CASCADE FLYER March 2006, Vol. 06, Issue 3 President's Message: Thanks once again to our own Richard Benson for being our speaker last month. Richard had some great videos and stories about the Northern Idaho grass strips he visited last summer. They make our local airports look pretty tame. It was pretty exciting to see how to land at some airports where you can not see the runway until you are established on a dogleg final. We also took care of business and finished the yearly election of our officers. I am happy to see a great group of people step forward and help keep the chapter running smoothly. The contact details for the officers can be found further down in the newsletter. The best news is that we now have a full time Program Chairman in Ed Endsley. So I'll leave it to Ed to properly introduce Brandon Wilcox of the Flight Shop who will be this month's speaker. In other news Ken Dunn of Bend has been elected to be Secretary of the OPA. Ken is new to Bend and we should welcome him in to our group for the help he is lending to the OPA at the state level. Calendar: 16 March - Monthly Meeting 18 March - Monthly Flyout 20 April - Monthly Meeting 22 April - Monthly Flyout 18 May - Monthly Meeting 20 May - Monthly Flyout 2-3 June - Central Oregon Fly Safe Clinic 10-11 June - Balloons Over Bend 15 June - Monthly Meeting 17 June - Bend Airport Aviation Day Web doings: I can tell whether the weather has been bad from the size of my INBOX. This month it was overloaded again. Joel Premselaar sent in two videos this month. One shows how to take off from dry land in a float (not amphibious) plane. The second is a pretty scary looking and brief carrier landing. Don Wilfong sent in a video of how to water ski to a landing in a Cub. All three videos are now on our chapter web site. As always, the CO-OPA website contains recent newsletters and other goodies. http://co-opa.rellim.com To access the members only areas the username is "S07" and the password is "123.0". My Inbox: Barbara Malcolm, the President of Impressive Events, has confirmed that this years Balloons Over Bend will take place as previously scheduled. The Balloons will launch from Summit High School on Saturday and Sunday, June 10th and 11th. In more good news Barbara is working with sponsors of the Bend Airport Aviation Day to see if her company can add their brand of professional management to our event as well. Putting the Aviation Day together has always been a big job. David Sailors has done a great job in years past and now it is time to get him some real help. The hope is that with a skilled professional team in place that our event can be all that it can be. I have added a link to the event web site on our Links page: http://www.balloonsoverbend.com/ Gary Miller COOPA SAFETY CORNER By Joel Premselaar I was struggling for material upon which to base this month's "SAFETY CORNER." I found it on page 40 of the March '06 issue of the AOPA Pilot. Good old Barry Schiff's article triggered some thoughts I had previously shared with certain members of our group. How do you measure flight experience? Is flying measured by flight hours? To use an old saw, is 1,000 flight hours 1,000 hours of flight experience or is it one hour's experience 1,000 times? The only aircraft I've flown with an autopilot was a TBM (Grumman's torpedo bomber). It controlled pitch and roll only and it rarely worked at that. The first of many questions I have to ask is, how much stick in hand per flight hour do you have? How many stick in hand takeoffs and landings per hour of flight do you have? For almost nine of my 70 years as an aviator, my logbook shows more than one landing per hour. Granted that that was an unusual phase in my flying career. What is your stick in hand ratio of time inverted to right side up? Is your stick in hand ratio of "Gs" per hour equal to one? Do you have any stick in hand time flying terrain following? Do you finally get my point? What to do? See my suggestion at the end of this article. You have but to look at G.A.'s so called technological advancements (glass cockpits) in the light of Schiff's words. To quote him, "Increasing automation causes some airline pilots to predict that cockpit crews someday will consist of a monkey and a pilot. The monkey's job will be to push the correct buttons; the pilot will be there to feed bananas to the monkey." Many years ago, Life Magazine had a cartoon. It depicted a line of military pilots each seated in front of a monitor (CRT screen). One of them, with a cup in hand, was in the process of standing. The caption stated something like this: - "Oh well, I guess I'll get a cup of coffee. I just got shot down." Don't get me wrong re technological advancements. I'm all for it. It's inevitable. After all, I was a part of it. Remember that the banner of this piece is, "SAFETY CORNER." I merely want to remind you that if the "Oh, (fill in the blank)" situation suddenly degrades your system in less than a graceful way, you'll have to revert to stick and rudder. Gee, how's that for a lead to one of my favorite subjects: - proper stick and rudder use. O.K. relax, I'll elaborate on that some other time. The experimental psychologists (ergonomic or human factor folks) at Boeing invested time and $s to determine the time it takes from total failure of a system or a component of that system to complete recovery with human involvement (in spite of all the warning modes you can think of, the copy I have of the delay times that will scare you). I'll provide that report for your review upon request. We addressed the problem by designing graceful degradation and redundancies into the system. I fought a fruitless battle against using duplications as redundancies. I argued that functions should be duplicated, but not the hardware and software. It was my contention that the cause of the discrepancy would repeat the failure if the redundant system was of the same design. The bean counters won and I lost. To counter this, a design was submitted to incorporate a system to be employed for critical phases of flight such as an autopilot ILS approach. The design would allow the pilot to manipulate the controls as though she/he (ladies first) were flying, say an ILS, but the autopilot would in fact be controlling the plane. Upon a failure of the autopilot, control would seamlessly revert to the pilot and since she/he was "already in the loop," a delay would not occur. The Human Factors people loved it. I left without knowing its fate. Pilots do not simply drive an aircraft as the average person does a car. Pilots operate in a different environment, one that involves six degrees of motion. Upon encountering a problem, the modern car driver pulls to the side of the road, picks up his cell phone, and calls AAA. Pilots, on the other hand do not enjoy such a luxury, the pilot must have in-depth knowledge of all systems and how these systems, including themselves as humans, integrate with one another. Woefully, it's been my experience that the average G.A. pilot does not have sufficient in-depth knowledge of the equipment she/he operates. This knowledge must extend beyond the aircraft's class or even its type. It must encompass the specific plane being flown - with all of its vagaries and hangar rash. Knowledge is power. In aviation it has another attribute, its called survival! Re "What to do." In one brief statement: take aerobatic lessons. Not only is it fun, you'll learn more about flying in 15 minutes of aerobatics than in 1500 hours of 1 G flight. Don't believe me? Ask Jack Kohler. Gee whiz! As delicate as I am, I hope I don't fall as I step down from this +=*%#! soapbox. ______________________________________________ To Controllers Everywhere: Thank You Sir!!! Below is a story from one of several I thought you might enjoy about some radio contacts I've encountered. At this late date I'm still trying to make sure my brain is in gear before engaging my mouth. I still sometimes grind my gears and strip the threads in some poor controllers' ears. Ed Endsley Random Thoughts: The flying weather has been so iffy for the last month that I have been reduced to cleaning out my flight bag just to remind myself what it looks like. Inside I came across a little gadget that is chapter property. That device is a FlightStat pulse oximeter. It clips on one of your fingers and then tells you your pulse rate and the oxygen saturation of your blood. The chapter purchased one a while ago and it is available to any member that wants to borrow it. Hypoxia is a curious condition. In my experience it affects different people in different ways. Even though the symptoms vary from person to person they seem to be relatively repeatable in any one individual. My son Daniel will get a wicked headache when over 11,000 feet for more than 15 or 30 minutes. Having him put on the canula quickly cures him. Flying in the low teens would lead to a miserable day for him until we learned his special needs. My cousin Carolyn shows no symptoms, until she just passes out after a few minutes over 12,500 feet. When I descend back down to 11,000 feet she wakes up and has no recollection of having been asleep. If she were a pilot this would concern me greatly but otherwise she seems to suffer no after effects. My body seems to have a higher than average natural awareness of hypoxia. When I fly high my body naturally huffs more to maintain my oxygen saturation. No headaches, no unusual drowsiness, just an awareness of needing to breathe better. There is still a price I pay for not using oxygen. If I fly for 3 hours at just over 10,000 feet I will feel beat-up all over when I land ... like the day after recovering from a bad cold or flu. The rest of my day will just drag. The effect is not present if I have been using normal oxygen. With the O2 I land ready to make things happen at my destination, but I have to start the oxygen before I feel any symptoms. The FlightStat is a nice little device to help you learn and calibrate your own body's response to hypoxia. For me it is a cute toy that helps me put some numbers to my already known symptoms. If I were like some people and just quietly passed out from hypoxia then I would prefer a pulse oximeter with an alarm bell. Take ours out for a spin and see how your body responds to hypoxia. You can find out more information on this little device from the manufacturer here: http://www.flightstat.nonin.com/product.asp. If you want to borrow to test for yourself then just give me a call. ------------ Gary Pattern Aerobatics: by Ed Endsley I did some of my earliest flight training in the Eugene area at a little field called T-Bird Airpark. It's no longer in existence, which is probably just as well since final approach was over a cemetery one way and a swamp the other. The crosswind strip was about 500 feet long and guarded by railroad tracks one way and a creek the other. Don't over or undershoot! When I had accumulated about ten hours (three solo), this was the base from which I launched a Piper Colt to go shoot touch and goes at Eugene's big commercial airport, Mahlon Sweet, and precociously mix it up with the airliners. Their runways were so big I could have landed across the numbers or done twenty touch & goes down the length and that was before their expansions. The main runway was only 5000 by 150 feet in 1964. This day found me on right downwind for 34 when the controller told me to do a 360 for spacing. Well I knew how to do 720s, so this should be no problem. I racked that Colt up into a sixty degree bank and whipped off a 360 in nothing flat. Quite a good one too, because I hit my prop wash. I was sittin' pretty pleased on downwind again when the controller called and said it wasn't necessary to do aerobatics in the pattern and would I extend my downwind and plan number two for 34. I still didn't see number one, but I agreed as how number two would be fine. I'm grateful now that he gave me that gentle guidance and didn't give me a lecture or a phone number. '2006 - COOPA / POSSIBLE FLYOUT DESTINATIONS Airport Identifier Comments Albany, OR S12 Restaurant Astoria, OR AST Restaurant & Marine Museum Baker City, OR BKE Air Show Bandon, OR S05 Courtesy Van to great Restaurants Caldwell, ID EUL Restaurant Chiloquin, OR 2S7 Restaurant Coeur d'Alene, ID COE Restaurant - Overnight ??? Condon, OR 3S9 Maybe Brown Bag Lunch Bag location Dalles, OR/WA DLS Restaurant Eugene, OR EUG Restaurant & Aviation Museum Florence, OR 6S2 Courtesy Cars to great Restaurants Gold Beach, OR 4S1 Restaurant & Rogue River Mailboat trips Hillsboro, OR HIO Airshow Independence, OR 7S5 Restaurant & Museum with bicycles provided to get there Klamath Falls, OR LMT Restaurant Lewiston, ID LWS Restaurant Lexington, OR 9S9 Brown Bag Lunch Location McMinnville, OR MMV Airshow. Spruce Goose Aviation.Museum shuttle provided Medford, OR MFR Restaurant Nehelam Bay, OR 3S7 Maybe Brown Bag Lunch Location Nampa, ID S67 Restaurant & P-40 Museum Richland, WA RLD Restaurant Salem, OR SLE Restaurant Tillamook, OR S47 Restaurant & Military A/C Museum Walla Walla, WA ALW Restaurant - Overnight ??? NOTE: Great Outdoor locations will be chosen for Brown Bag Flyouts PLEASE CHECK THE LIST, & E-MAIL YOUR COMMENTS ALONG WITH ANY ADDITIONS / DELETIONS THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE. Thanks, Curt Turner curtis@bendbroadband.com ____________________________________________________________________________ ______ COOPA officer contact info: President Gary E. Miller 20340 Empire Blvd., E-3 Bend, OR 97701 541-382-8588 gem@rellim.com Vice President Nancy Lecklider 3054 NW Clubhouse Dr Bend, OR 97701 541 330-1853 leckone@bendcable.com Secretary/Treasurer Don Wilfong 210 SE Cessna Dr Bend, OR 97702 541 389-1456 dwnw@bendbroadband.com Flyout Chair Curtis Turner 20386 Big Bear Court Bend, OR 97702 541 317-1670 curtis@bendbroadband.com Program Chair Ed Endsley 63505 Bridle Ln Bend, OR 97701 541 382-6414 ed@edendsley.com And finally, send Newsletter inputs to Mike Bond, 22052 Banff Drive Bend, OR 97702 541 317-8443 mvbond@myexcel.com