Dear Doug: These are the times that try an airplane partner's soul.
I know our partnership agreement calls for you to have possession of the airplane for half the year—this half—but I sure do miss it. It's like giving up a best friend. The one good thing about this arrangement is that it gives my bank account a chance to catch its breath.
These are the sweat-soaked, dog days of summer. It's hotter outside than a tightly cowled turbocharged engine run hard and put up wet. But I see on The Weather Channel that you've had some three-digit daytime temperatures up there in Kansas City.
At least here in southwestern Florida the afternoon sea breeze kicks in to take the edge off the humidature. Not like that stovetop-hot prairie wind that tumbles into K.C., mixing with the thermals to feed monster Midwestern thunderbumpers. From my house I can look east toward the mainland and see the afternoon storms build, burst, and wither. Mostly they are relatively small and short-lived, unlike one of your super cells that billows up so high even the slickest new 51,000-foot-capable bizjet can't top it.
Speaking of convective activity, are we ready yet to pony up for a lightning detection system for our airplane? That trip I flew with my family to hand the airplane over to you for the summer convinced me that the old Mark II eyeballs and an overloaded flight watch frequency don't quite cut it when the storms are popping like flak in enemy airspace.
I say we stake out some unimproved real estate on the panel and pop in a lightning detector (or thunderstorm detector, spheric device, or whatever you choose to call it). We get along with that until they figure out how to reliably and affordably beam ground-based National Weather Service radar images up to our cockpit multifunction display. Of course, we don't have one of those yet, either.
You know, Doug, we're falling behind in the "my panel's got more displays than your panel!" race. The other day I rode along on a get-acquainted flight with the owner of a newly refurbished airplane. His new laser-cut, powder-coated, silkscreened panel sports a Garmin GNS 530 stacked on top of a GNS 430, a BFGoodrich Avionics Skywatch collision avoidance system and WX-500 Stormscope, and a Bendix/King RDR 2000 color weather radar. The Skywatch and Stormscope information can be displayed on the radar indicator or either of the two Garmin units. It's an embarrassment of display riches, to be sure. The beautiful electronic color splashed all over that instrument panel, the electronic processing power, electronic maps, electronic airplane symbols, electronic weather, electronic memory—the electronic capability is just incredible. Even jet jocks who have a couple of high-dollar flight management systems in the pedestal are feeling avionics envy over the firepower of the equipment available today for owner-flown aircraft.
You remember how proud we were of our new metal panel with the IFR approach-certified GPS and the VFR moving-map GPS? That was cutting-edge stuff a couple of years ago. Now it looks like we may be left behind on the latest GPS enhancement. WAAS, the Wide Area Augmentation System, will raise the accuracy bar for GPS and open the way to precision GPS approaches. They say the WAAS-corrected GPS signal—which is now available for VFR use—is accurate to within one to two meters horizontally and two to three meters vertically. I don't know about you, but those are tighter tolerances than I can fly, and a lot smaller virtual box than our airplane will fit into.
Problem is, our GPS system can't be upgraded to accept the discrete WAAS VHF frequency. And it probably never will be since the GPS manufacturer is getting out of the general aviation GPS business altogether.
That's the way it goes with technology: No sense waiting until tomorrow to buy because tomorrow's technology will be obsolete—or the company may be out of business—the following day. You have to pay your money and take your chances on today.
The only problem I see, Doug, is using all of that stuff to good advantage while still keeping your head up and on a swivel. It's mighty difficult to keep a scan directed outside at a squinty-bright, seemingly empty sky when the panel is so much more technicolorfully interesting. Some day, maybe soon, all of us who fly single-pilot will have to have some sort of collision avoidance system in our airplanes because we'll be too absorbed in watching television—the instrument panel—to keep an eye out the wind-shield for bogies.
Are you looking forward to that day, Doug?
I don't think Saint-Exupéry was way back in 1939 when he wrote in Wind, Sand, and Stars: "The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."
Tell our airplane I miss it.
