Truth In Op-Eds - And Precision In Aviation Terminology

By Mike McCarthy

After Hand-Flying The Big Jets was posted, but before the sequel Dicing With The Devil - Landing A 747 At Aspen was posted, I took a lot of email heat from a reader who I'll refer to as Captain Anonymous. (I suggested to him that if he felt strongly about what I had written then maybe he should write an Op-Ed of his own, which he indicated he might very well do. Presumably he will identify himself as that person if he follows through.)

To get ahead of myself, Captain Anonymous says that I'm dead wrong (so to speak), and that he (and everybody else in the know) controls airliner rate of descent with elevator and airspeed with throttle.

My reaction is that you can do this if you're well away from the stall and can afford the airspeed excursions, but the Laws Of Physics suggest a very different technique if you are hand-flying an approach into a short field ...

... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Okay, here's what all the email was about:

First, Captain Anonymous accused me of misleading you, Dear Reader, by my supposed attempt to convince you all that I am an experienced airline pilot. As the sequel makes clear, this is not the case, nor was it my intention to give anyone that impression.

Nevertheless, I do have several hundred hours in FS aircraft (I don't keep a log book), including probably 50+ hours of fly-by-keyboard. So in the sense of our hobby I have a fair amount of experience - but probably not anything like the kind of time that Captain Anonymous probably has in real aircraft. (Anyone who has, say, 8000 hours in FS aircraft and who isn't a paid professional beta tester is either retired or crazy.)

However...In my 110 hours of total time in real aircraft I also had 50 or so real hours operating Cherokees and Citabrias out of a very short New Jersey hillside airstrip (roughly 100 yards long), much of it in hot and humid summer conditions. So I will bow to nobody with respect to the principles of extreme short-field operations. I have been there and done that many times, on the backside of the power curve at 400 feet AGL, flying directly toward what looked very like a mountain, with my life dependent on the engine's not failing. (I am not recommending this as a way of life, but it taught me a lot about the "safe" handling of aircraft under extreme conditions. It turned out to be easy in the Citabria but actually very difficult in the Cherokee, which handled like a pig, especially near stall, and most especially if there was any kind of crosswind. My flight instructor, who rode with me a few times till he was sure I could take care of myself, was a bush pilot from Canada, and he liked my style. He also taught me how to hedge-hop at fifty feet in rainstorms, another potentially life-saving skill which Captain Anonymous will not find discussed in his airline's operating manual.)

But back to Captain Anonymous' concerns:

Mea culpa, mea culpa. I should not have used the term "maneuvering speed" when what I meant was "design speed" (or whatever it may actually be called, I'm too lazy to do the research). Captain Anonymous correctly pointed out to me that "maneuvering speed" is the highest speed at which full elevator input (or a vertical gust while cruising) is guaranteed not to break the airframe.

Next, mea culpa again, and yet again. In the intro to the sequel I wrote "Eagle County" when I meant "Pitkin County." (Or is it the other way 'round? You know what? I really don't care.) And when at the back of the piece I said that joystick commands "absolute deck angle" what I meant to write was "absolute elevator angle". Mea culpa, mea culpa.

There are probably other errors in the articles, but what of it? (Even though I was aware of the last-mentioned two errors, I didn't even bother to send in the corrections - that's how unimportant I think this stuff is. These are unpaid pieces written for the joy of writing. If those of us who have written Op-Eds had to fact-check everything we write, we wouldn't write -- and FlightSim.Com couldn't afford to do the fact-checking for us.

Captain Anonymous urges precision in terminology (reasonable, though he is not the sole arbiter of what various terms mean, as in our heated sub-debate about the meaning of "coffin corner"), and he effectively accuses me of creating a safety problem by misleading rookies about the way airliners are actually flown. (In his SAAB miniliner, Captain Anonymous tracks the glideslope using elevator. He controls airspeed using power. He says that this is standard in the airline biz.)

So I yield. I agree that this is the way Captain Anonymous flies. It may even be as he says, that this is the way essentially all airline pilots fly all approaches in all turbine-powered airliners (though I did receive email from a DC-10 captain who was quite happy with what I wrote, and who gave me the straight skinny on how to hand-fly DC-10's)...

...But it doesn't change the physics of the situation. The air molecules don't know how many or few hours Captain Anonymous has, and they don't know what's written in the manufacturer or airline operating manuals, which are written for average pilots operating in normal situations.

When the short-field chips are down -- when you're flaps-down and hanging it from the prop (or standing it on the jet pipes), just a few knots away from the stall - you don't have any airspeed margin to conceal the true nature of the situation, and you have no choice but to control descent rate with throttle and airspeed with elevator ...

...And if you can fly right when you are just about to stall, then you can fly right when you're well away from the stall...

But really now. Isn't it obvious that the kind of maneuvers I'm talking about are not safe in real life?

Isn't it obvious that we're talking about hand-flying SIMULATED big jets? Do I really have to put in the kind of disclaimer that Captain Anonymous faulted me for not including? Is Captain Anonymous effectively insisting that I fly my simulated 747 into Aspen using the procedures his airline requires for his SAAB at other airports? Or is he really saying "I'm an airline pilot and you are not, so what I say goes, without question."

Guess what, Captain Anonymous, I probably have more FS hours than you do, and I probably fly FS aircraft better than you do when we're talking about hand flying, which was the point of the articles - everything was leading up to landing a simulated 747 at a simulated version of the Aspen airport, which can only be done by hand-flying while operating close to the stall.

But you know what? Give me an hour of familiarization and I bet I could pull off the same stunt in a "real" airline training simulator - or even a real airliner - and I bet I could do it better than you because, very clearly, I understand the principles of aerodynamics better than you do, while possessing some very real aircraft handling skills.

So I have a question: Assuming that both Captain Anonymous and I are rookies when it comes to 747's, is there anyone out there in a position to grant the requisite "real 747 simulator" time to Captain Anonymous and me?

Let me refine my challenge: Give me ten hours with the real aircraft performance charts, and then give me one hour at altitude for playing games and making notes, and then give me five shots at Aspen starting from DBL at fifteen thousand feet with 10,000 pounds of fuel aboard, and with gear and flaps down, at 130 knots on a heading of 270. I bet I get in on the third try, and I bet that I grease it on for try number five.

Then let's give Captain Anonymous five hours at altitude, and give him ten shots at Aspen under the same circumstances. But there's a catch... After he turns south at DBL, let's require Captain Anonymous to control the flight path with elevator (spoilers verboten), and let's require him to control airspeed with the thrust levers...

Then we'll score the ratio of survivable landings to unsurvivable crashes for each of us.

Is anybody willing to grant the simulator time? Is Captain Anonymous willing to play?

Mike McCarthy
mikemcc@earthnet.net

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