The Need for Speed

We now live in the fast lane.  Snail mail is now e-mail.  Fast-lanes for commuters are becoming ubiquitous.  High speed rail, if not yet a reality in the US, is on the tip of our tongues.  But with advent of enhanced security and the scrapping of the Concorde, the speed of air travel has declined.

Bill Garvey in his, as usual excellent, editorial in the June issue of Business & Commercial Aviation, Studebaker Time, reminds us that it has been 63 years since Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound and became celebrated as the first human to do so.  Except for the Concorde, a technological triumph and an economic disaster, as Bill correctly describes this British and French bird, civilian air travel has been restricted to subsonic speed.  He suggests that a business jet may be the first to make supersonic travel possible in the next ten years.

Behind Yeager’s well-known tale of his famous flight in the X-1, there is a little known story about a man who may have reached the other side of the “sound barrier” before Yeager.  There is substantial evidence that George Welch, a civilian North American Aviation test pilot, exceeded the speed of sound in an XP-86 the week before Yeager did.  My good friend Al Blackburn’s book, Aces Wild, the Race for Mach 1, tells the story of pilots who explored this unknown region of flight in the Mojave Desert in the fall of 1947.

George Welch was an Army Air Corps fighter pilot who shot down at least four Japanese aircraft as they attacked Pearl Harbor.  Some records say that Welch should have gotten credit for six kills that awful morning, but there were no gun site cameras to record the action.  George would have needed only one camera as one gun jammed.  He decimated the enemy aircraft with only half of his weapons!

After the World War II, Welch joined North American Aviation, the company that designed and built 17,000 T-6 Texans.  Almost all military pilots in the 40’s and early 50’s received basic training in the T-6.  The two most successful combat aircraft developed by North America were the P-51 Mustang and the F-86 Sabre.   The latter was the first swept wing jet fighter and dominated the sky during the Korean War.

While test flying the XP-86, Welch would routinely create a ba-boom over the famous, or infamous, desert watering hole, Pancho’s.  All the while Bell engineers and Yeager were furiously trying to get the X-1 in flying condition.  The X-1 was a single-purpose rocket ship that could not take off by itself, but was carried aloft by an Air Force B-29 bomber.  The government had spent millions on the X-1 trying to prove supersonic flight was possible despite the fact that Nazi V-2 rockets exceeded Mach 5 thousands of times years before.  Stuart Symington, Secretary of the Air Force, determined that the V-1 should be the first over the Mach 1 line, directed North American Aviation to keep the gear down on XP-86 test flights.  Welch ignored the orders, proving there was no such thing as the Sound Barrier.

There’s a Trail for That

The Department of Transportation’s mission is to "Serve the United States by ensuring a fast, safe, efficient, accessible and convenient transportation system that meets our vital national interests and enhances the quality of life of the American people, today and into the future."  Under the DOT is the FAA, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), The Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and the Federal Maritime Administration (FMA).  So now maybe we will have under the DOT: FAA, FHWA, FRA, FTA, FMA and be adding FBA, the Federal Bicycle Administration, to that alphabet soup.

Recently Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who likes to ride his bike in Washington’s Rock Creek Park on the weekends, has decided that the government is going to give bicycling the same importance as automobiles in transportation planning and the selection of projects for federal money.  A manufacturers' blog called the policy "nonsensical."  One congressman suggested LaHood was on drugs.

Shall we have runways or bike trails?  You decide.  You can vote now at Hangar Talk or next November when it really counts.

Go Girls

I watched Angela Braly’s testimony before Congress and could not help drawing the contrast to the testimony two years ago by the automobile CEO’s trying to explain their corporate jets in a similar setting.  Braly, CEO of WellPoint, a large health insurance company, was there to explain their recently announced rate increases.  She was polite but took a firm position defending her company.  When asked what her compensation was, she answered in detail explaining her salary, and all benefits, never looking at a note.  Her inquisitors, the congressional members, as usual looked foolish trying to be tough and get sound bites for the home town media.

I grew up in an age when the sexes were separated almost from birth.  After third grade and through college, I never had a class with a girl in it.  Now it is hard to find a single sex school or college.  My youngest daughter graduated two years ago from Washington & Lee University, which was all male until the 1980s.  Now I am told there are so many bright girls (sorry, I guess I should be saying women) that apply that the boys/men feel disadvantaged.

So when I see a bright attractive woman, there I got it right, dishing it back to some cranky old men, I say “Go Girls!”

Golfers, Gentlemen, and Pilots

I first met Russ Meyer 30 years ago when I was selling Cessna airplanes. Russ often gave me a ride to Wichita in a Citation when I was picking up a small Cessna to ferry back to Virginia. At one point he told me about his friend Arnold Palmer and how Arnold always bought the first of every new Citation model.

Russ met Arnold Palmer when he was a young lawyer at IMG, the powerhouse sports management firm. You can read more about this long Palmer/Meyer relationship in the February edition of Business Jet Traveler by clicking this link.

This is a great story, but what it doesn’t tell you is that Russ Meyer is a scratch golfer. Both of these men have been my heroes for years and I have dreamed of being on the golf course with them. That will never happen, but being in the cockpit with half the team has and is something I will never forget.

Note: I wrote about Russ Meyer in my Summer 2009 Newsletter when he was inducted into inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame along with Jimmy Stewart, and astronauts Ed White and Eileen Collins. Every living astronaut was there to honor Russ and the other inductees.

The Debacle Story Continues

In November of 2007 I posted an article, The General Aviation Tsunami.  That story was only the beginning of the disaster to come.  Hundreds of jobs were lost and over $100 million of invested capital became worthless.  Two highly regarded companies, TAG Aviation USA and AMI Jet Charter, were decimated by one of the best examples of over regulation and malicious prosecution by the Federal Government.  Supposedly the revocation of the operating certificate of AMIJC, a company with a perfect safety record for 10 years, was done in the name of safety.

Recently, Bill Garvey, editor of Business & Commercial Aviation magazine, tells the story in an excellent article, Lessons From a Debacle.  Bill says, “Now that emotions have calmed slightly, it’s time to consider what it all meant.”

I was reminded again this week about the injustice of the FAA when I read a story in the Wall Street Journal about the FAA’s plan to fine American Eagle, a unit of American Airlines, $2.9 million for a safety violation involving over 1,100 flights.  The FAA fined AMIJC $10 million, the largest fine ever, for ceding operational control of their charter flights to a foreign corporation who was an AMIJC minority investor. That investor was TAG Aviation USA, a highly experienced aircraft management company owned by a Swiss organization.  This fine was paid in full.  It is highly unlikely American Eagle will pay anything close to $2.9 million as fines like this are always appealed and substantially reduced.  AMIJC never had that chance – when they tried, the FAA simply revoked their certificate, laying waste to the company’s future.

My emotions haven’t calmed, even slightly.

Is NextGen Dead?

Maybe Not

Those who know me well and those who follow this blog know that I have been a long-time advocate of moving the Air Traffic Control away from the operational control of the FAA and making it an independent self-sustaining organization.  Today our large complicated and antiquated ATC system is dependent on the whims of Congress and the Administration.  Four of more times Congress has failed to approve a budget for the FAA.  In the State of the Union address the President proposed a budget freeze, which I initially thought NextGen, the long overdue remaking of ATC, would be pushed even further into eternity.  However, just two weeks later the White House asked Congress for a $1.14 billion budget in Fiscal Year 2011 for NextGen, a 31-percent increase from the FY 2010 figure.  There will be a lot of debate on the budget so stay tuned.

My friend Bob Poole recently asked me to review and comment on an article he has written on NextGen that will be published in the March issue of Professional Pilot magazine.  Bob is the founder of the Reason Foundation, a public policy think tank, and has for many years advised Administration officials of both parties on transpiration issues, especially ATC and airport security

Bob makes the case for the many advantages of NextGen.  But he also lays out the complications of making it happen.  The technology is here today and in a perfect world every airplane could fly the best route and takeoff on and land on time.  Fuel burns and carbon emission would be reduced.  No one disagrees on these points, but on funding NextGen there is little agreement.  Understandably the airlines and business aviation is not willing to pay for the expensive new equipment that is necessary to fly in a NextGen system until they are assured that NextGen will be in place on a date certain.  Too often the aviation community has made the investment and seen some new FAA driven technology fail to be developed or pushed far into the future.

Over ten years ago Canada “depoliticized” their ATC system, which was a part of Transport Canada, the equivalent of our Department of Transportation. Unshackled from their government except for safety regulation, the independent and not-for-profit NavCanada jumped far ahead of the United States in ATC service and technology – not quite NextGen, but they are moving rapidly in that direction.

Is it possible that the debate over the budget freeze could finally push the unshackling of the U.S. ATC system forward and create for our country what every other non-third world nation has?  An ATC system that pays for itself and operates as any high tech business should.

A Tale of Two Standards

Remember VHS vs. Batamax? Business aircraft charter saw tremendous growth in the 1990s and received another boost after 9/11/2001 when airline travel was extremely restricted. Major corporations and fractional companies like NetJets, FlexJet and others needed to be confident that the companies operating the business jets they chartered had the highest level of safety.

Although the U.S. market had several quality auditing firms performing independent safety audits, the charter community and the buyers of charter, were desperately seeking a globally accepted solution to the myriad of audits and standards being utilized. With the support of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and in conjunction with numerous business aircraft operators and regulators around the globe, International Business Aviation Council (IBAC) developed the International Standard for Business Aircraft Operators (IS-BAO), and introduced it to the aviation community in 2002.

IS-BAO was designed to establish a professional safety code of practice for flight departments worldwide, developed by the industry, for the industry. This safety standard has applicability for domestic and international flight operations, private as well as charter, and scales from one aircraft operators to the largest fleets. Through tremendous efforts over the last 7 years, hundreds of business jet operators have gone through or are going through the IS-BAO registration process. Regulators around the world recognize the validity of the IS-BAO standard.

In 2009 a second standard was announced by the Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF), a new organization developed by the National Air Transportation Association (NATA). ACSF will limit audits under their standard to only members of ACSF.

ARG/US, Inc. has been a globally recognized and respected data collection, analysis and auditing firm of aircraft operators for over a decade. ARG/US has declined to endorse or join ACSF as they see no value in introducing another standard created by a U.S. trade association that has no acceptance outside of the United States. Furthermore they feel the ACSF plan dilutes the enormous efforts by IBAC in achieving global acceptance of IS-BAO.

The wounded (by the collapse of JetDirect) aircraft management/charter industry does not need a battle like this.