Letters

Piper's Cherokee

I would like to thank Alton K. Marsh for the great article, " Honest Cherokee" (December 1999 Pilot). My father and I own a Piper Cherokee 160, and it is our pride and joy. I will always cherish the memories of happiness my father and I have enjoyed in the cockpit of this airplane.

I recently got married and my wife was very reluctant to crawl into the airplane with me in the beginning. After a few hours of nervous coaxing and sweating palms, she finally signed on as my copilot. Now, we go everywhere together and she loves it. We have thought about getting a bigger and faster airplane someday, when the kids come along, but then we realize our Piper Cherokee fits us perfectly because it always gets us where we want to go.

Robert Darren Kerns AOPA 1371000
Taswell, Indiana

When will you writers ever learn? John Thorp designed the Cherokee! Yes, Fred Weick had a hand in it after John turned the basic design over to Piper. But for the record, John Thorp designed the bird; please give him the credit due. And yes, Thorp told me that the 180 was the best.

Don Taylor AOPA 151609
Ajo, Arizona

Private vs. commercial

Three cheers for the NTSB! I have just finished reading " Pilot Counsel: Private vs. Commercial" (December 1999 Pilot), and I wanted to say that I appreciated the ruling of the NTSB on behalf of the private pilot. I am thrilled to know that there is the option for pilots to act as a Good Samaritan in times that the help is needed.

I do feel, however, that the FAA is much too strict on this rule. FAR Part 135 has its place, but Part 91 pilots should have the freedom to help when needed. Not as a job, but as a friend. I cannot count the times I have had to turn down friends who were looking for a ride. Instead they took the seven-hour drive or paid three times what I could have flown them for, if my doing so was not illegal.

Anyway, I hope that the private pilot did not do the ex-commercial pilot any more favors. He does not seem to be a very trustworthy man.

Eric Horton AOPA 1212170
Inman, Kansas

John S. Yodice's article on private vs. commercial flying underscores the misplaced emphasis of the FAA's enforcement efforts: efforts born of a policy predicated upon an exclusionary preoccupation with strict letter-of-the-law interpretations, exclusionary in that they fail to provide due credence for intervening spirit-of-the-law considerations.

Historically, lawmakers and law enforcers have recognized that no specific law or group of specific laws might be solely employed to exhaustively and effectively adjudicate the complex extent of any singular state of affairs falling within the law's domain without the benefit of some arbitrating variable representative of the intent of the law. It was obvious to the authors of our body of laws that any individual instance of an application of the law could effectively serve its function as a handmaiden of justice for promoting the good and welfare of a society only to the extent that the instance was representative of the intent of the law's authors. Thus the value of any letter-of-the-law interpretation is a function of how effectively it mirrors the spirit of the law in promoting justice.

With regard to the FAA's enforcement activities, which conspicuously snub any merit accorded to the spirit of the law, one wonders if their preoccupation with the letter-of-the-law interpretations is founded upon an ignorance of the necessary interdependence of these two concepts, or if perhaps some other consideration has usurped this historically mandated union. I suspect that "some other consideration" has in fact intervened. Specifically, I would suggest that those FAA enforcement policymakers responsible for the aforementioned misplaced emphasis have succumbed to the erroneous conclusion that effectiveness has a wholly quantifiable character. From their point of view, the more enforcement actions numerically attributable to the agency, then necessarily the more effective their effort to discharge the agency's sanctioned duty.

Ira Davis AOPA 1010597
Anchorage, Alaska

How low can you go?

Bill Booth, in " Postcards: On Top of the World" (December 1999 Pilot), quoted some interesting data; to wit, a field pressure of 1050 mb corresponding to 32 inches of mercury and a density altitude of minus 7,400 feet.

By my calculations, 32 in Hg is equivalent to 1083.69 mb and the density altitude was minus 7,980 feet. My answers differ from his by more than 3 percent for pressure and almost 8 percent for the density altitude. I did not use an E6B calculator, so that might explain the different results. In a practical sense such differences probably are not important.

Air at minus 40 degrees Celsius (and 1013.25 mb pressure) can hold only one-one hundredth as much water as it can at 15 degrees C and standard sea-level pressure. Therefore, even at 100 percent relative humidity, the oxygen content of such cold air should be about 24 percent greater than that at 100 percent relative humidity under standard conditions. This should result in significantly improved engine performance.

Since the cold air density is much greater, lift (and drag) should be increased. Would the increase in kinematic viscosity of the air be enough to affect these increases? How much, if any, improvement in the aircraft performance results from taking off, flying, and landing in such cold, dense, dry air?

Perhaps an article exploring these and related subjects would be interesting and helpful to cold-weather fliers.

Edward Lovick Jr. AOPA 1414327
Northridge, California

Testing's weather failure

Thomas A. Horne made a lot of good points in " Wx Watch: Flunking the Wx Test" (January Pilot). I agree that the FAA knowledge test does a poor job of testing decision-making skills. As a CFI, I notice that many pilots completely ignore the synopsis part of the briefing. I always try to emphasize the importance of understanding the "big picture" of pressure systems and fronts before getting into the details of reports and forecasts.

I disagree with him a little bit about the FAA's weather publications (note that Aviation Weather is AC 00-6A, not 00-62 as noted in the article, and that Aviation Weather Services is now AC 00-45D, replacing 00-45C). They don't make great textbooks, but I don't really find them poorly written or organized. There are certainly commercial texts that are superior to Aviation Weather, but I think that Aviation Weather Services is a valuable reference, and I do use it occasionally. Keep up the good work at AOPA.

Barry Silverman AOPA 1008744
Absecon, New Jersey

Would accident-involved pilots make the same decisions if they were sitting in an armchair at home faced with the same criteria? For 26 years, I have had dual aviation lives; my first love is general aviation, but my income has been derived from professional flying - nine years of military and 16 airline. I've owned my own plane since 1970.

Somewhere in this process of flying big and little airplanes, I realized that the decision-making process was radically different between these two worlds. Typically, the difference in accident rates between professional flying and personal flying is attributed to the caliber of the equipment and the caliber of the pilot. I used to believe this and then watched many, many airline guys lose their lives in GA accidents, while a loss of life in the airline business is extremely rare. Harvey Watts, an insurance broker for airline pilots, reports that the second most frequent cause of death for airline pilots prior to age 60 is a general aviation accident. Even worse, the causes of GA accidents involving professional pilots exhibit the same bad decision making as the general accident statistics.

When I examined the differences between these two worlds, I realized that there were significant differences in the decision-making process: Most airline weather decisions are not made in the cockpit but on the ground. Airline operations specifications, operations manuals, and pilots' handbooks set objective criteria for most weather decisions. The level of guidance has dramatically increased in the past few years. Also, a system of accountability reinforces objective decision making. There are layers of accountability: first officer (CRM boosted his/her role), dispatcher, the FAA, and fellow pilots in other aircraft, to name a few.

The real problem in general aviation decision making may not be knowledge, but the process. As you pointed out in your article, this decision making cuts two ways: Flights that ought to be taken are not begun and flights that shouldn't are. By placing all decisions in the present (extemporaneous), GA decisions are vulnerable to emotional content. I will step out of my field for a second and assert that the decision we make in the armchair and the one we make in the press of real-time factors involve different segments of the brain.

For my part, I sat down and wrote an operations specification for my personal flying and shared it with my wife, who has been my constant copilot for 29 years. I update this Ops Spec from time to time - but never in the press of flying. The results are better, more relaxed, and consistent decisions. Structured decision making can be taught.

Chris Burns AOPA 1083903
Hanover, Pennsylvania

Memorable moment

Imagine my surprise to turn to page 21 of your January issue and find, in the upper left-hand corner, my mentor, Jim Rieke, pictured earning his private pilot certificate late in October. When he and I complete the work of getting my private ticket, our combined ages are apt to total 148!

On the bottom right, on the same page, you show a mother and her son. The mother, Jeanne Mann - who is from Midland - is our "adopted" niece, and we have known her since she was 3 or 4 years old. Never have Midland, Michigan, pilots received such publicity in your magazine.

Stuart J. Bergstein AOPA 1420260
Midland, Michigan

Clarification

The FAA has not yet approved horsepower and TBO increases that Great Planes Fuels hopes to obtain with its new AGE-85 ethanol-based aviation fuel (" Pilot Briefing," December 1999 Pilot). Great Planes is using the fuel to power a Cessna 180; an Ag Cat and a Mooney are being modified to burn AGE-85. For more information on the fuel, contact Jim Behnken at 605/882-6311.

Errata

Because of an editing error, " Pilots: Jeff Caniglia" (December 1999 Pilot) stated that Caniglia took off and radioed the pilot of a VFR aircraft who was experiencing difficulty in poor visibility conditions. Caniglia's helicopter was actually on the ground at the time.

A typo occurred in the Web link for the Hotel Punta Pescadero that appeared in "Postcards: Baja Bound" (January Pilot). The correct link is www.puntapescadero.com. We would repeat what we incorrectly wrote last month, but this is a family magazine.

We welcome your comments. Address your letters to: Editor, AOPA Pilot , 421 Aviation Way, Frederick, Maryland 21701. Send e-mail to [email protected]. Include your full name, address, and AOPA number on all correspondence, including e-mail. Letters will be edited for style and length.