Quote:The Last Minute Hitch: 28 October 2024
28 October 2024
– Steve Hitchen
Australian aviation's night-of-nights was given extra sparkle this year when the Australian Women Pilots Association (AWPA) showed up in numbers to see their organisation carry off the 2024 Southern Cross Award. It all happened on Saturday night at the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame induction dinner. This event is already a who's who of aviation, attracting everyone within the industry considered a mover and shaker. But I don't think the AAHOF dinner has ever been moved or shaken like it was when the AWPA rocked up. Their enthusiasm for their organisation, for aviation and for each other is infection and–unfortunately–completely unmatched by any other aviation association in this country. That was pretty obvious from the cheers and applause when Flt Lt Sarah Hume stood up to accept the award. But it's not only the membership that should be applauding, the entire aviation industry in Australia should join in the ovation: the AWPA deserves it. The night also contained some classic Aussie humility from George Morgan, who admitted he didn't know how to take his induction. A hard working bloke who's not used to accolades, he nevertheless regaled the attendees with stories of GippsAero and his fellow inductee Peter Furlong. It was a masterclass in understated pride from George, but everyone there knew how much it was really deserved.
"..the all-metal airframe may prove too heavy to pioneer electric aviation.."
I had a very enlightening conversation with Gabriel Massey from Pipistrel last month. Massey is a Textron man at heart, dropped into the Slovenian LSA and glider manufacturer when Textron bought them to best leverage Pipistrel's expertise in electric aviation. One of the things that Massey hinted at was their ambitions for a four-seat, practical electric GA plane aimed at the private market, for the post-avgas era. He did admit that the current Pipistrel airframes were not the ideal thing to carry forward and that a completely new design was needed. Or not. Naturally, that got me thinking about an electric C172, but the issue with that is the all-metal airframe may prove too heavy to pioneer electric aviation with the capability of extant technology. So that turned me in another direction. Who remembers the Cessna NGP? This was the composite Next Generation Piston that buzzed Oshkosh in 2006 as an introduction to the world. It got nowhere; a bit over a year later Textron bought Columbia, which had the desired composite expertise, and the Cessna TTx became the prime composite offering. The TTx went into production, but wasn't the "Cirrus killer" that Textron was after. The NGP, a high-wing composite, exists now as only the answer to a trivia question, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it, or a derivative, emerge again as a platform for developing practical electric aviation. Of course, all of this is guesswork, but isn't that the way so much innovation starts?
Navigating Aviation's workplace culture survey is probably something that needed to happen. One thing we know about the commercial side of GA is that it's high-pressure and asks a lot of engineers, pilots, students and administrators. It has proven many times to be the cause of broken hearts and broken dreams. For many, the costs is high, perhaps too high. Whether the pressure comes from employers, passengers/customers or regulators, at times it takes its toll. There is, shall I say, a degree of reticence within the GA community to engage with this survey. That comes from a natural fear of honest feedback coming straight back at you like an ugly headwind. That in itself is probably an indicator of a cultural problem that needs some attention. Another cause of trepidation, ironically, is that the survey may expose cultural issues that GA operators will need to foot the bill to fix, leading to more stress. Sometimes surveys asks more questions than they can answer, but that doesn't mean you don't ask them anyway.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
&..
Quote:The Last Minute Hitch: 1 November 2024
1 November 2024
– Steve Hitchen
Standard business practice dictates the fastest possible return on investment (ROI) period; mostly that's around five years. In aviation, when it comes to investing in developing new types, 10 years is not unknown. Vickers Aircraft is now 15 years into the Wave development, possibly the longest gestation period of any new type in recent memory. And CEO Paul Vickers is not apologising for that. From the inception, Vickers has always stated that he wouldn't set milestone deadlines, not even so much as an estimate, because he wanted the space to develop the Wave without the pressure that too often leads to shortcuts and a final product that is short of the original ambition. It's a gutsy approach; his investors must have patience and belief in biblical proportions. But time erodes everything, and that includes patience and belief. The Wave is now expected to market next year, and I think Vickers now needs to deliver the product before the market gives up on it. Patience and belief need returns on investment as well as money.
"..we are navigating a great uknown.."
Piper Aircraft is trying to head off an Airworthiness Directive (AD) that, if taken to the extreme, could ground the world's PA28 Cherokee series of aeroplanes, and with them, the flight training industry. The AD will require the wings of nearly all PA-28 and PA-32 aircraft to be removed and checked for cracks around the bolt holes. That will be expensive and time consuming, and you can add the cost of correction onto that, which may mean replacing the wings completely. For many of the early PA-28s, that's a death knell because the cost will exceed the airframe value. The FAA is concerned that wings with cracks could separate in flight, which brings into focus once again Australia's ageing aircraft fleet. It came to light during the Cessna SIDs program that the aircraft manufacturers never thought their aeroplanes would still be in service over 40 years after they were first rolled out. That means we are navigating a great ughknown; one with a central contradiction. Piper has pointed (and the FAA agreed in 1989) that the inspection regime is actually capable of doing more damage to the wing spar connections than any extant cracks. That fact that the FAA wants to push ahead with this despite agreeing with past arguments leads me to believe they've run out of patience with old airframes. The AD may not come out exactly as proposed, but something is likely, and we can expect that CASA will adopt the final AD wholesale. For Australia, that's a bigger problem: our dwindling engineer population just doesn't have the capacity to deal with a sudden workload of that immensity.
Graphical weather forecasts (GAF) were introduced to simplify interpretation, and yet we can still get it wrong sometimes. That's probably because weather is not a definite thing; forecasts are accurate only to a degree and anything outside that degree is anyone's guess, sort of like flying an aeroplane outside its tested limits. Sometimes our desire to fly can cause us to read a forecast through CAVOK-coloured glasses, which I suspect is what led to the C210 tragedy the ATSB reported on this week. I can remember times when I launched happily having decided the weather would not be a factor, only to have clouds and viz spoil my day. Then, when I looked back later on, I could see that the GAF did contain hints, I just didn't see them clearly enough. Who else has done that? I doubt my hand is the only one raised. Aviation weather forecasts are always going to need interpretation; there's too much information to be delivered in anything but code. What's needed is better education on reading the codes and, more importantly, understanding what the information is telling you about the flight conditions. CASA has scheduled a webinar called Mastering Aviation Weather Forecasts, slated for 15 November. I've signed up in the hope that this will close what may be a large gap in my understanding of GAFs.
Nine days. That's all you have. Nine days to complete and lodge your 2024 CASA Wings Awards nominations. We're closing the collector on 10 November, so if you haven't done your submission yet, I would advise you to get it in this week. The judging panel will get to work immediately the collector closes because we're have a tight schedule to meet, and that means it's unlikely there'll be an extension to the deadline this year. Keep that in mind if you still have some work to do.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch
MTF...P2
