
Cool behind-the-scenes site. Charlie stood in a trench in the last scene, to make her shorter than Maverick (Tom Cruise is 5’7”).
Charlie’s house is scheduled to be demolished. The volleyball courts are long gone. The San Diego restaurant where Goose played the piano became famous, collected Goose’s helmet and the “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” jukebox, then lost everything in a fire. Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire! TOP GUN filming locations!
BUT the same restaurant recovered from the fire, helps celebrate the 25th anniversary of TOP GUN.
Since 1985, one of the real pilots in the movie rose to four-star Admiral rank, commanding all US forces in the Pacific. Another commanded the Enterprise, the aircraft carrier used in the movie. More TOP GUN trivia here.
A biker in Germany recreates a Kawasaki Ninja exactly according to the movie, lots of pictures of the 1985 filming, including an immaculate 1/12 scale model made by a friend.
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My Dad told me 
Today he owns an aerobatic Pitts Special S2B, a P-51 Mustang and a Gulfstream jet. Commercial license, multi-engine and instrument ratings.
