 and welcome back to Sun and Fun 2008. And thank you for pilots being here. Rich mentioned pilots, but also pilot companions who also want to know about the five mistakes pilots can make. Maybe this will be a help for all of us. Our speaker today is a very unique person. I talked to him a little earlier, and I said, why are you doing this? And he said, because I can make a difference. And you could tell, he really meant it. JJ has 13,000 hours. He's a retired American Airlines pilot. He has been a Czech Airman in the 767. He's a retired captain. Today, JJ is the chief flight instructor at the Air Safety Foundation. He's a representative for AOPA. AOPA represents 415,000 pilots. He's an advocate for pilot safety and for pilots in the world today. JJ has done something very important recently. He has stepped up to a 172. So what he's doing is he's taking the lessons learned in aviation, the powerful lessons that brought an infant industry in the 40s and 50s to the safest one in the world today, and taking the lessons learned and showing us how we can take that safety record and embed it into general aviation. Please welcome JJ Greenway. I hear this because she's taken a few shots here in the last hour or so. I need some solos here. Anybody else have a 172 or fly assessment 172? Anybody with an M model? Something from the 70s vintage with those disco orange colors? Good. A couple of things. When you walked in, there's a door prize entry form from the AOPA Air Safety Foundation. If you fill that out, you can drop it off in the AOPA tent and win a prize. And a seminar registration card. If you participate in the Wings program and you want Wings credit for this course, fill this out. And what we do is we send you a certificate of completion. And with that certificate of completion, you can go ahead and claim Wings credit when you get all done. I was told to bend that mic down right away when I got here and I forgot. At any rate, do we have any non-flying spouses that are accompanying here to the air show? We have a couple of non-flying spouses. My wife is a non-flying spouse and she likes to fly with me. And she puts up with my flying. And I am at the airport seven days a week since AOPA is on an airport. And then I spend my weekend at the airport. So she puts up with that. But she doesn't go to air shows. And a couple of years ago, my friends all know that. A couple of years ago, my friend Tom called up and said, do you and your wife want to go to the air show? Sun and Fun. I'll fly you down. And we know that Tom has an airplane that's much nicer than my old 172. So my wife jumped at the chance. So this is my wife and I on our way down to Sun and Fun last time she came with me. The only time she's been to Sun and Fun, the rest of the time I come by myself. So that's a little bit more comfortable. And I had in mind us going down this way at 65 miles an hour. And she'd have nothing to do with that. So take your pick. Would it be that one or that one? I bet I'd get about 50-50 if I said take your pick. Coming down here in a J3 is probably just as much fun as coming down here and something like that. At any rate, I appreciate you all coming here. I know you'd all be here anyway, even if the room was dark and empty because it's the only public air condition building on the field where we can seat this many people in the middle of the day. It's nice to come in here. We will be experiencing some of the sounds of freedom and democracy during the show. You'll hear some explosions out there. The thunderbirds are performing later on, but I guess we have the warbirds performing right at 1 o'clock. So there may be some noises and some shaking of the equipment here as the explosions go off, but don't be alarmed. It's just normal. Flowing safety. That's our game at the Air Safety Foundation. We don't take it as a game. We take it very seriously. The National Highway Administration is always publishing different statistics about automobile deaths and drunken driving. And we look to other industries for a model. And when we look at the problem of drinking and driving, one single organization, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, has affected a change in the laws in the United States that alcohol-related injuries and deaths in automobiles have been severely reduced. Motorcycle riding still has its fair share of fatalities and shows that it's more dangerous than riding in a car, but there are things motorcycle riders can do. Vending machine accidents. I assume there is no vending machine safety association like there is for a lot of others, but you'll get to poking around on the web. And I found out that since 1978, there's been a few deaths, 40 deaths in vending machines. Something to think about. But we want to compare apples to apples when we're talking about aviation safety. So what we do with the Air Safety Foundation, do we have any AOPA members in here? Mostly AOPA members. Okay, well, you know that we are a general aviation organization. So the accidents we're going to be talking about here are aircraft less than 12,500 pounds used for private use and for private instruction as well. So we're not talking about air taxi, we're not talking about helicopters, we're talking about fixed wing. How safe is flying? It's just exactly as safe as you want to make it. Right now, we're running about 500 deaths per year, 500 fatalities per year in general aviation aircraft. And none of us, when we set out to embark on a flight, plan on having an accident obviously, but every year there's about 500 fatalities. And let's look at the root cause. We have the NAL report, and that's our product that we produce and back on the back table back there. I've got a stack of them. I actually have exactly 106 pounds of them because I signed the air bill here recently when they were delivered. But take one with you and you'll see in there that we have all the different types of accidents broken down statistically. And we've found that 79% of the accidents that happen in general aviation are pilot related accidents. So most of what goes wrong goes wrong up here in the cockpit. It doesn't go wrong with the airplane, with the engine. So the airlines back in the 50s used to have a lot more fatalities than they do now. It was in the hundreds annually. And through regulation and through the insurance companies forcing it and through the government enforcing more regulations, the airlines have cleaned up their act to the point where they had a couple of years of zero fatalities. That's a very enviable record. I don't think we'll ever get quite there in general aviation. But as we step through some of these accident causes, you'll see that there's a lot of things that we can do to improve our safety. There's a lot of things that we are doing wrong right now that are jeopardizing us. And I just want to look at a few of those causes in just this brief time that we're going to look through some of these. We'll look through the top five fatal accident causes. And we'll look for some ways, I told you that was going to shake, we'll look for some ways to steer clear of the most obvious ones. Some of the things that affect us, and if any of you learned to fly when you were teenagers, and I have two teenagers myself, so it's all coming back to home for me, you know how invincible teenagers think they are. But with new pilots, we tend to be a little like teenagers sometimes, and we think that accidents can't happen to us. But it's just not the case. But you'll see when we look at some of these accident types that it's almost wrong to be calling them accidents. It's people setting themselves up for failure, people setting themselves up to get themselves in a situation that is dangerous, or a situation that ends in injury or death. It's human nature that causes all these things, and it's the complexity of the psychology that would probably be beyond my understanding. But what we've done is we've just winnowed out all the psychological talk and turned it into pilot talk here, and hopefully you'll see some of these characteristics in some of yourselves. I know that I've been guilty of making all five of the top five accidents. I've never ran out of fuel before, but I suppose I always could. We'll talk about that a little bit later. When I came to work for the Air Safety Foundation, my boss, Bruce Landsberg, said to me, do you know anything about the NTSB accident database? And I said, I'm in the NTSB accident database, so I know quite a bit about it. Accidents always happen to the other guy though, and there's a lot of other guys, but we don't wanna be one of the other guys. Let's look at the top accident cause. Anyone wanna take a stab at what it is? Pilot error? Well, the top thing that we do as we're making our pilot error, the NTSB calls it maneuvering flight. It's kind of a boring term, but let's just take a minute and look into what they define as maneuvering flight. As I was on my way into Lakeland Airport here, I did not see a sign that said caution the surgeon general has just determined that acting out air show pilot fantasies may lead to personal injury or death, but with all the litigation nowadays, maybe there should have been a sign like that. And these ladies and gentlemen that you hear out here in the background noise are highly trained professionals, and these are not things we should try ourselves at home, unless of course we've had the same training that they have. But maneuvering doesn't just include buzzing. We have operations in the traffic pattern which are quite similar to buzzing. We're down low, we're turning. Banner towing, formation flight, and people attempting aerobatics. These things are lumped into the same category as maneuvering, and that's why it's such a high accident rate. Let's take a look at what really happens when pilots are operating an airplane in an area that they normally are not used to operating it. With buzzing, it's real easy to be down in an area you're not familiar with the terrain and the obstructions. So controlled flight into terrain. Recently had a stearman that went in up in the upper Midwest where very, very experienced pilot had never flown down a section of river at a low altitude and didn't realize that there were low wires hanging over the river. The wires may or may not have been on the chart, but he was in an altitude where the wires became a factor to his flight and he hit them. We have controlled flight into terrain. We have uncontrolled flight into terrain. You fit, and that's typically a stall spin accident that happens when an airplane is maneuvering down low. Last, we have stupid pilot tricks. That's not staged by Hollywood, by the way. That's for real. And this gentleman lived to be a air show reporter in the future. Of course, you know all the regulations that have us back from the flight line here. These are things that were enacted after there were several air show accidents that he wanted me to get in touch with news editor and let him know that it would be late for his next story. So I may know how to fly my Cessna 172 pretty proficiently in an altitude of more than 1,000 feet above the ground, but I'll be real honest with you. I've not spent very much time in that airplane 30 feet above the ground and I would be a good candidate in that case for being involved in a buzzing accident if I were to undertake it. I'd like to quote my boss Bruce Landsberg on this sufficiently poor judgment can overcome even great skill. And here we have a 300 series BMW, it looks like. Keeping up pretty well with a Piper Aero 4 series with a tea tail with a landing gear problem. And this was not staged either. These are some people that actually thought this might be a good idea to get the gear down. And I don't know if they're successful or not, but this sort of thing happens with alarming regularity and occasionally happens with disastrous results. It might be better off just to take the gear up landing and let the insurance company sort out the rest rather than end up with unfavorable results. And I don't know what the outcome of this one was, but I'm hoping it was favorable. It was successful. Good, thanks. Talk to me about that afterwards. Residents are also upset over reports the pilot of the plane may have been doing aerial acrobatics just before this. The emotional response to this crash is that neighbor after neighbor reported to KCRA 3 that they saw this plane owned by Patrick O'Brien doing low flying aerobatic stunts over Roseville, not only just right before this crash, but also a day earlier on Saturday. He was flying pretty low. He was only about 300 feet above the houses. And when he took vertical here, he was only about maybe 800 feet. So when he stalled, there was no time for him to recover. Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the more egregious accidents of this type that's happened. And I cast no stones at the pilot. It's not my point here, but here's a repeat offender, someone that routinely did aerobatics with a low altitude over the neighborhood, not only did he endanger himself and his airplane, he also endangered his passenger, the fatal accident, and then an innocent bystander, someone in the occupant of the house was killed as well. And this was a big thing. This gives general aviation a real black eye, and that's something we really don't need right now. We have enough problems we're trying to combat, and we don't need to go out there and cause more problems. We all know from our basic aerodynamics and from our little graphs in the back of our performance section that as the angle of attack increases, the stall speed varies. But these are things that when we're flying along in normal flights, straight and level, cross country flights that we don't see very much, so resist the temptation to get down there low and surprise yourself, because you might not like the surprise. And I'm not advocating buzzing at all, but altitude is, if you can do your buzzing from the two or 3000 foot level, let me just say and see what you need to see up there. The altitude is your best friend. Some of these things have figured into some of the accidents that we've looked at lately. It's easy to be distracted. The whole point of going low for some people if they're buzzing is to see, and they're looking outside the airplane, not paying attention to what's going on in the airplane, and they find themselves getting into a situation that they have never had training for. And 300 feet above the ground, as in this last accident, the Roseville accident that we just saw is a really bad time to realize that your airplane takes four, five, or 600 feet to recover from a stall and you're only at 300 feet. The real simple one that as CFI, as we see in the traffic pattern quite a bit, do we have some CFIs in here? We have any FAA inspectors in here? Oh, we'll make you raise your hand, Wayne, I'm sorry. It's okay, he's a nice guy. Traffic pattern, the base to final turn, that's if you look at accidents in a traffic pattern, that's been a real high area. You've never done this yourself, but you misjudge the wind, you overshoot your final, you tighten up the turn, and you sneak in a little bit of bottom rudder there to help you out through the turn, and the next thing you know, your controls are crossed, and if you get down your stall speed, you're usually at a low altitude between three and 500 feet, and that's a real bad time also to try to recover from a stall. That's why if you're a student pilot, your instructor has you practicing stalls at at least 3,000 feet, maybe even higher at 3,500. Bad news when we have a situation we can't recover from and we don't have any altitude to recover from it, but a few things to think about, you might want to set a hard fast limit for yourself, we'll talk just a little bit later about personal minimums, if you do have to make a turn of more than the bank of more than 30 degrees in the pattern, it might not be a bad idea to go around. The number two of the top five, let's take a look. Accidents that happen on the descent and approach, how many instrument ratings do we have in here? Good bit, that's good in Southern Florida. Warning, fragile aircraft, do not use the clear trees or brush, do not use as an excavating tool to reduce the risk of serious injury, do not attempt to disobey laws of physics or taunt mother nature. Important, children under 16 must have adult supervision, that's not a sign that we see in our approach charts. Let's look, a quick look at some of these accidents. Many of them involve maneuvering on the descent and landing, the approach and landing, but a good deal of them are instrument approach procedures too. Descent below minimums, I do a lot of instrument instruction, and one thing I really like to see on my students charts is highlight markings because getting down towards decision height is a real lousy time to look down at your chart and decide what decision height is. So if you can take a look in advance and highlight some of the important things on your chart, you're saving yourself some grief later on. The try it again, let's talk for a minute about that, they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We looked at an accident a while back that there were seven approaches made to an airport and the pilot crashed on the eighth approach and that was far and above what I've ever heard of, but you need to think about why you're making another approach to an airport if you're IFR. If nothing's changed, if the RVR is still low or if the visibility is still a quarter mile and you miss the approach the first time, going back and doing it again greatly increases your chances that you're gonna come to some grief. One time, two times I'll make an approach, but I really don't have much business making a third approach unless it's something I think that I've done. I've not had the airplane right at DH or MDA or maybe a good reason to try it again. For non-precision approaches, I was listening to a lecture on WAAS, GPS WAAS just earlier in the day and I heard the statistic that GPS approaches with vertical guidance are actually about to surpass ILS approaches in this country and that's a very good thing because the non-precision approach was a real problem area in these top five on the descent and approach. The non-precision approach was a real problem area and I know some of you old guys like me remember NDB approaches and we're doing less and less of them. By the way, I just gave my first instrument rating the other day to a guy that I never had to teach NDB approaches to, so that was a record for me. Has anyone else done that as an instructor? It was an odd thing because we all remember flying the NDB, but the VOR Alpha approach is one that's with us quite a bit and I know in my home field in Frederick, Maryland we have a VOR Alpha approach with an MDA of 600 feet above the ground. Well, the missed approach point is right at the VOR and the VOR is right in the middle of the field. So when you conduct this approach down to minimums 600 feet and you break out and all you see is a little circle of ground underneath you and you say, hey, that's the Frederick airport, that's where I live, what do you do then? You're at MDA and you see everything you're supposed to see, but it's a VOR Alpha approach. You're not lined up to land. So these are some things you need to think about in advance. What are you gonna do? You're gonna circle, of course. Which direction are you gonna circle? You might've wanna thought that one out in advance and when you circle, are you gonna be able to keep the airport in sight the whole time as you're circling and are you gonna be able to get yourself from right over the airport, back around to a position? And I love doing this myself when I get my instrument proficiency check and I love doing it with students as well because we all know how to fly a downwind at pattern altitude. Pattern altitude is usually 800 to 1,000 feet, but circling minimums you'll see are often as low as 300 feet and it is completely legal to circle an airplane at 300 feet, if that's the published minimum, and maneuver on downwind, base leg and final for landing. And that's not something that, for the neighbors in my vicinity of my airport, I'd like to practice a lot, but I sure hate to do it for the first time in actual conditions. So even though you may conduct a non-precision approach to minimums and see what you need to see, there still may be a reason to divert it. They're coming closer. More frequent instrument proficiency checks. We recommend at the Air Safety Foundation that you just take a six month check whether you need it or not. If you're having trouble in good weather places like in Florida here and we have this trouble in Maryland, sometimes we can't keep our instrument proficiency just based on flying alone. So most of us up there at Foundation take a six month check every month. And the thing is too, and I will say that I'm guilty of this, most of my instrument time is logged in a crew situation. I do fly a lot of IFR in single-engine airplanes, but the majority of it is in a multi-crew airplane. So SPIFR, single-pilot IFR is an emphasis that you need to think about if you're used to flying with two pilots and your two pilots are sharing the duties, and I see that a lot when I'm flying with another friend of mine that's qualified as well. We share the duties, but then when I have to do it by myself, I'm not used to doing it by myself. So if you're in that situation, think about getting an instrument proficiency check that focuses on single-pilot IFR operations. As an instrument instructor, you may be real tempted to reach over and change a frequency once in a while, or even I'm guilty of this with students. I see them fumbling with a map and I say, here, let me fold that map for you. But I'm really not doing, I'm doing my student a disservice. If I do something, let's fold a map for them because the next time she or he is out doing it by themselves, they need to fold that map for themselves, and that's all part of single-pilot IFR flying. By the way, if you're at any more of our AOP expo's or fly-ins or anything, we do have a single-pilot IFR course that we've developed that's great. It's basically teaching you how to juggle, and when you can master that, then you're good for single-pilot IFR. We've developed a few products at the Air Safety Foundation, and I ask for a show of hands on who are AOPA members. You don't have to be an AOPA member to access the Air Safety Foundation side of the website since we are donor-supported. It's a public service, but we've got some of these IFR chart challenges that we've put out, and let me tell you, they are some pretty good challenges. What we've done is we've taken an actual IFR approach chart. We have the NACCO format available, and we have the JEPSEN format available. If you use either one of those, you'll be comfortable with both. And we've stepped through, and we've found accidents that were tied into those charts. We found accidents that actually happened on those approach charts, and we've stepped through a series of questions just determined to see if you can pick the things off the chart that you need to pick off the chart, and if you can adequately, in the comfort of your own home and sitting at your desk in front of your computer, if you can make the decisions that some of these pilots have made wrong. And I will tell you that some of these really are challenges. That's why we call it the chart challenge. I usually get first pass at the draft of these things when they come across my desk, and I'm running about a 70 or 80% completion rate first time around. Some of these things are real gotchas, but there are some gotchas on the charts, and the more proficient we are picking out the gotchas on the charts, the safer we'll be flying IFR. The number three of the top five, accidents that happened in the takeoff and climb phase. Here's a picture of a sign at a local airport near us. Notice for noise, abatement, climbs straight ahead to 1,300 feet MSL, preferably without crashing, that's loud. I think one of our developers photoshopped, one of our developers photoshopped this sign for me. I think that's not really what it says, but is takeoff an easy thing? Let's look at a couple of things that come into some of these takeoff accidents. And not all of these end up as fatals, I will say that an airplane that deviates off the runway and runs into the grass and minimum damage, things like that don't make it into the NTSB database, so we have no way of tracking that. But we do track the fatalities and that's why this category is in here is number three. But think of the things that are happening on takeoff, your angle of attack is very high because you're trying to get off the ground, that's the whole point, obviously your airspeed is low. High engine stress, and for any of you that live in the northern latitudes, you've got a cold engine if it's your first takeoff of the day, that can affect your engine reliability and your engine performance. I noticed that when I started presenting this, I noticed my developer put in left turning tendencies and we can't do this overseas because if you've flown a British airplane, you notice it has right turning tendencies and you have to use left rudder on takeoff rather than right rudder on takeoff. So turning tendencies, let's just say, and as your speed increases and your kinetic energy increases, your control forces are different. Notice how it takes a lot of elevator to get off the ground at a slow speed and if you applied that much elevator at cruise speed, you would have some pretty serious deviations. For the number of accidents that do happen for mechanical failure, there's an amazing amount of these accidents that happen that probably could have had a better end if the pilot had pushed the nose over after an engine failure on takeoff. Now this isn't quite so important in your J3 Cub in Cessna 172 as it is in some of these high performance singles with a 300 horsepower engine or I do some instructing in the Stearman and when that engine quits on takeoff, that big radio, you really have to unload with the elevator and get the nose over right away, otherwise you're gonna be seeing some things that you haven't seen before. So one thing to spring load yourself with if you do have an engine failure on takeoff, true it's mechanical, but you still have a chance to get that nose over and hit the ground with flying speed rather than stall spin, which an alarming amount of accidents end up in that category and look for something straight ahead of you that's soft and inexpensive and non-explosive preferably. So something to think about. I know I saw an instructor the other day looking at airports he hadn't been into on Google Earth and I thought that's a pretty innovative way of prepping yourself for what an airport's gonna look like on takeoff and what an airport's gonna look like on landing if you've never been to that airport before. At least you can get a general idea of some of the things that are around the airport, housing developments or tank farms. I know in Frederick, Maryland there we have a propane tank farm off the end of one runway. So we try not to use that unless we have to. Other issues that pop up on takeoff, some of them are caused by our own doings. Doors pop and open or control locks being left in. We'll talk about short runways in a minute and we'll talk about density altitude in just a minute too. Weight and balance and winds and just flat out pilots not being practiced and not having rehearsed. We all go out and practice landings, but takeoffs under extreme conditions, takeoffs under high wind conditions are not something that we always practice. So we're always worried about the landing, but we can't forget about the takeoff. We recommend at the Air Safety Foundation that you fudge your distances a little bit. Now one reason why the airlines have enjoyed such an immense safety record in the last few decades is under part 121 that the airlines operate under, they're required to fudge their takeoff and landing distances by a figure of either 40% or 60%. So that's why air carrier landings are, air carrier airports are generally 10,000 foot runways. It just accommodates everyone. I can assure you that a Boeing 757 can be landed in about 2,200 feet. It's not very comfortable and you wouldn't want to be on board, but I've seen it done during flight test at the Boeing plant. So the airlines fudge their takeoff and landing distances, they build all that into it. So we recommend just for safety that you try the same thing yourself. And just as a rough rule of thumb, take off distance over a 50-foot obstacle and take 50% of it and add it to your original takeoff distance. And you're still gonna come up with pretty short runways. 1,800 foot runways is about the shortest I regularly operate off of. They don't get much shorter than that, but at least most of the airports we operate off of are at least 3,000 feet for the majority of us. So go into the book, find out what you need, add a factor to it and make yourself a little bit safer. One thing with some of our older airplanes, and I know this is true for my Cessna 172, it's got 1,700 hours on it and it's 34 years old, so it hasn't been, the major overhaul hasn't been conducted yet. And I'm pretty sure it's not still developing 150 horsepower after all these years. It's got good compression and everything's passing and it's got good annuals, but our airplanes, unless they're brand new, are not performing to book value. So if we're using book value to create our performance figures for takeoff, that's another thing to think about, that you're probably not going to get the figures you think you're going to get. Anybody recognize that right there? Everybody have one in their flight bag right now? I found my, I got my original E6B flight computer when I was 15 and I just found it the other day and the instruction booklet was still with it and it looked like the instruction booklet hadn't been opened up, so I guess I hadn't been using it much and I had to refresh myself and go through it because I'd been using an electronic flight calculator so much lately. But you remember that little density altitude window? That's something that us people flying out of the Flatland airports here don't look at it as very much, but I had the opportunity not too long ago of traveling down to Indonesia and flying with some of the pilots from Mission Aviation Fellowship, humanitarian flying organization down there and they fly some very capable airplanes, Cessna 206s and Cessna 208 caravans some other things as well but that's the main backbone of their fleet and I was very impressed with their system of operating safely and they had the discipline of an airline if not even more so and let me tell you about what they did the guy, we were going out for a day of flying we were building a hospital up in the Highlands on Arianjaya and we were carrying concrete block and bags of cement and all those heavy things that you load into Cessna 208 and he came and pounded on the door of the hut where I was staying about four in the morning and said come on we're going so it's like we're going flying all day not in the middle of the night so he gets me up at four a.m. and we load all the concrete block and everything into the airplane and he was in a horrible hurry and I was kind of tired and his temperature was about 20 degrees warmer than this and he was humid and he said we gotta be in and out by 10 a.m. otherwise we're spending the night up there and you don't wanna spend the night up there and I didn't ask any more questions then I just kept loading things in the airplane for him didn't wanna get in the way and sure enough the density altitude up in the highlands when we were only landed at 5,000 feet the density altitude was such that if we couldn't get in and out by 10 a.m. the temperature would be so much that we couldn't get out they had a hard fast rule about it that was built into their operations manual and this isn't a general aviation aircraft and I thought wow how much more could we improve our own safety if we just made a hard fast rule for ourselves if you've done any flying up in the high mountain country in Idaho some of these strips have just now opened up for the season and just opening up actually they still have some snow out there on some of them but some of those strips unless someone's flown in there and told you this before some of these strips you really can't operate safely out of them unless you are in there and out of there at the cooler temperatures and there was one accident or accident database there was one airport that had four or five accidents that had happened in almost exactly the same place at the same airport under the same conditions where people were trying to take off with a tailwind when they should have been taken off with a headwind but it was people just hadn't built in to their own system of operating safely just hadn't built in the checks balances and safeguards to keep an accident from happening so think about density altitude and even low altitudes one reason why I don't mind paying federal taxes we've gotten AWAS and ASOS at most of our airports now most of the airports I fly out of anyway and you notice that they do tell you density altitude on there and so it is easy to forget how to use your E6B computer because you may not have to be computing density altitude because AWAS and ASOS is telling you but at least it builds an awareness of it be aware of the density altitude is over 2,000 feet because it's starting to affect your takeoff performance think of warmer air being less dense as just being the basic rule and when you're at high altitudes your airplane is heavy and it's a warm temperature it's routine to see altitudes in the Rocky Mountains density altitudes of over 10,000 feet pay special attention wins that's another thing in the takeoff like I said we don't tend to practice takeoffs as much as we do landing but in the proximity of an airport that's in a constrained area constrained area with buildings around the buildings create their own microclimatology if you will so take a look at an airport if you haven't been into it if you're not familiar with the local buildings the topography and the terrain around special conditions can be created that you may not anticipate taking off in the wind a tragic accident happened with a highly experienced Navy pilot not too long ago here in Venice, Florida where the aircraft took off out of the water and encountered basically no horizon still in the preliminary stages and I'm not speculating but we see a lot of accidents that this does happen particularly coastal airports where the departure path is out of the water we're taking off via far we need to be in a mindset that we need to be on the instruments from rotation on in a case like that we really have no horizon I'll tell you what if you saw that night air show last night I don't consider myself an aerobatic pilot at all but that night air show it's beyond me how these ladies and gentlemen can do those things they do with a limited horizon you see how dark it is around here in around Lakeland at that time of night but I would have trouble thinking of how to orient myself at the top of a loop when I looked out and couldn't see what the horizon was take off accidents on the gauges from the start we're down to about 15% of all fatal pilot related accidents the number 4 pilot killer take a look and see what it is weather, danger natural forces may impose stress loads in excess of aircraft structural limitations it's not a sign you see by the flight service station phone when you're calling but let's take a look at some of the weather accidents that people have gotten in trouble over there's a lot fewer of them but as you can imagine with takeoff and landing accidents these obviously happen near the ground so the airplane may not have much inertia so the results may not end in fatalities but with weather related accidents these are all happening for the most part at higher altitudes nearly all of them are fatal and here's one interesting statistic we noted with the advent of more sales of high performance single engine airplanes I'm talking about things in the 300 horsepower range these airplanes are sold to people who intend on using them for cross country flights they're sold with the intent of them being a cross country traveling machine cruise speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour and so we find that this new generation of aircraft is having an unfortunate number of weather related accidents I may not ever be in a weather related accident in my J3 cub because I'm not going anywhere where there's weather I fly it on very nice days with very calm winds but you can understand the challenge and the change in the accident statistics where all you do is cross country flights and you're flying between 15 and 20,000 feet on oxygen you're going to be encountering in this part of the country thunderstorms in parts of the country ice so the accident demographic has changed a little bit and it's something to think about that if you are involved in a miscalculation with the weather there's a very high chance of it being fatal but the couple of major areas I don't know if any of you caught my boss Bruce Lansberg presentation yesterday on thunderstorms and we've delved into some of these causes and thunderstorms are one that keeps popping up now this is obviously a country that's susceptible to that I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and we really only had about one thunderstorm per year west of the Cascades so it was not a real factor but if you're in an area with thunderstorms it obviously is something that can impact a lot of your flying VFR and IMC we'll see a little bit more on that in just a minute and that's something that affects IFR pilots and VFR pilots alike IFR pilots because if they are flying VFR they may not be in an area where they can pop up and operate IFR due to terrain and icing unfortunately we have about a dozen fatal icing accidents per year in the United States and we tend to view this as a wintertime problem but I was surprised flying up in the state of Maine last July that we picked up ice in the month of July in the state of Maine and it was not forecast so this is something in the United States that you can pick up just about any time okay not in the summertime in Florida maybe at the altitudes but it's something that we have to plan for we have a couple of safety products that we've produced at ASF and we have a line coming out right now it's the weather wise series and the current one that we release is thunderstorms and ATC we have one coming out on air masses and air fronts but if you want some guidance on some of this operations around weather get on this is just a couple of sample slides from some of our product you can find out what's new with ATC back in the old days of en route flying the controllers at the center controllers did not have any capability to display weather so if you looked out your window and you saw weather ahead of you and you asked them about the weather you would get a standard phrase that they would read you from their pilot controller phraseology book that would say we're not capable of displaying any weather operate at your own risk something like that but now the controllers have pretty good capability to display weather their primary function is to keep airplanes from hitting airplanes so they may not always tell you about the weather it's incumbent upon you, the IFR pilot ask about weather or even a VFR pilot if you're in contact with center ask about weather ahead of you ask for a recommended solution I heard on the frequency coming down here a couple of pilots were asking about the ATC about weather and the controller said you can either go 200 miles south or 150 miles east and the guy didn't quite get it he said well can't you get me a route through it so I had to chuckle at that I guess he thought the controller was going to pull a Moses on him and part the waters but at least the guy was asking anyway it was worth a try and this is something we get into in our flight planning if we do have to go around the flight thunderstorm how far do we go around it I can tell you some of the biggest deviations I've made around thunderstorms flying airliners in between 4 and 600 miles and that's an option that you had when you were traveling at Mach 0.85 but it's not an option that we have to go around a thunderstorm by that far because I don't know about your airplane but 4 to 600 miles is getting up towards the total capability climbing above a thunderstorm definitely not an option in this country they tower to above 45,000 feet get around down in the equator and you'll see them going up over 60,000 feet so flying around a thunderstorm is definitely not an option the most frequent option for waiting out thunderstorms is waiting out thunderstorms in the comfort of my hangar and listening to the hail on the roof that's really about our only option and I don't think in our lifetime we'll see technology develop to the point where we can fly through thunderstorms so that's probably going to be an option that's with us for quite a while workload permitting though ask the controller another important thing too when you're switching controllers you can fly 150 degree heading for weather and when you're switching controllers make sure that you tell that next controller that you are flying 150 degree heading for weather because that may not have gotten passed along to that new controller and the new controller may say go ahead and fly direct now and you may take that to mean that you're clear of the weather but you're not clear of the weather until the controller tells you that you're clear of the weather a couple more of our ASF products where you can educate yourself more on these topics are here now one thing that's come up and a gentleman was asking me to talk about handheld weather devices and XM weather and next rad these are good things it's not a certified means like onboard weather radar but there's some fantastic information out there in the handheld market the 396-496 Garmin units and the MX200 on the panel mount great things and it would be foolish to ignore that advance in technology it would be equally foolish though to rely on that technology which is not certified for us to use as means of weather avoidance it would be foolish to ignore it but it would be foolish to depend on it completely but there's some great product out there that we can use let's look at a VFR and IMC experience until you've flown through weather like this before so you press on you find yourself easing back slightly on the controls to give yourself more clearance then with no warning you're in the soup you peer so hard into the mist that your eyes hurt you swallow only to find your mouth dry somewhere a voice is saying you should have turned back you now have 78 seconds to live you push the rudder and add a little pressure on the controls to stop the turn but this feels unnatural and you return the controls to their original position this feels better but now your compass is turning a little faster and your airspeed is increasing you scan the panel for help but you don't find any it doesn't make any sense you're sure you'll break out in a few minutes but you don't have a few minutes you now have 100 seconds to live you glance at your altimeter and are shocked to see it unwinding you're already down to 1200 feet instinctively you pull back on the controls but the altimeter's still on winds the tack is in the red and the airspeed's almost there too you now have 45 seconds to live now you're sweating and shaking with the controls pulling back only moves the airspeed deeper into the red you can hear the wind tearing at the airplane you have 10 seconds to live and you see the ground the trees rush up at you you can see the horizon if you turn your head far enough but it's at a strange angle fellow pilots I don't mean that as a scare tactic but VFR into IMC weather is one accident that's continued to plague us and it's as far back as we've been tracking accidents instructors with your students create a realistic scenario maybe slap the hood on at a time that the student least expects it and simulate VFR into IMC if you're an instrument instructor you might want to maybe take a student on an instrument flight in actual conditions even a private student just let them see that when you get in the clouds it's not something that you can navigate out of by your feel if you don't want to go with an instructor and pay an instructor have a fellow pilot ride safety pilot for you in practice making a 180 degree turn always know where you are on your map so you can know what your obstructions are in that we talked about the obstructions coming up to 1200 feet if you're in an area where all of a sudden you encounter an inverted IMC you need to know where you can go what altitude you need to be at to be completely safe all the reasons that get us in trouble for other accidents are the same reasons that get us in trouble for VFR into IMC we don't have proper information you know a project that we've been working on I've been working on personally they just ended last Monday we've had a real dearth of pilot reports out there and I don't know if when you get a weather briefing you ask for pilot reports but I got to a point a while back where I stopped asking for pilot reports because there were so few of them so cooperation between the FAA and the Air Safety Foundation we launched a project out in Seattle center's airspace a lot of challenges out there we have mountainous terrain up to 14,400 feet we have icing conditions in the wintertime due to the onshore flow and we have a lot of unforecast weather that pops up but pilots don't seem to talk about it much they either don't want to talk about it or they're too busy to talk about it so we launched a program where we had the controllers cooperate with the pilots and we got the controllers to ask the pilots for pilot reports for the conditions and then to go ahead and type it into the system so for this three month period that just ended April 7th last Monday we've gotten a great number of pilot reports sometimes as many as 10 or 20 per hour in a place where we weren't having any at all and it's been great for the flight planning and like I say this is just a test if it's successful we plan to roll it out nationwide with the FAA's cooperation but it's really nice to be able to look and think well you're flying here but somebody else was just there and they didn't encounter any ice but they found the visibility four visibility would be three to five miles and what a great thing to know about that in advance so if you hear more about this program we're going to be publishing the results of how this 90 day test went and like I said if it is successful maybe it's something we can all participate in nationwide in all the centers airspace like I said if you're not instrument rated you might want to think about it just if you don't even plan on flying IFR it gives you the proficiency I know due to the age of my airplane I'm not really excited about flying an airplane IFR that's got one generator and one vacuum pump so I typically don't operate my Cessna 172 IFR I know that if I inadvertently encountered IFR conditions though I'd have a pretty good chance to keep in the wings level and upright since I've had some IFR training in my career talk for a minute about off airport landings due to weather these must be I've never had to make one but I've talked to people that have the agonizing decision they've ever made some of them result in damage to the airplane but what is better damage at the airplane or hitting the ground in such an attitude that you lose your life over it the insurance companies would much rather pay to have the airplanes wings taken off and loaded up on the back of a flatbed truck than they would rather pay for the investigation and pay for the pieces of the airplane to be hauled out in a dump truck so something to think about if weather is going to happen to an off airport landing don't be afraid to do it at least you can tell about it another thing with weather is the ice and most of the airplanes we fly at least I'll say this for myself the only de-icing and de-icing on board is just the heated pedo tube and that's really not enough to do much for us but the ice basically just changes the shape of the wing and since most of us are not test pilots all of a sudden we're in an airplane that we were flying in a different configuration at the same time and if I have my wife and family on board I'm not sure I want to be in that position so think about where you were when you didn't have ice and how you got to where you are when you do have ice and maybe think about a 180 degree turn to get back as soon as you are picking up ice if the last place where you didn't have ice was inside your hangar then I really can't help you with that one maybe you shouldn't have taken off but airspeed decay is one of the first things you get when you get to where you can you're going to start noticing a decay in airspeed another little tip on pedo heat I see some people using pedo heat very sparingly as if they're paying for it by the minute but if you're operating in IMC conditions and the temperature is near freezing then you may want to go ahead and use that pedo heat all the time and I know with turbojet operations anytime the temperature is less than 10 degrees celsius so you can use that to build yourself a little bit of margin in there and use that I don't think that most of us really think it through all the way but if you lack de-ice, anti-ice equipment on your airplane most of our airplanes are really unusable for a good portion of the year in IMC now I'm not saying we can't fly but we just can't undertake flights that are going to put us up in the clouds most of the year, especially in the northern latitudes let's jump into the final top five number five anyone want to take a guess fuel management I don't like it that this one is even in the top five because this seems to be one of the most preventable ones that there is talk real quick the definitions of fuel starvation versus fuel exhaustion fuel exhaustion is when the only fuel available to the aircraft is in a pump down on the ground and you're in the air fuel starvation is when the only fuel available to the aircraft is in a tank that you don't have connected to the engine because of your own failure to switch a tank does anyone fly Beechcraft and ANZES at all a friend of mine has a 1959 I'm not sure the V model it is but I will only describe the fuel system on that airplane as being spooky I wouldn't dream of undertaking a flight unless I'd studied the fuel system very carefully the accidents that have happened in some of these airplanes have complex fuel systems it's obvious that people haven't studied the fuel systems very carefully on some of these airplanes this is a been a real tough thing at the Air Safety Foundation for us to educate on because there's between two and three closer to three fuel starvation exhaustion accidents every week I know you all are going to be flying in the next week and I'm going to be flying in the next week you're not going to run out of fuel and I'm not going to run out of fuel but three people are in the next week it's going to happen so I guess that's the education element that's been so hard for us to put together and we've come up with a couple of PSA's pilot safety announcements that we've made up and we play them at some of our safety seminars and we're trying to get the word out but I want to share some of them with you these are pretty new and we're doing them on other topics too flight deck ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking looks like our flight time to Hawaii will be about 5 hours and 20 minutes we're trying to save little gas by keeping the fuel load pretty light today so just a heads up not to panic if you hear the engine shut down a little later in the flight since you might have to glide that last little bit not a little not to worry though we almost always make it so sit back, relax and enjoy the ride humorous, yeah I guess in the light of some of the other maintenance issues that have come up maybe there's bigger problems plaguing the airlines but at any rate airlines don't operate like that and I know this is pushing a little bit but sometimes as pilots we tend to cut our load a little light and maybe I'll stay a little high just in case I don't have as much fuel on board as I thought I did when I left so something to think about look at one more of them we all know that dependence on foreign oil is a problem and a lot of us are doing something about it we've cut our energy consumption and traded our gas guzzlers for hybrid cars but isn't there more we could be doing? all across the country pilots are joining the fight to end our addiction to foreign oil they're carrying just enough fuel to get within gliding range of their destinations some are even conserving by walking those last few miles after all why waste fuel when your airplane can glide to the ground using gravity and the power of the wind hybrid power it's not just for cars anymore that's my bird by the way no actual assessments were harmed in the production of this piece so since you're not going to run out of fuel in the next week and since I'm not going to run out of fuel in the next week try to spread the word that that's one of the most easily preventable accidents that are happening out there so talk to your pilot friends and tell them usually we shut down on the when we come to the freezing slide but this time we shut down and we came to the fuel slide at any rate, we've wrapped things up we have the top five and they're easy to remember and they're easy to prevent so I really appreciate you all coming out I know with aviation safety sometimes it seems like a little bit of a boring topic but I don't see a lot of scuba divers coming out in hundreds to come to safety seminars but we get several hundred come when we do these around the country and I appreciate the professionalism that you all display by being interested enough about yourself about the people that you fly with your loved ones and about taking care of the equipment that you're flying thank you very much for coming out don't forget to drop off your card at the AOPA 10th if you want wings spreader for the course, thank you thank you thank you very much come on up people if you have some questions we just want to thank you for this program finished with today