August 2014- I have lately been thinking about the future. The thoughts arise because my children are suddenly grown-up beings with independent lives of their own—and it is clear that I am not getting any younger, either.
My attempts to see into the future involve midnight calculations regarding my health (medium-good, if I watch myself) and the intimations of mortality that come with being 60-something, parsed by hopes of the things I’d like to do while I’m still on the planet.
Many of those hopes involve a new sailboat from which I am writing this as I sail south from New Jersey, where I bought WindStar, to Florida’s southern Gulf Coast. She’s a 2005 Catalina 350 for those aviator-sailors among you.
Sailing, like long-distance flying in small airplanes, affords lots of time for thinking.
I was struck by a recent conversation with a young man who is a few hours away from his private pilot checkride. He is a new college graduate and a very bright fellow, but otherwise seems typical of his generation: optimistic and full of dreams, which is as it should be.
I asked him to share his feelings about the sorts of analysis one reads in the aviation media about the problems facing aviation: training costs, fuel costs, an aging GA fleet, reports of looming pilot shortages and government regulations.
His response got me thinking about perception. He suggested that many already in aviation have trouble seeing past their propellers. Acknowledging that getting past the “outsider/insider” barriers he found at the FBOs he visited was difficult, and that “flight training ain’t cheap,” he said that the experience wasn’t all that different from learning to ski, or fly-fish, or restore an old car.
Groups of aficionados have their passionate cultural ways, he said, and that can create barriers to outsiders. Nevertheless, he added, what really matters is the desire that pushes someone to get involved. If you want to learn to fly—or anything else really—you’ll find a way.
His words suggested to me not to get too caught up in the cautions that age and experience sometimes bring, and to instead remember to seek the sorts of opportunity that seem routine to the youthful.
Put another way, we need to look outside the cockpit or outside the FBO window more often and learn to be less “aviation-centric” in order to be more “aviation-healthy.”
While aboard a commercial airline flight from Florida to Atlantic City en route to survey and purchase WindStar, a conversation with a flight attendant regarding risk management and the laws of unintended consequences also triggered musings about the future. The attendant, who told me he was a private pilot, mentioned two things that stayed with me: life jackets and their use aboard aircraft, and a prediction that jetliners would very soon not carry pilots.
After I looked it up and consulted with folks more flying-smart than me (Where would aviation be without certified flight instructors? But that’s another story), I was startled to learn that the FAA regulations regarding safety equipment such as first aid kits or life vests and the like for private GA aircraft are simply nonexistent.
There are plenty of rules for the airlines and our sorts of aircraft flown for hire, but no rules for private fliers. Canada and the Bahamas have regulations about safety equipment if we fly our planes to visit, as does the state of Alaska.
I am not the sort of fellow that believes in additional government regulation; far from it. But anyone who chooses to fly in the backcountry or out of gliding distance of land without serious thought to safety and survival equipment can, well, go without me.
Aviation statistics show that the odds of losing an engine and having to ditch in the ocean, or having to land off-airport, are small. But I personally know two pilots who survived the former, and three who experienced the latter. All of them were glad that they had not only trained for such circumstances, but also that they had emergency equipment aboard to help ensure their comfort and safety while they awaited rescue.
If the U.S. Coast Guard requires a minimum of a sound-signaling device such as a whistle along with personal flotation devices for each soul aboard—as well as visual signals on even the smallest boats, and more on larger private boats—isn’t flying over water or into the backcountry worth a look at either owning or renting safety equipment?
I recently bought personal emergency position-indicating GPS beacons to attach to the offshore sailing life vests aboard WindStar. They cost $150 each after the manufacturer’s rebate.
I have written previously in this space about the ditch kit I carry in an airplane, and a cursory search of the web will give you lots of ideas about what should be in yours. The fact that the FAA doesn’t require such things is no reason not to be prepared.
As the flight attendant and I visited, he shared that in the airline emergency drills he is regularly required to attend some crewmembers routinely forget their training and inflate their life jackets before exiting the plane.
Don’t do that. People have died, trapped inside planes because of their inflated life jackets, he said. That led to airline rules about better safety briefings, he added.
I looked it up, and he was right. According to the news stories from back in 1996, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767, was hijacked by three men seeking asylum in Australia. The plane crash-landed in the Indian Ocean due to fuel exhaustion (the hijackers didn’t believe the captain’s fuel status information); 125 of the 175 passengers and crew on board died, along with the hijackers.
The event was until the September 11 terror attacks the deadliest hijacking involving a single aircraft. Many of the passengers aboard who died, the news reports said, had inflated their life jackets in the cabin, causing them to be trapped inside by the rising water.
With that example of the Law of Unintended Consequences in mind, it is important to think about practicing using any safety equipment you keep aboard your aircraft long before you ever need it. Trying to use your fancy new personal locator beacon, or flares, or fire-starting device for the first time while you’re shivering in the snow alongside the plane you just successfully landed in a Montana field is probably not the time to be reading the directions.
So what about my new flight attendant friend’s prediction about pilotless aircraft?
I remember back to before I was self-employed, to that phrase that used to surface in job interviews: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” Well, 10 years ago I didn’t have a smartphone capable of becoming an internet hot spot that enabled me to email this essay to Jennifer from my boat anchored near Norfolk, Va.
Will the convergence of drone technology, which like everything else in aviation’s history is benefitting from military applications, mature to the point that planes will fly themselves?
Well, if you have a GPS-integrated autopilot your plane has been able to do that for years and that technology is quickly getting better and less expensive. (My sailboat integrates the autopilot, radar and GPS chart plotter, and will even tack itself—and the boat is almost 10 years old.)
I am absolutely certain that jetliners and new GA aircraft will be able to fly without human intervention or even human presence at the controls very soon. Cirrus is pretty much there already. The question turns on whether the marketplace and our emotional comfort will support such notions, not whether the technology can deliver the goods.
We who enjoy flying our own airplanes should consider the balance between the increased safety that technology can create in our aircraft (I remember feeling really good having my first Magellan GPS, knowing that the device the size of the Manhattan phonebook would keep me from ever getting lost) and the question of what we might lose in the process.
That balance is underscored by all the recent studies and warnings about needing to concentrate on our basic hand-flying skills. Are we lazy? Did the gadgets and gimcracks in our planes make us lazier? If we are indeed becoming too dependent on technology, is removing us from the control loop safer? Maybe, but that’s not a world in which I want to live.
My pickup truck has a rearview camera that will beep if it sees something in my path while I’m backing up. I have found myself just looking at the video screen as I back out of my parking spot at home, without ever looking over my shoulder as we were all taught to do in driver’s ed. Will a day come when I don’t even look at the screen and rely on the beep to keep me from running over my neighbor’s bicycle, or worse?
A short story called “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury was published back in 1951. I offer it for your reflection. Substitute flying your basic aircraft, with reference only to compass and what’s outside, low and slow over green fields for the pedestrian in Bradbury’s story.
The story is set well into the future, and is about a citizen of a TV-dominated world. He enjoys walking through the city at night, something that no one else does. Bradbury writes, “In 10 years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time.”
On one of his walks he encounters a robotic police car, what we might call a drone today. It can’t understand why he would be out walking for no reason and takes him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.
We live in interesting times, and the future seems in closer proximity than ever before.
David Hipschman is a private pilot, a lapsed newspaper editor, and a U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain. He taught journalism at the University of Florida, served as the director of publications at EAA, and is the editor of the National Association of Flight Instructors’ publications. He lives in Fort Myers, Fla. Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
