Lt. Col. Tony Carelli nearly had his flying career (and life!) come to an end when he started experiencing severe chest pains about 3 years ago.  Carelli was flying the A-10 Warthog for the Pennsylvania Air National Guard.  It had been his lifelong dream to be an Air Force pilot.  An exam revealed that Carelli had a badly damaged aortic valve and an aneurism.  It was determined he actually flew with the condition for about 6 months before the severe pains started.
He saw Dr. Joseph Bavaria who replaced the damaged valve with an artificial one known as a “Toronto valve”.  This valve is so much like the original one that the recipient need not be on medication forever.  It also is a permanent fix – that is, there is no need for a transplant in the future.

The hardest part was convincing the Air Force to let Carelli again take the controls of the A-10.  Since the jet is a single pilot aircraft, there is no backup.  It took 30 months of being grounded and a battery of tests, but eventually he was cleared to flying status.

One of Sam Walton’s sons, John Walton, died last June when he crashed his experimental CGS Aviation Hawk Arrow after taking off from Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  According the NTSB, which did not identify the cause of the crash, several factors  may have contributed to the accident.  According to the report, the aircraft he was flying had a loose flight control component and had been heavily modified.  Prior to the departure from Jackson Hole, the aircraft had suffered a hard landing at another airport and had been trucked to Jackson Hole for repairs.
They did not provide details of the modifications, but the designer of the aircraft did say that the aircraft had never been tested in the configuration of Walton’s version.

Modifying an aircraft is serious business, and must be done carefully.  I think that the plethora of experimental aircraft available almost give a sense that airplane design is easy and anybody can do it.  You don’t necessarily have to have an engineering degree to modify or even design an airplane, but you do have to understand the process.  We don’t know why his aircraft was modified in such a way, or what he was attempting to do when he crashed.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University created an ‘ab-initio’ (from the beginning) flight training program in 2003 to take pilots with 0 flight time to the right seat of a commercial airline in as little as 225 flight hours.  This was a break from the traditional approach of ERAU which also included academic work and those things called ‘degrees’.  ERAU decided to drop the program, which was intended for those with college degrees seeking a career change to aviation, back in February.

The program however, is not gone — it has been sold to Flight Training Services International (FTSI) also located in Florida.  The CEO of FTSI is actually an ERAU graduate, and they seem eager to have the program.  I’m not sure what they paid for it, but part of the deal includes a $100,000 per year donation to ERAU scholarships.  Works out good for ERAU, but I’m not sure about FTSI.

The press release I read (from ERAU) referred to the CAPT program as an “experiment” that proved you could take a person from 0 hours in an airplane to first officer status in 225 hours.  Not sure what they were trying to prove, but it wasn’t new.  These programs are not new and have already been ‘proven’.

The future of FTSI is probably OK, though, because it sounds like they are fulfilling pilot needs for carriers outside the U.S. and are also working on military contracts.

[Source: ERAU Press Release]

Good news if you are thinking about a career as a pilot!  Recent trends are showing that the hiring of pilots in all sectors is on the rise and the numbers are looking like they did just before 9/11.  Not only is airline travel back up, we are hitting a time when many Vietnam era military pilots who became airline pilots are having to retire due to the age 60 rule.  Additionally, many experienced pilots in the U.S. are leaving to fly in other countries like India, the Middle East, and of course China.  The rapid growth of those economies has caused a demand for more commercial flight operations.  Many of the vacancies are available for lower time pilots.

While it’s probably still not the best paying job you can find, but there is money to be made if you can stick it out.  Corporate flying, if you are with a healthy company, can be a good option.  You tend to fly modern equipment that is well maintained, but non-scheduled service can sometimes put a damper on your life (I know, as my wife is a corporate pilot).

Air, Inc. is a good resource for finding employment as a pilot.  Also, Be A Pilot has some information regarding an aviation career.

I sat in on the speech given by Marion Blakey (current FAA Administrator) at EAA Airventure, which was the first time I had seen her in person. Overall she came across as a typical government official; that is, there just seemed to be a disconnect between her world and our world. I think the biggest problem she has when relating to a group of pilots is the fact that she is not a pilot herself. One can be a great administrator (in general terms) but if you are not a part of the group you administrate, you will always have a separation between you and them (no matter how many photo op flights you take).

Her speech was fine, and covered quite a lot of topics from safety to LSA regulations. You could, however, tell that it was carefully prepared and she definitely is a politician. So what did Blakey actually say? You can read the text of the speech at the FAA website, but perhaps what nearly everyone was waiting on was what she had to say about user fees. This has been a hot topic for quite a while and will defitely heat up in the coming months. In September of 2007, the current funding mechanism for the FAA expires and congress must renew it.

The main problem that has caused all of this fuss about user fees is that the FAA is in need of money. Like any government agency, they always grow and need more resources to keep operating. Of course, the FAA is vital to our NAS – I’m not saying they should not grow. However, in general, our government tends to grow to solve problems instead of innovate, which is what companies do. I am not convinced at this point that the FAA is the leanest run agency it can be, so the “we need more money to do this” is really hard for me to believe. The argument is that because the number of flights are increasing that FAA must also grow to handle it.

What bothered me most about Blakey’s comments was that she never backed up her claim that “we need more money to pay for improvements” with any numbers. Perhaps she did not feel this was the appropriate place, but even some data would have been helpful. She indicated that since the opportunity to change the funding mechanism only comes every 10 years that we must change it next year in order to finance the improvements. I have some experience in state government and I know how that mindset works. Usually not good for the taxpayer.

Blakey stated that she did not believe that “broad user fees” were necessary for general aviation and that there probably was not a one size fits all solution. The problem with this approach is that any introduction of a user fee system on ANY segment of aviation will eventually be applied to all segments. Simply looking at any other country where a user fee system has been applied reveals that it does not work in the long run. It ends up stifling GA and actually making few users available to bear the costs.

Her speech didn’t really give me great comfort in what is going to happen with this, but I am glad she came to Oshkosh to see the sheer number of GA pilots who will be affected by any change in the funding mechanism. I only hope she keeps her promise to not do anything to stifle GA.

One of the next major improvements in business jets will be the addition of Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) which depict the view outside the airplane even in low visibility conditions.  Honeywell is the maker of one such system.  They utilize GPS to precisely pinpoint the aircraft’s location and then project the surrounding environment in real time.  For example if an aircraft is flying an approach to an airfield in low visibility, the pilot would be able to see the airport environment projected in the correct orientation so they could land safely.  This is mostly going to help business jets, because they are the ones typically flying into smaller airports without ILS approaches.  Airliners probably would not adopt the technology, at least not right away simply because the vast majority of them fly into larger airports already equipped with ILSs.

Rockwell Collins is also making an SVS system which they hope to sell to the U.S. Air Force.  In fact one of their spokemen stated a potential use would be in brownout condition in Iraq.  Of course, my thought was that the brownout, which is a thick dustcloud, is not the same as thick fog or low moisture clouds near the ground.  In fact, I doubt many pilots would be flying through thick sand storms so bad they would need SVS to get through it.  I’m guessing the airplane would not like all that sand going through the engines.

It really came as no surprise this past week when Honda announced they would actually produce the HondaJet in an effort to enter the VLJ market. In the past they had maintained they were only producing the aircraft as a test bed to perfect the jet engine they were co-developing with GE.

The VLJ presence wasn’t overwhelming simply because of all the other markets represented, such as the light sport aircraft, but you could certainly tell this is going to be a serious business in the next few years. No wonder the airlines are getting scared…