Almost to Arkansas

 Almost to Arkansas 

The sun was shining brightly, there was no wind to speak of, and my wife Carolyn and I decided to fly to Mena, AR, to look for information on her ancestors. I had been exploring cemeteries, visiting courthouses, and compiling her family tree for several years. 

This was our third trip to Durant, OK, since I had gotten my pilot’s license, and I was enjoying the easy flying out here where there were no tall mountains in the way. The date was August 1, 1990.

 The two old boys in the airport at Eaker Field wondered why I came out to the field so early in the morning to fly. I told them I liked the smooth air then, and they laughed. “You must be from out west in the mountains!” they said. “The air is smooth all day long in Oklahoma, unless it spins up like a funnel.”

I explained I was from Winnemucca, Nevada, and if you didn’t fly in the morning, the air got turbulent and made it hard to practice precision flying. This day I told them I was flying to Mena, AR, and back, and they told me to be sure and check the weather, as there are some mountains over there in Arkansas, and the fog in the valleys sometimes made flying difficult.

I thanked them and made a quick call to a weather station. I have forgotten which one. It was before the internet, GPS, and radar coverage on a pocket sized phone. No frontal systems were in the area, and ceilings were above 2000 ft.

Carolyn and I loaded our two small bags into the back seat of the Cessna 172, and taxied out to the south end of the runway. I stopped at the end of the taxiway and did a full runup on the engine. The engine was fairly high time, and it barely passed the compression check at the last annual, but it still climbed out at 400 or 500 ft per minute down here in southern Oklahoma. The old Continental six needed a quart of oil now and then, but it was still reliable and sounded good.

As we headed northeast away from Durant we tracked out from the VOR beacon there. Somewhere about halfway to Arkansas I planned on switching to the Rich Mountain VOR, which was just north of Mena.

As we passed over the farms and towns below, I focussed on the gyrocompass, following the heading given by the VOR. It was dead reckoning at its best, and with the plane trimmed out, it was easy to lose track of exactly where we were. We were beginning to get a thin overcast above us, but it was well above me and I wasn’t worried about it.

As we approached the state line the VOR from Durant was getting weaker, and I switched to the Rich Mountain VOR in Arkansas. As I was tuning and adjusting the navigation equipment, my wife said, “I can’t see anything.”

Whoa! It looked like some Twilight Zone out there. Fog had rolled in under us, totally obscuring the ground, and the thin overcast had become thicker. We were sandwiched between the layers, which merged somewhere in front of us. The horizon had completely disappeared.

Suddenly the plains out here weren’t so easy anymore. I immediately went to my training on instruments and started scanning my panel. The artificial horizon was showing us level and the altimeter showed us right on 7500 ft.

My sights moved to the turn and bank indicator, and I carefully banked the plane to the left, lined up the little wing tips to the marks on the gauge, and added a little rudder to keep it coordinated. I started counting chimpanzees. That’s how I learned to count seconds when I was a young kid. Most people I know count by thousands, but it all works the same. After holding the turn for one half minute, I rolled out level and straight and followed the Rich Mountain course heading outbound.

Once I was fixed on the track outbound, I took my hands off the yoke and just used small rudder inputs to keep the plane on course. The smooth air made it simple to trim and hold the altitude. Most airplanes fly straighter and smoother if the pilot lets the plane fly itself. 

One of the first things I had to unlearn during my training was what is called PIT. That’s Pilot Induced Turbulence. Don’t do it! Stay steady on the controls.

In a few minutes the ground appeared beneath us, and the overcast layer burned off as well. I decided that was enough excitement for one day, and I told Carolyn we would fly back to Durant. I couldn’t get a good signal on the Durant VOR yet, so I tried to locate us by the towns beneath us.

On of the bad things about all the little towns in Oklahoma, is they all look alike from the air. Luckily, many years ago, during the early days of aviation, people painted barns and water towers with the town name. I saw a water tower ahead of us, so I descended and circled it, and found myself over Kenefic, OK. That put us due north of Durant, and all I had to do was follow the highway south.

We found the airport and landed with out any further trouble. I filled the tanks and rolled the Cessna into the old WWII hanger just north of the terminal. 

It was a good day, and educational as well. Down here in the South, the humidity can get so thick you can’t see through it. It was never like that in Nevada!

 

Boeing Corporate Culture

 Boeing Culture

I have been watching the Youtube coverage of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 Max carefully to see if anyone caught the problem that has been obvious since the MCAS debacle. So far everyone is focussed on the door plug hinges, the roller tracks at the top of the door, and the conditions of the bolts that hold it all together. 

So far, the reports are all on the details of the mechanical defects. The real problem is the company culture. Sure, blame the workers who didn’t put it together correctly. Blame the lack of QC inspectors who failed to catch the error. They are looking in the wrong place. Raise your sights!

People were trying to tell management about the quality problems on the floor. They were ignored, or in the worst case, fired. That culture is not just at Boeing. From the frozen O-rings on the solid rocket boosters to the heat shields on the shuttle wings, people who knew the problems were ignored until disaster happened.

The cultural problems have to do with the way the company is structured, with people who know the problems at the bottom, and people who have the power to do something about the problems at the top, and then the several layers of middle managers in between who add almost nothing to the process. In my experience, they function as a wall to prevent information from getting to the top. They really don’t like Quality Control Inspectors because they know it will reflect badly on their fiefdom.

From my forty years of working for large electric generation companies, I have enough stories for several hours of ranting. I will spare you all!

I will have hope that the operational culture problems are being addressed when the whistleblowers who were fired are hired back with bonuses and backpay and promoted to jobs in the QC department, and the managers who fired them are sent down the road kicking a can.

Japan Air A-350 crash

 Japan Airlines A-350 Crash at Haneda, Tokyo

For the last couple of days I have been watching coverage of the collision of an Airbus A-350 and much smaller Dash-8 on the runway at night in Tokyo, Japan. There is so much to learn from the results of this accident.

The fact that almost 400 passengers and crew safely evacuated the Airbus A-350 before the plane was consumed by flames is a miracle. To be certified as a commercial passenger carrier, the plane must demonstrate the ability to evacuate all the passengers out half of the exits in less than 90 seconds. This plane had only three of the eight exits available, due to fire outside. And yet, everybody was evacuated alive.

Several other things made the successful evacuation possible. The passengers listened and followed the orders from the cabin crew. Nobody stopped to grab luggage - they got their bodies off the plane as fast as possible. The mantra is, “Save your life - leave your luggage!”

Another factor was the composite construction of the airplane itself. This is the first accident of this scope involving a plane mostly made of carbon fiber, rather than aluminum. It passed with flying colors, in my opinion. The carbon fiber insulated the interior better than aluminum would’ve, giving more survivable time to get out of the airplane. I understand that they actually used more than the required 90 seconds to get everyone off the plane. I heard one report that said the last person left the plane 18 minutes after the collision. That’s really remarkable. I’m assuming that was the captain. All the while the plane was being evacuated, a raging fuel fire was visible under the belly of the plane, held back from the interior by the carbon fiber material.

The damage on the A-350 demonstrates that the Dash-8 was holding on the centerline of the runway, waiting for takeoff clearance. One report said he waited for 45 seconds before the collision. It was at night, and neither airplane saw the other. The tail of the Dash-8 center punched the nose of the A-350 and broke off the front gear, which dropped the nose of the big plane down on the runway. The fuselage of the big plane straddled the smaller plane and essentially crushed it, starting the fire. The wings of the smaller plane smashed cuts and dents in the inlets of both engine nacelles on the A-350. Five were killed immediately on the small plane, with only the pilot surviving with major injuries.

Several things pop into my mind when I ponder how these two planes met on runway 34R. The tower transcripts show that the Dash-8 was cleared to taxi to 5-C intersection and hold there. To me, as a pilot, that was an incomplete command. I would have been listening intently for one of two words - “hold SHORT of runway 34R” or “hold CLEAR of runway 34-R.” The pilot knew he didn’t have a takeoff clearance. He was waiting for one. He was following the clearance for “Taxi into POSITION and Hold” which was NOT the clearance given to him. Unfortunately, he was waiting in the middle of the runway, where a huge Airbus A-350 had just been cleared to land.

I like to believe that I would have declined the clearance without clarification on the hold position. Since he should have been able look to the right and see the approaching plane, he should have rejected the taxi and hold clearance. Once he entered the runway and turned away, the approaching airplane was invisible, and the crash was inevitable.

If instead, the Dash-8 had been given a “takeoff without delay” clearance, he could have been in the air past the end of that runway and out of the picture in 45 seconds.

Dangerous runway incursions have been far too numerous this past year, for some unknown reason. Is it too many new air traffic controllers? Is it controllers being overworked with long shifts and not enough time to rest? We pilots are living in fear that there is an awful catastrophe in the future if a handle isn’t found to straighten out this problem.

I lived in Japan for a year and a half when I was in the US Army. I had to laugh as I listened to a video on Youtube by a group of guys called Flight Safety Detectives. They described the orderly evacuation of the passengers by the rescue crews after they had exited the plane. They were organized into groups of ten persons and sent marching down the runway away from the burning plane. I had to laugh! Only in Japan would this happen. I had wondered how they knew everyone got off the plane. If they are marching to the building in groups of ten, it’s no problem to get an accurate head count. 

I’m afraid if that happened in the US, they’d still be chasing down passengers wandering around the airport!