Waypoints

AOPA Pilot Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines learned to fly when The Love Boat was hit TV.

As you may have noticed, reality television has taken over the airwaves, and with airliners and business jets now receiving satellite television in flight, I guess one could say it is taking over the airways as well. If your captain missed that last radio call it could be because he was watching Omarosa get fired there on the multifunction display.

Fortunately, I don't have time to watch much television and aside from a couple of episodes of The Apprentice, I haven't seen any of the prime-time reality shows. I've seen the advertisements, though. I don't know about you, but eating cockroaches and being buried in a pit of snakes don't play much of a role in my reality.

Likewise, I've never come home to find my house completely redecorated, except on those days when the cats and the dog have been particularly rambunctious. But it does seem I've been having a few of those While You Were Out moments lately when I've been visiting flight schools. Wasn't it just the other day that the aviation industry was berating flight schools for not modernizing?

While I was out, someone replaced many of the clapped-out, tired trainers around the country with a fleet of modern ones — many of them now sporting glass cockpits; interactive online and DVD-based training programs supplanted tired old Exam-O-Grams, and online testing took the No. 2 pencils out of test taking. Oh sure, there are still some operations successfully teaching using the old methods, but they are becoming few and far between.

The biggest driver in this change is Cessna Aircraft's return to piston-aircraft production in 1996 after a 10-year hiatus. During the late 1970s when piston-aircraft production reached its zenith of more than 17,000 units a year, flight schools all had new airplanes and there was a glut of new and nearly new airplanes readily available. When the GA market bottomed out in the early 1980s, the flight schools continued to use their existing trainers; those airplanes served them well for a decade. But by the early to mid-1990s, flight schools were beginning to look around for replacements. About the only choices at the time were Piper Aircraft and what we then knew as Aerospatiale (now more commonly known as EADS Socata), each of which managed to snare a number of contracts for new fleets at large training organizations. Meanwhile, though, Cessna kept making noise about getting back into the piston market if the detrimental product-liability environment could be eliminated. Just the talk of Cessna getting back into the market kept many large flight schools from updating their fleets. Even those that had no intention of buying Cessnas wanted to at least wait to see what the company was going to do and what its return to the market would do to the price of new airplanes. It was this wait-and-see attitude that partly contributed to Piper's entry into bankruptcy in the early 1990s as the market for airplanes, especially trainers, dried up.

In August 1994, when President Clinton signed the General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA), the landmark legislation that helped limit manufacturers' liabilities to 18 years, Cessna almost immediately announced that it would start piston-aircraft production again. Less than two years later it was delivering new 172s from a new factory in Independence, Kansas.

While there was some disappointment in the market that Cessna simply dusted off the design of the tried-and-true 172 instead of developing a new trainer, most everyone was glad to see new airplanes flying again. Interestingly, it was Cessna's return to production — as well as GARA and a lot of hard work on the part of Chuck Suma, the then-newly appointed president — that helped remove the financial cloud from over Piper and allow it to emerge from bankruptcy as a new company.

While you were at the refrigerator

TiVo forward a few years to the early 2000s where the dearth of trainer options has become somewhat less of a dearth. Cessna reestablished its robust Cessna Pilot Center network, new or newer 172s dominate the training ramps once again, Piper has settled into a healthy delivery system that includes an entire line of products (not the least of which is the popular Seminole twin trainer), Diamond Aircraft has established itself as a long-term player in the trainer and personal-airplane market, and others, such as Liberty Aerospace, are attempting to stake out their own trainer territory. Even the Cirrus SR20, which most people think of as a personal airplane, is getting some trainer time. Cirrus Design this winter delivered the first of five SR20s to Lund University in Sweden to begin updating that fleet. The university dates to 1666, so you can bet some of those trainers are pretty tired.

You don't hear people complain much anymore about Cessna's decision to bring back the 172 rather than a new trainer. The Skyhawk does what it does so well. From the outside, that strut-braced wonder looks about like it always has, but inside and throughout the airframe, Cessna has made many, many changes. The most obvious, of course, is to fit it out with the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. Similarly equipped 182s are already in the field and you can expect your glass Skyhawk soon. Meanwhile, Piper has fired back with many enhancements to its tried-and-true PA-28 line, including — you guessed it — a glass cockpit, this time from Avidyne.

Last summer I flew a Piper Archer III with the Avidyne FlightMax Entegra system. Sitting in the pilot seat, I found it hard to believe that I was flying a design dating back to the early 1960s. Here's just a sampling of the technology: two large color Avidyne displays — a primary flight display and a multifunction display — an L-3 SkyWatch traffic system, datalink weather, and S-Tec Fifty Five X autopilot with flight director. Piper Chief Pilot Bart Jones, who has many hours in everything the company manufactures, noted that the trip from Florida to Maryland in the little four-seater wasn't bad at all — this from a guy used to flying the Meridian single-engine turboprop in the flight levels.

A few months later I was at Dowling College's Brookhaven Campus in Shirley, New York, when the school took delivery of its first Piper Warrior with the glass panels in it. Even Suma was surprised at the reception the new technology had received. "Ninety to 100 percent of our training aircraft now go out with the displays instead of the expected 50 percent," he said.

A dose of reality

Don Harrington, chairman of American Flyers, takes a pragmatic approach to the business of flight training. The company claims that it has trained more pilots in its 65 years than any other. It operates 15 flight schools around the country offering everything from primary training through advanced ratings. American Flyers owns a fleet of 75 Skyhawks, a number of Cessna Cardinals, and a few Beech-craft Duchess twin trainers. None of them has a glass cockpit. When asked why, Harrington is quick to respond: "We want to train you with all of the basics, and if we do it well you will be able to climb into a more sophisticated aircraft with flight directors and other advanced systems and feel comfortable."

While we were out, technology may have started updating much of the trainer fleet for a new generation of pilots. But if the trend toward glass cockpit is reality television, the likes of Don Harrington and others taking a wait-and-see attitude are Meet the Press, been around, plan to be around for a long time.

It will be interesting to see how next season shapes up.

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