 Welcome to the FAA Production Studios and the FAA Safety Team's National Resource Center located in the Sun and Fun Complex in Lakeland, Florida. Our next presenter comes from a family of pilots and he started flying in 1963. After college he joined the Navy and has flown over 247 different aircraft and retired as a captain of a Boeing 747. He is currently the FAA Safety Team Manager in Saddlebrook, New Jersey's Flight Standards District Office and his topic today is takeoff and landing in vintage aircraft. Let's welcome Bob Thorson. Thank you all for the kind words, thank you very much. Good morning everyone. As Walt mentioned, I'm from Saddlebrook, New Jersey and I also do part of the lower New York State area and I want to talk specifically about some of the operations that I've seen in the last several years on vintage and surplus aircraft. I have to give you a slight definition and when I say vintage I'm talking about most of the airplanes that have round engines that are over 25 years old and the surplus aircraft are those that we know that have a military history and have been set up as, I guess, a recreational or leisure airplane, many of the ones that we see all over the world flying. This may be a little bit different than what you're used to seeing for a definition of warbirds and as we go on I'll get into more specific definitions. I'm Bob Thorson. Walt gave me an excellent introduction but I'd like to tell you that I'm a pilot just like every other one of you in the audience. I've flown for the airlines, I've flown for commuters, I've flight instructed and I've flown warbirds. I've pursued aviation as a vocation and also as a navigation. It's given me a lot of great years. I have a great deal of passion about it and you'll see that it goes on and most of the people that know me that I'll have grease on my hands and elbows 10 minutes before an air show and I'll be out there flying the airplane as well. I want to take just a second here to thank a lot of people because I didn't make this speech on my own. Doug Rosendahl from the Commemorative Air Force and I talk quite a bit. What I'm going to say today is maybe not too different from what you heard at the National Warbird Operators Convention a couple of months ago. And I'd also like to thank the EA and EA Warbirds chapter for putting sun and fun on and sponsoring these types of forums all around the country. We're here because my basic job is a reduced accidents in my specific area by education and outreach and this is one of the things I do. I don't only do warbirds, I do helicopters, general aviation and air carrier work as well. I just picked this warbird topic today because it's near and dear to my heart and it's a lot of fun for me to do. So we want to talk about some of the things that I've seen by history and also by the statistics and then I want to tell you a few things that we can do to lower the risk. In other words, mitigation strategies for flying warbirds and also vintage airplanes. I'm going to do a historical piece first about what the statistics tell me. The statistics were prepared by the Accident Investigation Office in Washington, D.C. Hopefully this is a custom presentation of these statistics and I've taken some liberties when I did that. I took the helicopters out because a lot of them were used in law enforcement and some of them were used in agricultural work and external load. In other words, they were previous military airplanes and public agencies took them over to use. We want to talk about education and outreach because frankly, I wish I could do something so easy as a reducing accident rate because I can't do it. You really have to do it. I need to convince you and every one of you to fly airplanes to do some type of strategy and some type of planning before you fly to reduce the accidents that you may put yourself in a position to get involved with. I think a little bit earlier in this week, one of the other FPMs from Washington, D.C., Karen Art talked about risk management. I'm not going to go into that deeply because I think most everybody at this point in time understands risk management and what we're talking about. Basically, you look and see how you can get yourself in trouble and you do something about it before you put yourself in that position. And then once again, I want to talk about best practices because there are some things that piles do as a group that are best practices that reduce the chance of you having an accident. I took a 10-year cut out of the statistics from 1999 to 2008 and the people on AI 100 gave it to me in a Excel spreadsheet with just the numbers. Now, I should kind of correct myself because these aren't rates. These are actually counts of worldwide warbird accidents. In other words, every one of those dots represents an accident over that 10-year period in the world. And you can see that there are in-registered airplanes that are warbirds flying outside the United States. Some in the Pacific, some in the Caribbean, and some up into Canada. But the bulk of them are pretty much within the domestic United States. Here's what, if you enlarge a domestic chart, here's what it looks like. And you'll see that, unbelievably enough, there's an even geographic distribution across the whole United States. You might notice that if you get out into the Los Angeles basin, that there is a cluster there as well as around this area. And I think that's because there's quite a few warbird owners in those areas. And I think that the more population you have, and you look at the accident by counts, that's what you're going to see. Just a higher count rate in those areas. I don't think there's anything statistically significant about it. I had somebody from our 290 branch in our region up in New York who is a statistical analysis agent go back and look at all these things. And see if he could come up with anything. And the only thing he told me was that there were a high number of accidents during maneuvering flight. We'll talk about that when we get a little bit further into the presentation. If you look from year to year, it's kind of interesting since 2001. It's been trending down, and I'm certainly happy about that. And I'm sure a lot of other people are. I can tell you that if you look at the general aviation accident statistics, you'll see changes from year to year. If you go back to 1999, you'll see that it's probably the lowest year. So we've had good years like in 2006, and we've had bad years like in 2001. But once again, if you look at the left side of this graph, you'll see that that's 21 or 22 accidents. And out of the total number of flying war birds, that's relatively low. 2009, hopefully, because of a lot of the things that are going on, more mentoring programs, more educational programs from clubs and associations, that we'll see a continued decrease. I decided I wanted to look at the types of operation. Because every day as a fast team program manager, I go in and look at accidents by types of operation. How many happen in takeoffs? How many happen in landings? How many happen on approach? How many out of circling approaches? How many of more helicopters, gliders, and the like? And for war birds specifically, I don't really see anything much different. You'll see that roughly half of the accidents occur in the landing phase. And a little bit during a takeoff, maybe 25% of the total are during takeoffs. You'll see that light blue section up to the top of the pie chart that says maneuver. I used a little bit of a different definition. If you go on the regulations, you won't really see a maneuver definition. If you go to the latest null report, you'll see that they consider a maneuver, anything down to basically short final and shortly after takeoff. Maneuver for me is anytime the airplane is doing anything, not necessarily acrobatic, but outside of the pattern. So war birds, you typically have a higher number of aerobatic operations going on. And you typically see people flying 90 degree or 360 degree overhead approaches. And this isn't what you would normally see in a general aviation fleet. So I pulled a maneuver out. And you can see that anything that has to do with low air speed or close to the ground, which means takeoff, maneuvering, and landing is pretty much 80% of our problem. Climb cruise, descent, and the go arounds, they're relatively small. It's kind of surprising because I would have thought that in a go around, in an airplane with a large engine, you'd see more problems. Historically, you've heard the rumor about P-51s on torque rolls, or an A-1 Sky Raider doing a torque roll on takeoff or sudden application of power. But we don't see those types of accidents happening. We normally see them happening when the air speed is low and the closer to the ground that you get. I also cut them out by types of aircraft. Now, I pulled most of the helicopters out, as I told you previously, because they don't apply. A lot of surplus helicopters that came from the Army and the Air Force and the Navy are used in airborne law enforcement, ALE, as we call it. For example, several major cities around the country use them in the law enforcement mode, and that's not really what I wanted to talk about. Those folks are in a different breed and category in a type of operation compared to what we normally see. These are strictly propeller and jet-powered airplanes and some helicopters that are involved in doing air shows such as Sun and Fun or the EA Air Venture at Oshkosh. And this is what I see. It's basically propeller airplanes, and we all know that because the bulk of the airplanes from World War II and Korea are what we all know and love. And they're the ones that compromise the largest part of the fleet. But you can see that that turbojet, Blue Area, is almost 25% of the total. And as you look at the statistics like I do on Monday mornings and most mornings, there's a fairly large number of classic war jets or warbirds that are having problems. And that population is growing tremendously as well. So we need to reach out to those folks and talk to them about some of the things that are going on today. I can tell you that the guys that I hang out with are probably all my age in their mid-60s and we're not the 18-year-olds that were flying F-4s in Vietnam and the A-5s and the A-4s and the Sky Raiders and all the different airplanes. So we're later in life and we're probably not as quick as we were when we were kids. But having said that, we're still making almost the same accidents that the general aviation population does on a day to day basis. The only difference is if you have an accident and a warbird, the possibility of a fatality or a very serious injury is much higher. And I think it's got a lot to do with people pushing the envelope. And maybe as you get older, you might think about what you're doing a little more carefully and not putting yourself in an area where you can't dig yourself out of. Let's get into the education part about this. I saw this the other day, experience is what you learn shortly after you needed it. And there couldn't be a truer statement anywhere. I can tell you that I've learned some things on my own because of my own view of aviation. I used to dig and push the envelope and experiment. I started out when I was in a Navy doing things that most people wouldn't do with an airplane. I had a license before I got in the Navy and maybe that was part of that culture. And of course, it was a time of war of Vietnam so I really didn't think to the future if I could get through the war, I would have been happy. I was only looking a few years ahead. But we don't want to do that today in Warbirds because most of these airplanes are older airframes so we want to fly them gently. The pilots are older so we want to be careful that we're in physical shape when we get there. And we want to think about what we don't know about the maintenance and the operation of this airplane that we should know. Part of the human factors, part of aviation is that we are human. We're human beings and believe it or not, we're not robots. We make a lot of errors. Friends of mine always tell me that the best pilot doesn't worry about the errors he makes, but he has a whole bunch of recovery procedures in his pocket that he knows how to pull them out and get himself out of a problem he may get himself into. And I want to talk about some of these that are specific to Warbird and vintage airplanes. One of them is agent physical fitness. As I mentioned, I wish I could jump up and do things that I used to, I can't. I mean, my brain still thinks I'm 18, but my hands and eyes are not 18. And so I can't do that. The other thing that I like to bring up, I call the Yahoo factor. Now, we learned this week at Sun and Fun that there are several other pilots around here that understand what I'm saying, but they call it differently, like Corky Fornoff calls it the yippy factor. And you may have noticed that on the belly of his airplane, he's got yippy on there, which is great. But it's basically always goes down to the loss of inhibition. And I'm going to talk to you about a few things that cause this loss of inhibition and put you into a position that you didn't want to go to in the first place. I want to talk about egos. Everybody's got an ego, and Warbird pilots have fairly large egos. And rightfully so, because they've gotten to that part in their flying career that they can afford an expensive airplane. They got qualified in it. They're very proud of it. They've probably spent many hours working on it, restoring it, polishing it. And that generally strokes your ego. But I want to tell you about the downside of that and how to keep that under control. Habit patterns, flying is a habit, believe it or not. And what you do every day in training and testing is what comes out when you have an emergency. So if you don't do it today, if you don't train right today, if you don't test right today, when your time comes, you won't be ready to perform. The other thing I want to talk about is awareness. I mean, one of the biggest terms in aviation is situational awareness. But I want to talk to you about it in a broader term, about just general awareness of what's going on and how you can change your awareness by a close in focus and a distant focus in what causes that to occur. Let's get into the specifics about age and physical fitness. Everybody's got a chronological age and everybody's got an actual age. You can look at any of your friends and some people age better than others and some people don't age as well. And depending on your occupation, you may keep your muscles up to a better strength than someone else. If you're flying some warbirds like an A26, it takes a great deal of arm strength to muscle that airplane around. Other airplanes, the fighters, they're fairly light on the stick. You don't need that much muscle. But if you're my age and I'm going to fly an A26, you're going to see me at the gym, much like the Blue Angels are at the gym every day, working on my upper arm strength because I know I'm going to need it in that airplane for a lot of maneuvers. The other thing is chronologically, certain things happen to you. You probably sleep less as you get older. One of the most interesting sleep studies I just saw said that you're really not awake until 20 minutes after your eyes open. In other words, you're awake and you sense that you're awake. But you're not fully functioning until 20 minutes later. Think about those poor battle of Britain pilots who were sleeping in a grass and five minutes later they're up into their spitfires and launching and climbing through 4,000 or 5,000 feet ready to engage in a battle. I bet you most of them weren't at their peak performance. Same thing, flying your airplane. If you're not well rested the night before and you're not ready to go fly it, don't do it. And as you get older, don't think that you can do it like you were 20 or 30 or 40 because you just can't do that. Believe it or not, and I know people don't like to hear this, flying is demanding physical sport. And my AME happens to be a very good one. He is a senior AME and he's also a lawyer. So I get the benefit of asking the legal questions about aviation while he's giving me my medical examination. And we talk about it being a demanding physical sport all the time. If you think back about World War II or pre-Korea or pre-Vietnam years, most of the military did calisthenics. And the reason they were doing calisthenics is get the muscle tone up, get the brain pumping more blood and getting all the physiological parts of you up to speed to fly a military airplane. Now, I can't tell you how many people that I know don't do that. If you're flying a P-51 today, the same physical demand is on you as any of the pilots in World War II or Korea. You need to think about that. I'm talking about some physical conditioning. I'm not necessarily talking about the grueling physical conditioning. Maybe the Blue Angels go through prior to a show. But if it's spring, like it is now, it's the start of the Seymour Johnson air show. It's the start of the air show season this weekend. You need to have gotten yourself into some good flying physical condition before now. You need to start thinking about it back in January and February. And so that there is less of an impact upon your ability to fly. If you're not physically fit, you're not going to do as well. If you have a problem, you're not going to be thinking as well. If you're pulling a lot of Gs like some of these acrobatic pilots out here, it's going to tire you out a lot quicker in a routine. And then you start losing your edge that you keep up. The other thing is at shows and anytime, the heat and dehydration is a very serious issue about physical fitness. And any given day, I can tell you that you should drink probably between 25 and eight glasses of water. And if you're one of these shows, you should be probably drinking a lot more. If you look at most of the competitive people in the International Aerobatic Council, you'll always see them walking around with a water bottle. And there's a very good reason for that. Your body needs water to make you provide peak performance and also peak mental performance. If you fly on an airplane, it's got an open cockpit or a glass canopy. This is taking the water out of your body at a much higher rate. And I can tell you, I've flown to B-17 probably for 16 or 17 years, I'm Memphis Bell with Dave Talachey. And at the end of the day, I probably have lost five to six pounds of water lost just sitting in that. And it's not an all glass canopy. I mean, we have plenty of windows, but it gets so warm in there. There's no air conditioning. So that's another part of this physical fitness part of flying. Doug Rosendahl and I were talking about the use of oxygen. And we had differing views. And I'll tell you why, I've done a lot of my board bird flying in England. And you'll see the people in England always have in their spitfires or in either airplanes, hurricanes. They have their oxygen mask on shortly after start because there's a great amount of carbon dioxide coming off the engines. And we should probably think about that with our flying in this country. If you have an oxygen system built into your airplane, I would suggest you use it. This is also true for the cross country part because I noticed that a lot of the war bird guys are flying higher and higher to stay above the terminal flight restrictions, TFRs. So they don't have to worry about getting violated. What they're doing is they're flying up in the mid teens. Put that oxygen mask on. I know a lot of people can sustain flight at 12 to 14,000 feet without oxygen. But I'll tell you what, after a two or three hour flight, when you come down into the pattern here, you're going to see a tremendously reduced performance if you're not breathing oxygen. The other thing is, is if there's a fire in your airplane, you have that oxygen mask on and a helmet on, you've got maximum protection. There's been a couple accidents in the last month of pilots and war birds getting severely burned because they didn't have the proper flying equipment on, no max gloves, no max flight suit, oxygen mask covering your face and a helmet. The last thing I want to talk about in this area is fatigue. I flew 767s and 747s most of my life for an international airline. And I can tell you that I've been on my hands and knees after flying for two or three days, particularly coming back from Tokyo. My body would just not adjust to the time zone. I've tried all kinds of techniques. I've sat outside in the sun. I've changed my eating habits. I've had more protein, less carbohydrates and everything I can. But in the end, your body, when you move those circadian rhythms by crossing time zones, they need a certain amount of time to catch up. And if you don't do that and you come to a show and you've just been on the other side of the earth, you're asking for problems. Or even if you just want to go training your war bird on a Saturday. I can tell you that when I was in England, there was at least two or three accidents of pilots who lost control of the airplanes doing very low altitude acrobatics. And when they went back and looked at their history of what they had been doing the last four or five days, they were out flying on a different part of the earth and they were very tired. They got back home, they probably had four to six hours of sleep, and they were in an air show doing acrobatics. That's not really good. I mean, you're setting yourself up. If you don't think about these things and give yourself a breathing room and making sure you're fully rested, you're going to cause some problems. There's also cumulative fatigue. If you're on vacation and you're spending a week or two someplace else and your body gets adjusted to say Italy or India, and you come back to the states and you want to fly, I think I'd give yourself a little bit of a breathing room on that as well. The Yahoo factor, or the Yipi factor. The psychological term is a loss of inhibition. I did some studying on this with Scott Chappelle who is one of the noted human factors guys in the United States. And it's kind of amazing that it really goes back to your personality trait and your earliest childhood. I don't want to get too much into the psychological part about it, but I want to tell you some of the triggers that you might see to cause you to get a loss of inhibition. I can tell you there's probably not a person watching this presentation today that hasn't thought about getting in the airplane, pushing the power up, snapping the gear up, keeping it low to the runway, and pulling up into a barrel roll at the end of the runway. Well, if you have all of waivered airspace and you have all the credentials and you've been approved by the authorities to do that, good luck. But the problem is that everybody has that in their mind. And most people don't do it because that inhibition prevents them from doing that type of maneuver for a variety of reasons. But there are some personalities that don't have that high of an inhibition, and they will do a maneuver like that. Two of the biggest triggers that you're ever going to find, and particularly at an air show, are the camera or peer pressure. If I'm flying in front of people that I know from the military, or I know from the war bird scene, or at some of the air shows that I go do every year, I have to really tell myself, don't go so low, don't do certain things. Because I know that they're looking at me, and at the end of the day, I said, gee, you know, you weren't at 200 feet. You were at 300 feet. Or gee, that watermelon drop didn't go off very well. You were like 1,000 yards away. That little subtle hazing that goes on after an air show. So the peer pressure puts us on you, you wanna be aware of this. You know, don't do that because professional discipline in aviation is everything, particularly when you're flying war birds. The other thing is the camera. The camera makes people ham it up, makes them do all kinds of crazy things. If they know somebody, even if it's a neighbor at a private strip, taking a picture of you and your GAC 52, doing a couple of slow rolls or a high speed pass, for some reason, with a certain personality and those two triggers, you end up with the same end result. Be careful about those types of things. Don't let the yahoo factor get in your way. This is also true of pushing the envelope. Some people have very aggressive flight characteristics. They don't care about going over air speeds, going beyond air frame limits. They say, well, it's built to 150%. So if I can do a 5G maneuver, why can't I do a 7G maneuver? Well, that's pushing the envelope beyond what the airplane was designed to do. You shouldn't do that. Stay within the parameters of the airplane. In the older the airplane gets, these things, it's really hard to tell. If you're flying a wooden airplane, how good is that glue bond? Is it gonna hold together? How good are all those cables on the wings? How strong are your spars? How much corrosion has occurred in the spar that you're not aware of? That airplane may be not capable of only holding the book limits. If you've stated the book limits, there's a little buffer between what it was designed to do and where you're flying. So don't push the envelope. Don't try maneuvers that your airplane is not designed to do. I've watched somebody this week do something. I've seen a couple of things this week that I personally would never do. And I doubt if Bob Hoover would do it. But the guys are very good at what they do, and I'm sure they design some safety and some mitigating factors into it. But if you're an average warbird pilot, don't push the envelope. Don't do new maneuvers without training practice. Any good person knows that they'll go to altitude first, 4, or 5,000 feet. If you have a new routine or a new maneuver, you want to perfect. I've just lost a good friend less than a month ago that didn't have a lot of experience doing acrobatics. And while the final conclusion's not out, everybody that saw it, including his son, pretty much know the end result. And it was a new maneuver and he had not practiced it at altitude. Had he had a few more thousand feet, he might be with us today. So don't do new maneuvers without training practice, without somebody with you that's doing, that does it regularly. That can train you and walk you through it. One of the things that help our mentors, I can tell you that the EA Warbirds Magazine last month was wonderful. They brought up more safety issues and more mentoring issues than I've ever seen. Mentoring typically can happen within a group of pilots. It can happen through an organization such as EA Warbirds, a member of the Air Force, CJA for the jet folks, and any other number of ways. The guy that originally taught you how to fly. But if you mentor somebody, try to keep them under control. I have a couple of young kids that I got into the National Guard. And we have a lot of talks about, they have a lot of energy. I said, please don't get yourself too far on that limb. They're pushing all the time and they're good. But I try to rein them back and I would suggest that you do the same thing. Pay attention to the articles in these magazines that mentor and pay attention to your friends that fly the same type of aircraft. I talked about egos, they come in varying sizes and shapes. You can't say that every P-51 pilot does a certain thing or every B-17 pilot has a certain characteristic. Because you're not in the military, you haven't been psychologically pushed into a hole or tested to be a fighter pilot or a bomber pilot or whatever it may be. So we have people of all different backgrounds. Some people that are working in industry, in stock markets, that are doctors, that are plumbers, that are one of everything. And FAA inspectors like myself that do air shows. And you have all different kinds of varying egos. So when you're flying with somebody, particularly in formation, get to know them, spend some time with them. I don't let anybody fly on my wing unless I know who they are. Much like I won't work on a flying airplane unless I've worked on it. And I know the mechanical condition of it. Ego and peer pressure. If you get pushed with a large ego by your peers too much, what will happen is they'll pull out of the group. It was at the Reno Air Races three years ago and one of the world-noted astronaut was there. And I wanted to go up and say something to him, but whoever was running the air show, and he had had some kind of a conflict. And the group of warbird pilots that were running the pylons there, I guess must have been tough on him. So he decided that he was gonna sit over in this row and separate himself from the crowd. And when you see that, the first thing you wanna do is, if you get a chance, get with that person and bring them back into the group and keep them within that group. Because when guys start going off on their own, that means their ego is out of control. Don't let that happen, and don't let that happen to you in particular. We all lead busy lives today, no matter where you go. Somebody's pulling your cell phone out, pulling your computer out, pulling their iPod out, making the kids ball games on Saturdays, having things to do at work, having things to do at home. If you're gonna go fly, give yourself some breathing room. Pick a time that you know that you're gonna be up to speed. A lot of people will fly on a Saturday morning. I particularly think that's a good idea because it's the end of the week. You can sleep in, and you're resting, and you're ready to go. But don't let your time, your schedule pressure you into doing something. A lot of people say their egos come and talk and say, I can do anything. I can do anything with any amount of time. One of the things about military train pilots that I like, and this is my opinion, is that the first thing that they learn is how to keep their egos in check. And it's mostly because a drill sergeant is sitting there threatening you to within an inch of your life. They push you as hard as they can. They don't let you sleep. They physically run you around all kinds of obstacle courses and cross-country courses. And they push you into such a degraded mental and physical state that they want to see if you can still maintain discipline underneath those conditions. Now, if you had to do that today to own a warbird, I don't think you'd get too many people buying them. Or even surplus airplanes. Or vintage airplanes. But you need a little bit of that discipline to keep your ego in check. And I hope you try to think about that before you go flying. Discipline is everything in flying. Another subject is habit patterns. I can tell you that I have a very nice parrot at home. And I train him to do certain things. And he's an animal like any other animal. And we, as humans, are in some ways exactly the same. If I do the same thing with him every day, he will expect the same thing every day. And he will respond in the same way. And that's true of the human. So before you go fly, if you get into an airplane that's new and you haven't flown much, spend some time in there running through all the switches, running through all the checklists, until you're very comfortable in the airplane. Too frequently today, I see guys jump from airplane to airplane to airplane. And don't do that. Well, you're increasing that risk. Let me ask you something. All airplanes that I've ever flown take off and land on the main tanks. I'm assuming everybody would agree with me. Is there any warbird that anybody can think of that does not take off and land on the main tanks? Well, one that comes to mind to me first is a P-38. And the first time I saw one, I said, that's really strange because I've never seen an airplane take off and land on the aux tanks before. And if you got in that airplane and you reverted to your normal habit pattern, you were new to it, and you didn't reinforce that, you didn't use the checklist, say, oh, I've landed 100 times. I don't need to pull a checklist out and make sure I've gotten everything completed. You're gonna have a problem. The other thing is tailwheel airplanes. All tailwheel aircraft generally raise the tailwheel on takeoffs and do a wheel takeoff. There's very few airplanes that do a three point except which one. Well, when I got to the B-17, I thought it was very strange that that airplane, you do a three point landing in a three point takeoff. And if you try to do that in the DC-3, I'll guarantee you that you're gonna go for a ride. There's a few people that can do it. They're that skilled and they fly the airplane that much. But basically, it's a habit pattern. So when you go from one airplane to another airplane, be careful about your habit patterns and make sure that you're ready to go for the airplane that you're flying. Two other things that I'd like to bring to your attention is, some people around the airport will say, I always do this or I never do that. You should listen to whatever the statements are and find out why that is because it's a good idea to listen to these people. They've probably learned from some experience and I can tell you hanger flying is an excellent way of passing information on. And today that's basically what we're doing here is we're hanger flying. I'm passing what things that I think are important in flying vintage and warbird airplanes to you as a group. You don't have to agree with them. You certainly don't have to adopt them. But I wish you would just listen just a little bit and consider them. I call it habit pattern mitigation. Review the systems for each airplane you fly and make sure you do it regularly. I can tell you that the airlines and 135 operators have the lowest accident statistics because they're forced into doing this. They're forced in the systematic checks every six months. A lot of times you'll get into somebody else's airplane. I have a friend that lets me fly as N3N. And while it looks like a stearman, it's considerably different. And when I get in there, I have to remind myself of certain things. It's got a lockable tailwheel. A stearman doesn't have it. It's got four ailerons and a stearman doesn't have four. It's only got two. I said, well, gee, this is not a stearman, although it looks like it. And it feels like it. It's not. If you don't lock that tailwheel on landing, you're going to have a great time. You're going to learn what your feet are for. It's a real experience. So make sure you go around all the cockpit switches and the handles and levers and look at them and make sure you know what they're for. Used to be an old military joke that if it's not shiny, don't touch it. I don't think that rule's ever changed, not even today. Make sure you know how your systems work. Because I can tell you that in the last year, I've seen a number of gear up accents that could have been prevented if a person knew how to get the gear down manually. There was no reason to land with a gear up. Make sure you know how it works. Make sure you know how much usable fuel you have. Don't run your tanks all the way down to the bottom. In practice emergency procedures, I can tell you one of the things that the Navy used to do that I really liked is, every time before you went to fly, we'd go over one emergency item. We'd grind it upside down and why you did this and why you didn't do this. And go through it. I would suggest you do the same thing periodically, particularly in the spring, because maybe you haven't flown for three or four months over the winter months if you're like me up where there's a lot of snow. Between the winds and the snow, we haven't gotten out a lot this winter. Make sure you practice your emergency procedures over and over and over again, because if you don't, the second you have a problem, you're going to feel tremendously uncovered. Make sure you know the mechanical status of your aircraft. I mentioned to you before I do a lot of orbiter flying. I won't fly anybody's airplane unless I've worked on it. That's just my own personal rule. That's what I do to protect me. That's my mitigation strategy, my best practice. I do that and it forces me to know the systems and know the status of the airplane. The last thing I want to talk about in this regard is awareness. Make sure you're fit for flight. Scott Chappelle told me a very interesting story when I was down talking to him a couple of months ago about he had a car accident. And I said, wow, how'd you do that? He says, I've never had a car accident before. I said, well, what happened? He says, I take the same road every single day to work. And there's a stop sign about a third of the way to work. And I always stop. And I didn't stop this time. Somebody was coming out of the cross street. I said, how come you didn't stop? You saw it? He says, you know, I didn't see it. I says, you didn't remember it was there? He said, no, I physically didn't see it. He said, I just had one of the worst arguments I'd ever had with my wife. And I was driving down the road. I didn't see the stop sign. And the tape in my head was going around and around and around over what she said and how I responded. And it had me so upset, he said, I shouldn't have been in the car. And I would suggest that the same thing is even more true in an airplane. If you're not fit for flight, don't go flying. Just because you go to the AME and he lets you have that medical doesn't mean that you can fly at any time. There's a certain amount of that that's self-approving. You have to look at yourself. Are you mentally prepared to fly? Are you physically fit to fly? If you're not, don't go. This is overly focused is what I'm talking about. If you're nervous about getting up and flying in front of a large group of people, it's sort of like the first time you expect that and you get over it. But what you're going to see is that once you can relax in front of a group and put on a demonstration of your airplane, you'll start to see more things on the side. In most of these pilots out here, you'll see them talking to you right in the middle of a snap roll and everything else. They are so accustomed to flying that airplane and they know their airplane and maneuvers so well it's second nature. They don't have to think about it. So make sure you're not overly focused if you're out flying or doing any maneuvers. And you'll see what all of a sudden you'll start to see things on the side open up like this and you'll start to see things happening over here with your wingman or over here on the side of the runway. Somebody is starting to come up on a taxiway. You start to see more things. Make sure you're relaxed. Because it helps you tremendously with your awareness. Let's get down to the meat of this, taxi and takeoff operations. Generally there's a warbird brief anytime there's a waiver to airspace or any large air show. Most of the air bosses are excellent. Make sure you take a pencil and paper and write down everything that they say that applies to the air show. Make sure you listen and learn where the divert strips are and all the other things that you need to know. If you can't get into the single runway here where are you going to go? In a fast team we've been pushing lightly as ground operations are a critical part of flight operations. For some reason people don't think there's any risk to them at all when they're on the ground. But going back through the statistics you saw the number of taxi accidents which is roughly a third to a quarter of the accidents happening taxing out to the runway or taxing back in. Sometimes it's because of limited visibility of the airplane in a Stearman you can't see over the nose or some of the old airplanes, WACOs or like that. F-6X, F-6Fs, TBMs, all these Grumman bill airplanes are very hard to see over those P-51s. So you see the guys typically their mitigation strategy is the S-turn. But I don't care what kind of airplane you fly you need to look at being very careful about taxing on the ground. Where are your wing tips and where is your prop? And if you're a fairly large airplane like a TBM is there anybody underneath you that you can't see? Don't taxi too close to anybody in front of you and be aware of your prop blast behind you because you are as a pilot command responsible for that prop blast or the prop wake. Some of the other mitigation strategies that you want to think about it about taxing and taking off for performance calculations. I've noticed when I give instruction or I go out and do these like preflight clinics that we have outside here nobody is really looking at how many feet it takes to take off or how many feet it takes to land your airplane. I can tell you once again going to a structured environment like the airlines they have performance calculations that are done by the dispatch office and then also the captain looks at them and double checks them. I would suggest you when you fly your airplane that you need to sit down and look at what the performance calculations are for your specific operations. If you're in Denver obviously you're going to have a higher ground speed and require more runway than at Lakeland. But of course it's damp here and I think yesterday was some ninety degrees that's going to decrease your performance a lot of both your engine and the wing. Go in there and look at the book and most warbirds have excellent performance charts. Now if you don't know how to read those performance charts call me or go to your local chapter if it's a t-28 group or a t-6 group these guys know how to do it go back here and look at those charts they were developed years ago and they're very good. They'll tell you exactly how many feet it'll take you to take off the land. The other thing is when you go watch how many feet it takes you to get off the ground and then compare that to what the book says. You may notice that for a hundred low lead gas you may not have all the performance that you would have gotten out of a hundred and fifteen which is no longer available. On our B-17 we're the only one in the world that has turbos and those turbos make up for a lot of that. So I can tell you that I watch our takeoffs versus everybody else we normally get off a little bit shorter. Thank goodness we have the turbos but if I want to fly a non-turbo airplane I'd have to go back and look at those performance calculations to make sure on a hot day that I have enough with the gas load I have to get where I'm going and also to get out of that size strip. So please do that. I mean these are things that most people are taught at the private pilot level and I'd like to reinforce you know at your current flying level when you balance something else. Most people say well I didn't put anything in the airplane and I didn't take anything out but the gas and why should I do weight and balance. Well that's true but when that airplane was built it had a certain weight and balance and you may have added radios. You might have put a extra oxygen bottle in it. You may have made a modification in the back to put your clothes on for cross country in because most of these single seat war birds have limited space. You know go back and take a look at what these things do. I can tell you like a Spitfire the world's fastest airplane in a dive Mach 87 if that fuel tank's got fuel in it and you're doing that you got a problem because you're going to lose control of it shortly. Just that small 37 gallon tank behind the pilot seat will make that big of a difference. You need to look at the weight and balance of your plane as the airplane currently sits. Look at what modifications you've made go back and you can change original data. There's many companies nowadays that will do it for you. We talked about situational awareness. On the ground in an air show like this there's a lot of things going on. There's people flying above you in orbits. There's people taxing a very different type of airplane. There are balloons coming and going so be aware what's on the ground. We talked about the S-turns already and this is the term I want to talk about progressive taxi. This is basically came down from the military and I know a lot of people heard it before. If you don't know where you are on the ground or you need help just stop the airplane and if it's a towered airport ask the tower for progressive and they will tell you left go twenty more feet go a hundred yards go to the next light or whatever it takes to get you around they'll direct you. The same is true that when you pull into parking spots out here watch these ground marshallers very carefully. Don't go too fast and I can tell you that almost every show I've been to in the seventeen we're going into a tight spot we only have about forty feet to go and what is the marshallers do? He's right down the center line of the airplane. I can't see him. I stop and they don't know why I stop because I can't see you. The airplane stops the marshallers should understand that the pilot can't see him. So the guys after a while they'll get the idea and they'll come over here so I can see him and they can see me we have eye contact and I know what to do next. But follow the marshallers when you're at a tight spot. This is also good on a untowered airport if you're going someplace watch the line boys if you don't know parking some open area and shut the airplane down there. Don't put yourself in a tight spot without either a marshall or somebody watching your wings or your tail be careful when you swing your tail because many airplanes the wingtip will clear but the tail won't. Most of all taxi slowly. I flew with the same guy who blessed a soul passed away a couple years ago that he never taxied under forty miles an hour and everybody knows who it is and we used to laugh about it but the truth of the matter is is that he was a very good pilot but he was a world war two pilot they were taught to crank up and get off the ground as quickly as they can and not to burn the gas and to taxi fast and he never modified his flying that's very dangerous today taxi slowly so you know where you are you can make turns and you don't get yourself in a compromising position with other aircraft or vehicles on the ground if you're flying into a towered airport pattern entry is not too much a problem they pretty much tell you where to go and how to enter the pattern if you're at some place like sun and fun or any other air show the air boss is going to tell you what to do and they have fixed flight patterns air boss is normally control the field even if there's a tower when there's a waiver in effect here's a couple things that we talked about already but i want to add some war birds specifics to it and uncontrolled uh... field in other words there's no airport traffic uh... no air tower control tower there slow to pattern speed and this gives you time to make decisions about adjusting your pattern if you're unfamiliar with the field and also look for other traffic make sure you enter the proper altitude now this is a little tricky because some people are used to flying at eight hundred foot patterns some people that are in heavier bomber type airplanes or twelve hundred foot patterns and sometimes local regulations dictate non-standard right or left-hand patterns and non-standard altitudes where are you going to find that before you go look in the airport flight directly a little green book and normally they tell you also aOPA has a good airport directly gives you all that information maximize your outside scanning all the time what do i mean by that if you're coming into the field get your gear down early you know you don't have to be jimmy jetton put it down at the one eighty you can put it down farther back in the downwind it gives you time to do all your pre-landing checks make sure you're properly configured for landing now you have time to look at the traffic ahead of you look for other people and maybe in a pattern that you missed or someone else missed this is kind of what i like to see the v the big red v in the end of runway twenty seven there is is what your final over the approach speed to you generally what i do is i had ten knots increment to each one of them is this a hard fixed rule no because some airplanes are different but generally this will get you slowed down which if you enter the pattern forty knots over forty miles an hour over your final approach speed you'll you'll be able to handle this this also prevents you from getting yourself into an over shooting condition on final approach of your speeds down and it helps you get your hand and eyes coordinated to that slow speed flight that's required for landing when you land there's there's a couple things you want to do a power off landing or a power on landing i can tell you that it's a power off landings a thing of beauty and most people are always taught that but there's certain conditions that might want to think about keeping some power on besides a crosswind i'm not going to get into crosswinds i think everybody knows what to do there but i can tell you i started flying a b-seventeen everybody said gee you really do good landings but why are you landing with power i said well i want to control my touchdown and i want rudder effectiveness all the way through the flare and i don't want to worry about doing this down the runway they say yeah but everybody else just pulls off the power and i said well how's their landings compared to mine all man we're hitting the ground and going off the runway sideways in the grass and all i said i don't want to hear about it i understand what you're saying but when you have a power off full stall landing you don't have anything to work with when at the last few seconds and that's normally why you see loss of control on landing accidents because they're power off and people don't consider that they maybe they should do a power on approach maybe you haven't flown for a couple weeks or months make sure you manage your flare smoothly don't do one of these searching for the ground make a nice flare give the airplane time to settle crosswinds i'm not going to talk about but i am going to talk about bounce recoveries because if you make a bad landing make sure that you're comfortable doing a bounce recovery there's two ways to do it you can go around just put the power to it and make sure your right foot comes up with the power or the left foot if it's one of those russian bill engines and go around properly there's nothing wrong with going around or you know some airplanes if you're so low and your airspeed is low enough just hold the oak back just release the pressure just a little bit let it settle down on its own two different types of bounce recoveries if you don't know go out with instructor and work on a couple and see what works best for your airplane it's okay to go around if you need to do it nobody's going to complain about that make sure you do a stabilized approach i like to think 300 feet per nautical mile if you're a mile out you have to be 300, 602 miles, 903 miles that's pretty typical for most airplanes i don't know any other airplane that doesn't do that but make sure you're stabilized and under control not decreasing airspeed we don't do decreasing airspeed or what they used to call decelerated approaches anymore just fly constant airspeed constant rate approach down good landing is a good example for everybody look at all these factors that come in here if you're going to land run all these things through your mind how heavy is your airplane how much runway do you have to work with how fast is the aircraft a lot of times what i'll do is if i go into geneseo with a b-17 if it's early morning and know the grass is wet i'll make a power off approach it might not be a perfect landing but i know one thing that i'll be stopped on a wet grass and 4800 feet make sure you don't have a tailwind a lot of people get caught with a tailwind and they don't realize that a tailwind tremendously increases the amount of runway required for takeoff and landings make sure you're on speed i can't tell you the number of times i've seen accidents last year where people are way too fast they said well i had a crosswind well that's fine but you still need to get yourself down on speed make sure you respect that stabilized approach make sure you know if there's a required height over the threshold that you use it the other thing is when you land put your brakes on that's part of the goal once you're down on the taxi don't relax now it's not over a lot of people relax and they say well that's it i said well it's not it you're not down yet when you're in a chalks then you can relax half the accidents occur leaving the runway and taxing back to the ramp so just slow down do your s-turns stop if you don't know where you are and ask for progressive follow your ground marshals in tight spots and make sure you know what those marshallers instructions are if you go to a military base you may see something slightly different than what you're accustomed to seeing in the airman's information manual just a couple seconds on the safety culture like i started out this program saying i wish i could reduce the accidents but i really can't i have to sort of talk you into doing it you know making me look good but you know what that takes every person that has a pilot license needs personal dedication and accountability it's your attitude and your behavior that determines whether or not you're safe the other thing if you don't belong to any of these abc organizations you need to think about joining them because they do wonderful things to promote safety they have processes they have methods they have people you can talk to about your specific type of airplane you're gonna have to make a commitment aviation is not the j3 cub that i started out in where i went out got a service they told type looked at the weather and went flying well it's blue we can go flying now it's those days are gone it's a little more sophisticated so you need to make a commitment to learn and to work on things beyond simple adherence to a checklist or procedure you need to think about commitment to excellence you're flying and listening to mentors and also spending time studying your plane and doing something for proficiency training we like to push in the fast team the wings program and i do it i love it i do all these online courses and continually seeing things in there that i'd forgotten about years ago if you need regulatory information wwe dot f a dot gov has a lot of information safety team which is supports the production studios everything else you can find us at f a safety dot gov there's two more things that you can find they come out to the public or safety uh... alert for operators office so information for operators if you join f a safety dot gov and you do proper notifications info information tools will come to you along with such things as advanced notification tfrs which is a fairly big subject nowadays you have questions about regulatory guidance please go to the uh... fisto guys this website here f sims dot f a dot gov has most everything that inspector has and you can find whatever you need from can i put a data plate on my airplane to any other kind of training question the fast teams the arms but into the rest of the industry and we want to come to us and talk we don't do certification we don't do surveillance and we don't do enforcements because we want to be able to have an open discussion with you about all kinds of topics so and