Glass Cockpit

Recent aviation literature has concentrated a great deal of attention on "glass cockpits" -- integrated, all-digital electronic instrumentation packages for airplanes. These have been common in business jets and airliners for quite a while, but recent activity has centered around general aviation airplanes of the types I fly. Until Friday, Nov. 25, I was skeptical of the claims of the reports in the aviation press. One is always hearing about some new device that will revolutionize the way we do something, but past experience shows this is often not true: in particular, digital instruments in cars, except for the Heads-Up Display (HUD) that lets you see a speed readout without taking your eyes off the road, always seemed to me to be different but no better. I was never convinced that any other presentation was as intuitive as old fashioned round, white-on-black gauges. Such gauges show you more than a digital readout: they show you whether the reading is high or low, and whether it's increasing or decreasing, even if you don't look at it long enough to pick out the numbers.

So, I was prepared to pooh-pooh the idea that glass cockpits, when they finally came to general aviation, would be a huge step ahead in performance. I was prepared to conclude they were different (and much more expensive) without being better.

Well, on Saturday I went flying, for the first time, in an airplane with a glass cockpit, the Garmin G1000. I'm trying to recover instrument currency/proficiency after my favorite two airports were closed by 9/11 in 2001, and then in 2003, my wife gave birth to premature triplets (one didn't make it, but the others are now free of medical complications). I'm now flying out of Easton, MD, on the Eastern Shore near our vacation house.

The plane was a Cessna 182, a model I've flown before, although not as many hours as my favorites, the Beech Bonanza, Piper Seminole, or Piper Arrow. Anyway, I relearned something someone told me many years ago -- maybe it was my own father. When you spend "enough" money on something, it shows. Cessna (and the owner) spent enough on this airplane. The instrument panel looks like something out of "Star Wars". There are no gauges except 3 backups for emergencies that you don't normally have to look at. The main instruments are 2 TV screens, about a foot wide and 10" high, one in front of the pilot and one in front of the right seat passenger. The pilot's screen, the "Primary Flight Display" (PFD), shows a graphic image of an attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, and other "aircraft control" devices, while the right screen, the "Multifunction Display" (MFD), shows a moving map with your route indicated as a bright line and your current position indicated as an icon of an airplane. Superimposed on that image, you also get "blips" where the other airplanes are that are somehow processed from the returns of the controllers' radar and/or the transmissions of the other airplanes' transponders. We unintentionally tested this feature when the instructor pointed to one blip and said the other airplane was closer than he liked, and he hadn't yet seen it with the naked eye, but it was always better to know it was there. Well, I looked in the direction indicated by the instrument and wow! There was an airplane on our rear quarter, flying across our wake. This is an incredible development for safety, taking most of the risk out of collision avoidance.

The magic MFD screen can also talk to weather radar stations and display precipitation echoes, lightning strikes, and freezing levels along your route, or indeed anywhere in the country, since it's tied in to XM satellite technology. It even shows topography because it's connected to GPS and has a terrain map stored in it. If you're getting too close to the ground, the image turns yellow and then red. (The instructor says you should turn this feature off as you approach your destination, because it will give you a scare when the map turns red as you descend for landing).

The mechanical gyros, vacuum system, and magnetic compass have been eliminated. A ring laser gyro (used in many military systems) provides attitude reference and a fluxgate compass, a solid state thing with no moving parts, provides the system with a north-seeking indication. Since all this is electric, there is a second power bus with its own battery that can run the PFD for about half an hour after the main battery and alternator have died. Air charts, including instrument approaches, are stored in the device's memory, along with all the radio frequencies, airport locations, runway lengths and orientations, and ground based navaid locations. A GPS and a VOR/Localizer receiver are built in too, although you can't operate them without going through the MFD. (There's no ADF, but since NDB's are all there in the GPS database, you can get the MFD to simulate one, with additional imformation showing how far away it is). The FAA says you still need to have the paper charts with you as a backup, but I think a skilled user of the G1000 might never have to take them out of his flight bag. It appears the manufacturer thought of everything.

I was impressed. The instructor says it usually takes 5 to 10 hours of instruction to get proficient with this equipment, but I think it's worth it. If I'd had something like this on previous flights, some of my unpleasant moments would have been much easier (like that time I had to land in Monmouth County, NJ, and stay there overnight because of thunderstorms on my way back from Martha's Vineyard to DC). It also happens that the airplane itself is a very nice new one with exceptionally roomy accomodations and an amazingly smooth-running engine that isn't even as noisy as most planes I've flown before. It even seems some 10 to 15 knots faster than any other 182 I've flown.

It also became just a perfect day for flight -- the wind died out, visibility was perfect, and as I flew, the sun set in an amazing display over the Bay. We landed just 20 minutes after sunset, too early to log the landing as a night landing, but it was dark enough for me to get the flavor of night flight again.

While I could pick a few nits -- the glide slope indications on the Instrument Landing System (ILS) graphic are tiny, inconspicuous blue diamonds, and the altimeter display is not intuitive -- I've changed my mind about glass cockpits. If I could afford to own an airplane, and the glass cockpit was priced within reason, I would get it. Thumbs up, Garmin.

Five Laws of Naval Warfare

Alert readers will recognize that these "Laws" apply to a lot of other things in life. But, I present them as the "Laws of Naval Warfare" because I first developed them while reading about some of the famous naval battles of the past. I envision them from the point of view of an admiral, a commander in chief, or even the head of state, much as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, or von Clausewitz would have.

1. Never underestimate the opposition. You may have a brilliant plan, but as soon as other people are involved (both on your side and the enemy's) you can never tell what will happen.

2. Don’t believe your own propaganda. It’s OK to say the enemy is a stupid barbarian, but you must still be prepared to be surprised by his resourcefulness.

3. Don’t be too clever; the too-smart plan has a way of blowing up in the face of the planner.

4. Do nothing that isn’t motivated by strategic or tactical considerations; the notion that war is a means of communicating with the enemy is a myth of the intellectuals and has not helped those who did things “to send a message”.

5. Warfare and cost control, cost effectiveness, or cost consciousness may not be used coherently in the same sentence. Don’t worry about the bills until the treaty has been signed.

Navies and Conservative Politics

It is a cliché that there is a relationship between seafarers and conservative politics. Like many clichés, there are elements of truth in this one. Navies differ from armies in numerous ways. The most important in establishing their character, I think, is that the price of admission to naval power is huge. Not only do you (from the sovereign’s point of view) have to equip the crew with personal weapons and equipment, but you have to provide a ship to carry them, and in most periods, it must be armed with larger caliber weapons than an individual could use, or even carry.

This situation resembles, in some ways, that of the knights of the Middle Ages. Even if the individual crew members are not wealthy, a substantial concentration of wealth is necessary to field even one ship. Further, as anyone who has owned a pleasure boat can attest, maintaining a ship, even a small one, can be as expensive as buying it in the first place. (I have owned 6 boats in my lifetime, and I can personally testify to this). Taking this line of thought back further in time, the problems of fielding a fleet become even more stark. For King Minos of Crete, who is cited by the early historian Thucydides as the first monarch to benefit from sea power, paying for a fleet would have been a huge challenge. Minos lived before there was coined money, before there was credit, long before paper money, in a time when taxes were collected mainly in kind (around 1500 BC). While it may have been possible to move bars of bullion out of the royal treasury in wheelbarrows, it is more likely that the Minoan fleet had to be funded mainly in kind – by feeding, housing, and clothing the shipyard crews as they built the ships.

To build a fleet requires wealth, but to use it to control the sea lanes requires a lot more – organization, discipline, and foresight. For a ship to keep the sea more than a few hours requires that it be provisioned and stored for the voyage. In turn, this means stuff needs to be not only supplied to the crew as needed, but hoarded and doled out in advance, then rationed so that it lasts out the voyage. In turn, this calls into being a bureaucracy to administer the supply chain. To work a ship requires teamwork. Either a group of oarsmen must pull in unison, calling for months of practice before the art is mastered, or under sail, all the control lines, some of which call for the united efforts of 30 men, must be manipulated with precision to aim the sails to angles with the wind that have optimum values so that a degree or two of difference might measurably reduce a ship’s speed. The ship must also stand up to extremes of weather in an ocean that can become deadly to even the largest ships. All this leads to long term professionalism in the naval crew, as well as a strict hierarchy of command. The bottom line is that navies are very much a weapon of the “haves” and not of the “have nots” of history.

Related to this basic reality is the evolution of tactics in the Age of Sail. In 1514 the first warship was built with its main armament of cannon mounted below decks, firing through gun ports, the British Henry Grace a Dieu. (According to French sources the first such ship was built in France in 1501). While these big ships, the “capital ships” of their age, were not conceptually different from later sailing warships, it took a century for the basic tactics of using them to evolve. It seems to have been a Dutch admiral, van Tromp, who realized in the early 1600’s that ships with cannon mounted in broadside were vulnerable only from the bow or stern. Van Tromp reasoned that the best solution was to line the ships up in a column, each steering in the wake of the one ahead. Then the concentrated broadside fire of all the ships could decimate a target abeam, while the vulnerable ends would be covered by the next ship in the line. These tactics swung the Anglo-Dutch Wars in Holland’s favor for a few years, until the British copied them. Once they became established, navies became even more “aristocratic” than before, because not only was it much harder to win a naval battle if both fleets fought in line, but the tactics created an “aristocracy” among the ships themselves.

A "ship of the line” from 1650 to 1860 was one that could survive a broadside from the biggest ship afloat and remain operational (from the side, not from ahead or astern). Lesser ships, frigates and sloops, were “unfit to lie in the line” and rated a less senior officer to command them. The ship of the line was a big ship (and they grew bigger throughout the period). Requiring fleets of them to maneuver in formation was yet another huge commitment of resources and further raised the bar so that admittance into the ranks of naval powers became more and more expensive and called for more of a national commitment.

The end of the Age of Sail did not materially change things, at least not immediately. The steam-powered, steel battleship was basically the same in function as the ship of the line. The phrase “capital ship” was first used in the Age of Sail, but in the 20th century was applied to battleships. These ships fought in long lines as late as Jutland (1916).

It is therefore a fact that revolutionary regimes do not generally do that well in naval operations. Napoleon's admirals could never quite master the art of naval warfare. Germany, coming late to the game, couldn’t quite get the tactics right even though it had excellent ships, and thereby a British blockade had a lot to do with the course of World War I. Going yet further back, Mohammed’s successors, the caliphs, while they tried hard to field a navy when the Byzantine Navy recaptured Alexandria in 644 and kept it supplied by sea for a while, took centuries before they were able to challenge Byzantine and later Venetian mastery of the Mediterranean.

Navies, therefore, are associated with kings and empires. They are the product of wealth and privilege, not of popular mass movements. Armies have been more of a mass movement, especially since Napoleon. While armies also use teamwork and a command hierarchy to be most successful, they are more open to individual acts of heroism.

Soldiers must inevitably look forward to sleeping on the ground in primitive conditions, perhaps in tents, with the possible payoff of looting the conquered or being quartered in captured buildings. Soldiers are, however, not normally exposed to drowning. Sailors, on the other hand, will be taking their kitchen (“galley”), sleeping, and bathroom (“head”) facilities – appropriate to their era – along with them. They will be enclosed by the ship’s structure, which even if it isn’t heated and cooled as a modern warship is, will offer shelter and some degree of insulation from the elements. The ship will be doing all the transporting, and buoyancy, the force holding the ship up, is free. So, sailors do not have to march from place to place, or carry their possessions in a backpack, although if they fail in their duty they could drown. A navy is also much less exposed to sudden, guerilla-style counterattack, because there is no terrain to hide behind on the high seas, and visibility is usually such that tactical surprise is hard to achieve. This gives the ship’s company a somewhat greater degree of security from the enemy, at least subjectively. A navy is already an elite, although it has an elite within it too, the capital ship.

Bad Decisions Pilots Make

Flying an airplane calls for two distinct types of skills: the "stick and rudder" feel for your airplane, and the "aviation management" skills required to make decisions when things aren't going the way you expect. Those of us who learned to fly as adults are often second rate in the first type of skills, but we can excel in the second kind. Here's an example of someone who made an extraordinarily bad decision, but lived to tell about it. I saw it on the Internet (http://www.wftv.com/irresistible/4982688/detail.html) and can't vouch for the exact truth of the tale, but there were fairly convincing photos and a video to go with it. Of course we all know how easy those are to fake for the computer-literate, but oh well...

The Cessna 182 is a rather tame, very capable general aviation airplane suitable for beginners (as long as they are rather large, with powerful arms; the controls are quite heavy in certain flight regimes, and the instrument panel is tall, obstructing the view ahead for a smaller pilot). Unlike many small airplanes, the 182 can safely fly with practically anything on board that will fit through the personnel doors or luggage door. But, it is relatively slow and not particularly fuel-efficient because of its fixed gear and strut braced wing. So...Cessna introduced a "182RG", RG for "Retractable Gear", whose wheels retracted in a bizarre, very complex motion into the area behind the rear seats. This unusual retraction path was necessary because the airplane is high wing, and the usual practice of swinging the main gear sideways (in or out) to rest inside the wing would not work.

It turned out that the retraction mechanism was failure-prone (engineering lesson: depart from classical solutions only when you're SURE there is no better way), and it usually fails with the main wheels trailing back, neither up nor down, when the hydraulics stop working. Well, our hero, flying one of these airplanes, arrives at his destination, enters downwind for landing, and hits the gear switch. The main wheels stick halfway down. After departing the pattern and circling, trying his bag of tricks to get the wheels down, nothing works. His buddy on the ground has a Jeep (the open model, perhaps the Wrangler?) It can easily go 80 mph. The 182's landing approach speed, flaps down, is about 70 knots (75 mph).

Get the picture? Our hero turns final, descends to 5 feet above the pavement, while his buddy, with another guy in the Jeep, accelerates to match the aircraft speed. (This requires quite a long runway). The second guy in the Jeep grabs the dangling wheel on one side of the aircraft and pulls it forward....CLICK!! the downlink engages and the wheels are down. The aircraft peels off and climbs away, with the gear still down but this time down and locked with 3 green lights showing on the instrument panel. Our hero flies around the pattern and makes a normal landing, taxis to the maintenance hangar, and informs the airframe mechanic that he needs to repair the landing gear power pack.

What is wrong with this picture???

It shows a staggering lack of judgement on the part of the pilot. He was obviously a brilliant pilot in some ways: he held his "bird" in a precise position near the ground, maintaining an exact speed, while the boys in the Jeep did their thing. I'm sure the pull of the wheel caused yaw and pitch excursions he had to counter exactly with control motions. But, in trying to avoid a gear-up landing, he forgot to keep his priorities straight.

A landing accident is often expensive but rarely causes fatalities, or even injuries worse than cuts and bruises. A gear-up landing is usually about a $10,000 accident. The problem had been caused by mechancical failure. The gear-up landing would probably have had to be reported to the FAA and NTSB, but neither would have taken action against the pilot, since he was obviously innocent.

A collision between the 182RG and a Jeep going 80 mph might have been fatal for everyone in both vehicles! Because no damage was done, it is not reportable to either FAA or NTSB, but if it was, I am quite sure the former would suspend the pilot's license to punish his poor judgment.

How I Got Started

The event that started me down the this path occurred on June 21, 1963. I was ten years old, a passenger on the ocean liner Kungsholm in mid-Atlantic on a voyage between New York and Gothenburg, Sweden, with an intermediate stop in Copenhagen. I remember the date because the crew was erecting a Maypole on the aft well deck as part of the midsummer night festivities (much more important to sun-starved Scandinavians than it is in the US). After watching some of the activity, I went back into the promenade deck through the aft door. The door, a heavy weathertight thing, was hard to close for a child because its spring was disconnected. I braced my hand against the door frame to give more leverage and, you guessed it, slammed the door on my right thumb.
The ship’s doctor spoke no English, but he X-rayed my hand and gave me pills to control the pain (they worked a little). For the next 6 weeks, I had to hold my thumb above my heart or it would start throbbing unbearably. I was completely disabled for almost everything a 10-year old likes to do, except reading. So, next day, I made my way to the ship’s library and took out the book Famous American Ships by Frank O. Braynard, the first that caught my eye.
That book changed my life. When I got to the clippers and read about their records, I was hooked. I went to the big stairwell where the chart of the North Atlantic was posted with pins to mark each noon position and the list of day’s runs. (This was a fixture in transatlantic liners, one which has disappeared in today’s cruise ships, whose passengers aren’t that excited about their scheduled arrival. You have to be middle-aged at least to remember it). I went over the day’s runs and discovered that with all her thousands of horsepower, with all her advantage in size, Kungsholm had not once succeeded in traveling as many miles in 24 hours as Donald McKay’s Lightning had in 1854, using nothing but the wind. In addition, the sailing ships of that period were works of unsurpassed artistry, things of beauty as well as function. Later, when I learned to sail, I came to appreciate even more what a huge accomplishment it was to set those records, but for a time, I was mainly in information-gathering mode. Maritime museums in Scandinavia provided me with plenty of additional data.