NIFA Safecon

Good flying alone doesn't win collegiate championships

"Tap, tap, tap, tap." The sharp sound of wood lightly striking metal reverberated through the still, early morning Florida air on the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University ramp at Daytona Beach International Airport. m "Tap, tap, tap." A handful of people walk purposefully across the asphalt as the first rays of sunlight peek from above low clouds over the Atlantic Ocean to the east. More than 50 training aircraft — mainly Cessna 150s, 152s, and 172s, augmented by a few Piper singles and a couple of Diamond Katanas — are tied down in neat rows. Sporting a wide variety of paint schemes, these obviously are not the blue-and-white Riddle trainers that normally populate the ramp, although several carry university insignia or names on their tails.

"Tap, tap." On the north end of the ramp, two students from Central Texas College are preflighting a Cessna and one taps on the propeller with a thin wooden stick that he calls a "Wally stick," listening for the telltale change in pitch that would indicate a crack within the blade.

It's 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 4, the last day of the National Intercollegiate Flying Association's forty-eighth annual Safety and Flight Evaluation Conference (Safecon) and an hour and a half before the first takeoffs. Students flying in the day's event are attending the required briefing in a nearby auditorium, but their teammates are beginning preflight inspections of the aircraft. More than 250 students from 26 colleges and universities are participating in this year's competition.

Safecon's roots date to an intercollegiate glider meet in 1911. NIFA was formed in 1935 as the National Intercollegiate Flying Club, and despite a postwar name change in 1948, its objectives have remained the same: to promote skill, safety, sport, and education in college flying. Safecons consist of three elements: flying events, including navigation, power-off landings, short-field landings, and a message drop; ground events, such as aircraft recognition, flight computer accuracy, and preflight inspection; and a career-oriented trade show.

If one individual personifies the spirit of Safecon, it's Wally Funk — a spunky, white-haired CFI, ATP, airworthiness inspector, and air safety investigator from Grapevine, Texas, who serves as the competition's chief safety judge. She spends her day on the ramp, looking for safety violations that will cost participants points in the competition, evangelizing safety, and handing out her trademark Wally Sticks.

A Wally Stick is a foot-long piece of 3/8-inch wooden dowel marked off in inches for measuring fuel. It's also imprinted "I'd rather be flying," which Funk tells pilots not to do with three or fewer inches of fuel in the tanks. "I don't like to go by gallons. Too many people have run out of fuel using the gallon method," she explained.

Push the stick into the engine's exhaust to check for obstructions, she teaches. Tap it along the elevator and listen to verify that the counterweights are in place. Push it against flap track brackets to check for fatigue cracks. And then there's the seemingly incessant prop-tapping, which Funk has advocated for two decades. "One of my friends in the Powder Puff Derby, Margaret Mead, had a propeller blade failure over the Everglades," she explains. Mead survived the incident, but Funk says that a few taps would have revealed the crack and prevented the ordeal. "That's why I've been making Wally Sticks for 20 years now.

"Everything that I'm teaching these kids came from accidents that I've investigated," says Funk, who was the National Transportation Safety Board's first female investigator, examining more than 400 accidents during her 12 years with the board. "I got tired of seeing the same accidents occurring with new pilots."

Funk was a NIFA competitor from 1958 to 1960 while she was a college student, winning the Top Woman Pilot award while she was at Oklahoma State University. "NIFA was in my blood," she says. "That gave my career in aviation a start."

John DePaola and Carlos Wyre from Mercer County Community College in Trenton, New Jersey, pay close attention as Funk demonstrates the stick's use on an inspection of their Cessna. "She's teaching us stuff that's not taught to us," says DePaola, a senior and the team's safety captain. He plans to work after graduation as a flight instructor and says that he would use Funk's suggestion to check flap actuator brackets. "Wally said a failure there could result in split flaps, and that has killed pilots."

There's a tremendous sense of school pride at a Safecon. Each team is in uniform, although most are less formal than the Air Force Academy's military-issue flight suits; T-shirts or polos and slacks are typical, with some students wearing dress shirts and ties. Reflective orange vests are popular accents, in keeping with the safety theme. There's camaraderie, too, with "Good lucks" and handshakes offered all around on the flight line following the final briefing before each heat. And students are always willing to pitch in as spotters or to help push airplanes if another team lacks sufficient bodies.

Among the greatest beneficiaries of that help are Christopher Brett of Dowling College in New York and Stephen Britigan of Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina. They won the Top Pilot awards in regional competition and earned the chance to compete at Safecon — even though their teams didn't make the cut. They met on the flight line and teamed up for the message drop, an event requiring two crewmembers. "Everybody's been really great," Britigan says. "People have been going out of their way to help."

Norfolk State University's team has flown a Diamond Katana and two Cessnas to Daytona Beach for the Safecon; the Katana's novelty gives the Virginia team a celebrity status on the ramp. A delegation from Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, is full of questions for Donnetta Johnson and teammate Jim Rowbottom, who is preparing to fly the Katana in an event. "Everybody's come by to check it out," says Greg Pipes, a Norfolk State senior. "A lot of people want to get into it — it's more like a fighter aircraft, with the stick."

Although Central Missouri State University also has brought a Katana, Pipes says that his team is the only one using the airplane in every flying event. "We've been doing really well in it. It's got a high glide ratio, so it tends to glide a great distance. It handles more like a glider, almost."

Beside the runway, judges evaluating the power-off landing competition express among themselves only sympathy for the Katana pilots. While the Katana is clearly the most modern airplane in the competition, the venerable Cessna 150 is preferred because of its highly effective flaps, according to the judges — many of whom are former Safecon competitors. In fact, several schools keep one or more 150s in their training fleets specifically for the flight competitions.

Students have to concentrate on more than just their landings. Judges away from the runway ensure that competitors fly a rectangular pattern. Landing outside the 200-foot-long grid marked in chalk on the runway costs 400 points. Landing in it costs a point for each foot away from the center line, defined by cones on either side of the runway, and the lowest score wins. "Two's about the lowest I've ever seen," said Kevin Simecek, a Western Michigan University graduate student helping to judge the event. "The top 10 places are usually lower than 100."

Despite the students' enthusiasm, only a few journey to Runway 7R to watch the landing events. "It's not a spectator sport," explains Bryan Bourgeois, a CFI and assistant coach at Western Michigan University. "A lot of competitors want to come out and see how their teammates do, but nobody knows the score — not even the chief judge."

Points are assessed at the touchdown area and at different points around the pattern, Bourgeois says, and are not tallied until the end of the day. Even then, no scoring information is announced until the awards banquet.

In a sweltering Embry-Riddle hangar across the field, University of North Dakota junior Mike Smieja races over, around, and under a Piper that event judge Keith Simecek of Milan, Michigan — a United Airlines captain and an A&P/IA — spent nearly four hours "preparing" for the preflight inspection event. Some of the induced discrepancies are seemingly obvious, like the propeller that is mounted backwards. A reversed brake pad, cut cotter pin, loose bolts, and the wrong- color lens on the left-wing navigation light are more subtle. An airspeed indicator has replaced the tachometer, the registration number on the left empennage is incorrect, and all of the aircraft's required paperwork is incorrect or missing.

During the competition, students discover another dozen or so legitimate discrepancies, for a total of 75. Smieja, sweating profusely after 15 minutes of continuous activity in the hot Florida air, finds 54 — good enough for fourth place, he learns at the Saturday night awards banquet; the event winner, Luke Lokowich of Embry-Riddle's Daytona Beach campus, finds only 59. (Smieja also placed first in the aircraft recognition event, contributing to UND's third consecutive winning of the championship trophy. Western Michigan University placed second, and Daytona Beach host Embry- Riddle was third.)

To compete in the national Safecon, each team had to place in a regional event — and the consensus was that more precision was required in the national competition.

"Everything gets stepped up a grade here," explains Robert Schank, a Mercer County Community College freshman. "It's actually greater than an ATP standard." Schank says that in regional simulator navigation competition, pilots are permitted 10 degrees of heading variation; at the national Safecon, only 3 degrees' variance is allowed...and the checkpoints are smaller.

St. Cloud State University senior David Smith, who participated in the in-flight navigation event, agrees that the national competition is much more difficult. "One of our checkpoints was a pink building, and they put the identifying letter directly behind it," he said. "You couldn't see it until you were past the building."

Jon Lasneski, also a senior at St. Cloud State, finds that minor procedural differences were distracting during the power-off landing competition. "Back at St. Cloud it's a left-hand traffic pattern, and here it was right traffic," he says. Seeing the line of judges along the runway commanded his attention as he turned final. "It reminds you of the competition, and that makes it worse."

But the effort is all worthwhile, Schank comments. "This is recognized by all the flying organizations and all the airlines," explains Schank, who hopes to work as a corporate pilot. "They know the competitors here are the best in their regions, so [competing here] looks good on your resume when you apply for a job."

For many pilots, just the flight to Florida — which, from Minnesota, Colorado, or California is a literal cross-country — provided considerable challenge.

St. Cloud State's Lasneski logged 13.5 hours in one day, flying a Cessna 152 to Daytona Beach. "We left about 5 a.m. and got here about 11:30 at night," Lasneski says. "The trip down here and the events down here have all been a great learning experience." The event also fosters a sense of teamwork, he adds.

Lasneski says that at school, students seldom fly farther than the 300-nautical-mile trip required for a private pilot certificate.

"Just the flights from Minnesota to Florida and back are an educational experience," agrees Smith. Practicing for and participating in the Safecon helps tremendously to improve aeronautical skills and encourages students to work hard in order to achieve a goal, he adds.

More learning experiences wait in the immediate future for many of the Safecon participants at Saturday evening's awards banquet. While some may board airliners for the trip home, many will climb into training aircraft for the long educational flight.

The 1997 Safecon will be hosted by Western Michigan University at W.K. Kellogg Airport in Battle Creek from April 29 through May 3.