We and our airplanes are just getting older.
March 2015-
For a lot of us there was surely that one moment when you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror one day. OMG! you may have said. How did this happen?
Day by day, we all get a little older, though we may be no better at accepting the realities. We all love to banter around those cute little sayings about getting older, my favorite being the old Bette Davis line, “Growing old is not for sissies.” The older I get, the more truth I find there.
And if you think your body is showing the wear, what about the poor Piper Cherokee which has lived its life at the hands of countless student pilots, slammed and jammed on to runways for decades?
At the turn of the millennium (that’s 15 years ago, thank you very much) the FAA noted that the average age of the nation’s 150,000 single-engine fleet was more than 30 years old. By 2020, the average age could approach 50 years. Five years from now. 50-year-old airplanes. Average. AVERAGE.
Take a ride in a DC-3 at the next airshow; that airplane made its maiden flight 80 years ago. Let me say that again: 80. (Just so you know, the average age of jet airliners is a prepubescent 11 years old.)
Will there be a giant resurgence in General Aviation where wads of pilots just run out and buy wads of shiny new airplanes so that the average age of the our fleet will come back down? With the price of a 2015 Archer starting at $345,000, maybe not so much. Just like all of us continue to get older, so will the GA fleet.
So what are we gonna do with all these aging airplanes? Well, fly them, I guess.
In reality, airplanes have somewhat of an unknown shelf life. How many hours can they fly before taking their place in that Great Boneyard in the Sky? The scientific answer is, of course, who the hell knows?
Our IAs and A&Ps can give them tender loving care ad nauseam, overhauling engines and watching for naughty little cracks in the spars. Unlike the parts of our own aging bodies, airplane parts do have a known lifespan. We know, for example, that most vacuum pumps last about 500 hours, fuel tank bladders about 10 to 15 years, and so forth.
Aircraft engines have a suggested lifespan—the TBO—but even that is not a firm number when operating Part 91. And hats off to the restoration guys who can take a data plate and a checkbook and rebuild an aircraft to its past glory, in theory keeping an aircraft airborne in perpetuity.
But not so with pilots. We do have a shelf life. Truth be told, there is likely some moment waiting out there for all of us at which time we are no longer airworthy, an age at which no amount of expertise from a medical IA, no bit of magic, no amount of effort can keep us from that moment when we simply need to quit flying. The trick, of course, is recognizing it.
A number of studies indicate that after age 55 or so, pilots begin to experience a decline in airmanship and a corresponding increase in the accident rate. Older pilots may notice changes in their overall abilities, like staying ahead of the airplane, reading an instrument panel at night, maintaining situational awareness and multitasking. Even communicating with ATC gets trickier.
As our short-term memory abilities begin to fade with age, we oldsters find it more challenging to remember even little things: ATIS letters, the last assigned altitude, or simple instructions ATC has to offer. That’s just a fact. That’s the way it is. That destiny awaits all of us.
But those of us oldsters who fly in this new millennium are facing a double jeopardy. We’re not only addressing our own aging issues but a veritable tsunami of new technology that wants to change the way we’ve flown for years.
I remember when the first Garmin 430s began to show up in airplanes. People would stop and watch those amazing little boxes just like they did when the first television sets began to flicker in living rooms across the land. Wow, look! It’s drawing a magenta line right toward my destination!
Of course, that magic came along with the need to learn how to turn this knob this way, that knob the other way, then push this button twice… Huh?
Then there was our first experience with trying to fly glass panels. Oh, yeah, there’s the turn and slip indicator over there, but where’s the trim indicator… and that must be airspeed over there, and oooh, there’s the altitude readout.
What’s that arrow swinging across the attitude indicator—oops, no, that’s a flight director—and that arrow is indicting a course direction, but from the GPS or the VOR? And is that to, or from—and how do you know? I don’t care if the airplane is still tied down, looking at all that stuff for the first time is simply overwhelming.
I have a friend who learned to fly in an all-glass aircraft. Because that’s all she’d ever seen or known, she was equally panicked to find herself staring at a set of steam gauges. The look on her face was about the same as the look she gets before entering a Porta-Potty on a warm August afternoon.
I will go to my grave being more comfortable with steam gauges than any glass panel out there, no matter how intuitive it’s alleged to be. That’s just because the overwhelming majority of my flight time has been in cockpits with all those funny little round dials.
I currently fly an airplane with glass panels, but often I catch myself checking my altitude on the tiny little backup steam gauge rather than watching the altitude ribbon on the panel. I just can’t help it, that’s what I do. And truth be told, if I suddenly had to jump into a strange airplane and launch IFR into the night, I would rather be in an airplane with round gauges.
And also like most oldsters, I was pretty happy with the way things were before this tidal wave of new technology. I actually enjoyed speaking to a Flight Service specialist to get my weather. (I often still do; thank you, Lockheed!)
One time years ago I got a briefing and filed a flight plan. After I’d hung up the phone, the National Weather Service suddenly issued a significantly different forecast, one calling for all kinds of nasty things like thunderstorms and icing which weren’t in the briefing I’d received.
I was getting fuel and readying to depart when the Flight Service Station briefer actually called me back to inform me of the important changes. Might have saved my neck. To date, I’ve never had DUATs call me back.
I’m never going to be the guy who tweets his flight plan to some FSS cloud site or posts an in-cockpit selfie to his Instagram account. I’m just now being dragged screaming and kicking into the simple act of texting. Who can type on those stupid little keyboards on your iPhone? No one, if it wasn’t for Apple coming up with that swell autocorrection software that just as often changes my intended words into something I didn’t went .
New airplanes, new technology; old airplanes, old technology—all of that is on our plate now as aging pilots. There’s nothing we can do about it. But what we can do something about is how we go forth and commit aviation.
If you’re an aged (to perfection) pilot, there are lots and lots of things you can do to swing things back your direction. Like getting a good night’s sleep. No need to try and just power through like you did in the old days.
Get yourself some noise attenuating headphones. That will also help you from getting fatigued. Pick your flight times, as mornings and evenings are frequently cooler and less turbulent.
Plan two-hour legs, not four. Stretch your legs, pee, take a walk in the fresh air. Keep your tummy full, which oddly enough helps you make better decisions.
And the biggest thing you can do? Keep flying. Statistics show that experience can actually make us oldsters better pilots than those young whippersnappers!
“Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
—Mark Twain
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man. Send questions or comments to editor@piperflyer.org.
