Pilotage

This January, as with Januarys past, I make no New Year's resolutions. Daily to-do lists are bad enough — why compose a list that you have to face and feel guilty about for an entire year?

However, I am willing to attempt a wish list. Wishing for something means that you'd like it to happen, hope it will occur, or dream about the possibilities. It may be a pie-in-the-sky approach to encouraging change, but at least it's uplifting. For example, there's this old standard of a wish: I wish to achieve inner peace, live in harmony with my fellow men and women, and acquire the eye-hand coordination necessary to achieve consistently perfect landings.

Or, a more contemporary wish that's been coopted and put to profitable use by many state lottery commissions and pilots of slow aircraft: I wish to become fabulously wealthy through blind luck rather than through years of sacrifice and toil, and spend most of my fortune on a personal jet.

Contrast a wish with a resolution. You can't resolve to achieve inner peace, harmony with every faceless driver you rage at on the street — or, especially, a great landing every time. Those things make for nice but, let's face it, unrealistic goals. When you make a resolution, however, it means that you've thrown down the gauntlet, drawn a line in the sand. You've made a bet with yourself to accomplish something.

In the context of a New Year's resolution, that something usually involves overcoming some personal deficiency: I resolve to read at least one meaningful book this year (excluding the latest Dilbert anthology), get to within 65 percent of John Glenn's physical condition by the time I'm 65 percent of his age; and, if I can't land well all the time, then at least make nice approaches some of the time.

One of the fundamental problems with New Year's resolutions is accomplishing them. If you do, at best it makes you feel normal — you overcame a deficiency, and now you're average instead of below average. You say that you've finally been making consistently nice approaches to landings? Great! That means you're performing to minimum acceptable standards. Now, about those touchdowns. If you fail or fall short in accomplishing your resolutions, you feel worse than when you started the year. Your fragile commitment is ripped to shreds, and you despair in the realization that deficiencies rule. I'll take a wish over a resolution anytime. They're a lot easier on the ego.

I've resolved — uh, decided — to identify three aviation wishes for the New Year. I promise there'll be nothing on Y2K.

First, I wish that winds were like altitudes. When I fly westbound, I fly at an even altitude, plus 500 feet if I'm VFR. When eastbound, I go at an odd altitude. Why can't winds blow from the west at odd altitudes, and from the east at even altitudes? Then we'd have a tailwind no matter in which direction we fly. The turbulence from the shear we'd encounter when climbing or descending through each 1,000 feet would be well worth the enjoyment of a perpetual tailwind in cruise flight.

The second item on my wish list has to do with a term I've recently seen bandied about. Mooney Aircraft has announced that it is developing a new "entry-level" model, the Eagle. Mooney will keep the cost of the airplane down by using an IO-550 engine derated to 244 hp, benefiting from an expected streamlined certification process, and by installing fewer avionics. What is the price for this new entry-level four-place retractable? Somewhere in the neighborhood of $320,000, according to Mooney.

Meanwhile, at the recent NBAA convention in Las Vegas, Cessna heralded the first update of the popular CitationJet with a press release titled "New Citation CJ1 to Inherit Entry-Level Position." The CJ1 will feature a new Collins Pro Line 21 avionics system and a gross weight increase that should allow the pilot to fill the tanks and still invite just under four FAA-standard-weight (170 pounds each) passengers for a 1,250-nm flight. What is the cost of entry to the flight levels? $3.5 million in year 2000 bucks.

I don't know about you, but an entry-level jet sounds like a contradiction in terms. If I'm paying in the mid-six or -seven figures for an airplane, I wouldn't want to be congratulated for choosing what the dictionary defines as "the lowest level of a hierarchy." The Eagle may be the least-expensive Mooney, and the CJ1 the smallest Citation, but that's not necessarily the buyer's perspective. If I were trading in a fixed-gear single for an Eagle, or a piston twin or turboprop for a CJ1, I'd be thinking that I was on top of the heap rather than under it. My wish? That we agree "entry level" can refer only to a primary training aircraft. Everything else is a higher rung on the ladder.

My third wish is that the inverse relationship between the need to fly and the ability to fly be reversed so that we can fly more efficiently. At present I have compelling business and personal reasons, not to mention gobs of desire, to fly. I have lots of places to go — many of them at great distances — and not a lot of time to get there. I need speed. I have four kids, with things, to haul. I need space. I could put one of those CJ1s to excellent use.

The problem is, I don't have the ability to purchase the airplane of my needs. I dream that someday I may have the resources, but if wealth comes to me the old-fashioned way, after years of struggle, I'll probably be past needing the jet. My business will have wound down, and the kids will be raising their own families and pursuing their own careers.

It's the same with cars and houses. You need a big car and a big house when you're young and raising a family — just when you can least afford them. Big is out of the picture until the kids are gone and you're ready to retire. At that point a big house and a big car become symbols of prosperity, position, and achievement. Need would dictate that you'd live in a two-bedroom condo and drive a VW Beetle — a new one.