AIN Blog

Mercy Missions

2010-01-26T09:44:09-05:00

Without hesitation, business aviation did the right thing last month when it donated its people, its expertise and its airplanes to help ease the misery in Haiti. Also without hesitation, NBAA grabbed the baton of coordination this time around with surer hands than it did after Hurricane Katrina.

And also with minimal hesitation, AIN dispatched Stephen Pope to ground zero when the invitation came in from Honeywell PR veteran Bill Reavis to ride along in one of that company’s G450s. Pope’s story on page one of this issue captures not only the logistics of delivering people and supplies to a country in chaos but also some insight into the body corporate and how a swift and compassionate decision at the very top of the hierarchy set the mission in motion. AIN’s momentary hesitation in accepting Honeywell’s offer was our concern that Pope be allowed to participate and not occupy payload pounds or cubic feet in the G450 that could be better allocated. I believe his coverage in this issue of one company’s mercy mission earned him his place on the Gulfstream.

Pope’s participation with Honeywell was not AIN’s only involvement in the Caribbean catastrophe. Robert Tod (married to Vicki Tod, who works in the magazine’s publishing office in Connecticut) is director of operations for aircraft management/charter/FBO company Volo Aviation, and when a GIV owner donated use of his airplane to the earthquake relief efforts, Tod strapped into the left seat of the twinjet and headed toward the chaos with medical workers and supplies. His story, told on page 41, complements the experiences of the Honeywell pilots as both crews launched their missions at short notice.

What struck me was not only the compassion shown by all involved but also the highly public display of exactly what makes business aviation so appealing day in, day out–its nonpareil ability to react swiftly to events and needs, be they catastrophic or commercial, like no other mode of mobility. We can only hope this message was not lost on those who have been so strident in criticizing this industry in recent times.
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© 2009 Aviation International News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Loran’s Lament

2010-01-26T09:42:44-05:00

Nobody needs reminding how much debt the U.S. has amassed recently, but shutting down the loran system and hanging the future of ATC solely on satnav goes against the basic aeronautical tenets of backup, alternative load paths, redundancy and failsafe structure. Killing loran, we are told, will save our government about $35 million, no more than a decent bonus for one Wall Streeter. If, as loran proponents suggest, GPS is vulnerable to jamming, satnav should not be the sole structure for aerial navigation and the safe return of airplanes to runways in filthy weather. Europe continues to see eLoran as a necessary and viable backup. The sums of money necessary to preserve the U.S. loran system are chump change in the context of NextGen expenditures, and the U.S. tomorrow could well regret succumbing to misdirected penny wisdom today.
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© 2009 Aviation International News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

FAA Should Use Its ‘Nuclear Option’ To Save America’s Airports

2010-01-26T09:32:36-05:00

Right now, two towns on opposite sides of the U.S. are fighting to restrict business jet access at their local airports. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, Venice Airport is under siege; on the West Coast, it’s Santa Monica (Calif.) Airport that’s on the defensive. Although the two towns are going about their efforts differently, each has its airport in its sights and has already started shooting.

The town of Venice has steadfastly refused to allow the FBO on the field–Venice Jet Center–to build more hangars, fearing these would attract more jet traffic. And despite the FAA repeatedly decreeing that Venice allow the hangars, the city has rebuffed the FAA’s authority and spent armloads of taxpayer money in lawyer fees to fight the agency’s ruling.

But that’s not the only action the town has taken against the airport. The Venice City Council is trying to get the field–which was built in the 1940s as a U.S. Army Air Corps base–downgraded from a class C to a class B facility. This is another end-run to curtail jet traffic. The city has even taken the extra effort of rejecting aircraft traffic counts from a couple years ago for a more recent count–conducted at the depth of the recession and costing $350,000 of public money. Not surprisingly, this latter count showed less traffic, thus bolstering the city’s plan to shorten the runway so it doesn’t have to fix the safety zones for the existing runways.

Just three years ago, however, Venice Airport received $3.6 million in Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding to improve Runway 04/22, so the FAA earlier this month said it would not allow the airport to be downgraded. In the words of Bart Vernice, the assistant manager at the FAA’s Orlando FSDO, “The city is obligated, based on the [FAA] grant assurances, to maintain the utility of the airport.”

Three thousand miles west of Venice, Santa Monica has long sought to ban category C and D aircraft from operating at Santa Monica Airport. The tactic is different than that of Venice, but goal is the same: reduce jet traffic and eliminate the need to build proper runway safety zones for the existing runways.

Despite Santa Monica’s best efforts, the FAA and the courts have repeatedly prevented this ban from happening, also citing the grant assurances made between Santa Monica and the FAA. Still, the city continues to spend taxpayer money to fight the FAA, this time on an appeal of a ruling made in May last year. The fight drags on.

While there are plenty of other airports between Venice and Santa Monica that are under assault by various localities, the egregious actions of these two cities single them out from the rest. Both promised the FAA to maintain access to their respective airports when they accepted AIP funding. Both apparently have reneged on this pledge and are seeking to arbitrarily restrict use of their airport by whatever means they believe will stick. And both are relentless in their pursuit to impose their proposed changes, regardless the cost to local taxpayers. Most alarming, both Venice and Santa Monica are outright thumbing their noses at the FAA’s authority. If the FAA doesn’t take a hard-line stance against either or both, then other towns could be encouraged to follow their lead and make a real mess out of the nation’s airport system.

This is why one of these airports needs to be made an example of, and I don’t mean the wrist-slapping that the FAA is famous for. Instead, the agency should use its “nuclear option”–take back control of either Venice or Santa Monica Airport, or both, as allowed under the grant assurances–to show that it really means business and will take serious action to protect airports from assaults by city governments.

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© 2009 Aviation International News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

A modest proposal to boost general aviation

2009-11-03T11:47:07-05:00

Aviation has always been a tightly knit and closed society. We have our own language, ethical standards and barriers to entry so formidable it’s a wonder that people make the effort to become pilots, mechanics, controllers, flight attendants, airplane builders and so on.

The recent recession highlighted the fact that aviation of all stripes is extraordinarily vulnerable and that this niche industry shrunk considerably during the downturn. And recent efforts by governments all over the world are not going to help aviation climb out of its current hole anytime soon, but will lead to more shrinkage and a continued loss of jobs across all segments, including airlines, corporate flight departments, manufacturers, suppliers, charter operators, flight schools and even the FAA.

David Wartofsky has come up with a simple way to reverse the slide: eliminate the requirement for the third-class medical certificate for private pilots flying aircraft weighing 6,000 pounds or less.

Wartofsky knows about surviving the constant onslaughts against aviation; he bought an airport– Potomac Airfield–near Washington, D.C., before 9/11 and has done a fantastic job keeping the airport open in the face of severe restrictions and the government’s security vendetta against general aviation operations. (Note to the authorities: it was airliners that were used in the 9/11 attacks, not light airplanes that cannot by any stretch of scientific imagination do enough damage to make them worthwhile as terrorist vehicles.)

Wartofsky’s suggested rule change is to amend FAA’s definition of the third-class medical certificate (limited to private pilot, non-commercial, not-for-hire) to include the following: “a valid driver’s license is required to pilot any aircraft,” and “a third-class medical certificate is required for operation of aircraft heavier than 6,000 pounds max gross weight.”

In his proposal to U.S. Department of Transportation secretary Ray LaHood, Wartofsky points out that this would help clear up unnecessary regulations. And he adds, “FAA’s current medical requirements for operating a small private aircraft are comparable to DOT’s requirements for commercially operating a 65,000-pound truck. Although clearly prudent for commercial flight operations and larger aircraft (whose demands on the operator are significantly higher and which pose much greater risk to others than any automobile), imposing commercial medical standards onto pilots of small private family airplanes seems unnecessarily burdensome and needlessly restrictive. If a pilot is safe to drive an automobile, [he or she is] probably safe to fly a small airplane. When legitimate medical reasons force a pilot to stop driving, [he] will lose [his] driver’s license and for the same legitimate reasons will be stopped from flying.”

Too often, the government works hard to erect dubiously beneficial obstacles to participation in a given activity, like upcoming aviation security regulations and environmental restrictions. The third-class medical certificate is one obstacle that keeps many people from spending money on aviation, and its elimination would result in an immediate boost for flight schools, aircraft manufacturers, FBOs and even the FAA, which would have more constituents to oversee. Long term, the effects of lowering the barrier to entry for new pilots would have an enormously beneficial effect on aviation, because we know that the more people enter at the bottom of the aviation food chain, the more pilots are created, the more mechanics are needed, the more airplanes get built, the more airlines don’t have to worry about new supplies of future pilots and dying airports will see an influx of new business.

FAA administrator Randy Babbitt has commented on this subject, because he was asked this very question at the “Meet the Administrator” session at EAA AirVenture in July. (Full disclosure: I asked the question.) His response was that it was too much of a safety issue to consider. He is wrong. Every single case of a pilot becoming incapacitated or dying and someone else having to take over the controls has involved a pilot with a current and valid medical certificate. There is no evidence that eliminating the third-class medical certificate would result in any more pilots dying in the air due to medical issues. The fact that glider pilots are not required to have medicals supports this conclusion, as glider pilots do not die in the air at a greater rate than their medically “certified” power-plane brother and sister pilots.

Anyone can propose a new FAA regulation, and Wartofsky has done so. The process takes a long time and a lot of effort and it goes nowhere unless there is a groundswell of comments to move it forward. Submit your comments to the FAA.
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© 2009 Aviation International News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Gulfstream's Growing Family

2009-10-15T17:53:08-04:00

Gulfstream and Israel Aerospace Industries on October 6 rolled out the new Gulfstream G250 at IAI’s facility on Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, an event I was fortunate to attend. The G250 has its roots in the G200, which was formerly the Galaxy. Gulfstream acquired the Galaxy and Astra SPx type certificates from IAI/Galaxy Aerospace in 2001, with the objective of expanding Gulfstream’s product line by adding these midsize jets. The Savannah, Ga.-based OEM then took over completions, painting, marketing and eventually product support of the Galaxy and Astra airplanes, and soon rebranded them the G100 and G200, respectively. IAI remained the manufacturer of the jets, and continues as the OEM for the G150 and G250 models. The G150 replaced the G100 and the G250–when it goes into production–will replace the G200.

While watching the G250’s rollout in Tel Aviv–the airplane actually taxied under its own power for the event–I recalled Gulfstream’s launch of its big rebranding effort, which it announced at the NBAA Convention in Orlando in 2002. I remembered Bill Boisture, then Gulfstream CEO, telling a large group of customers, suppliers, company employees and media assembled at the Marriott World Center Hotel that Gulfstream’s product line would increase from four in-production models (the G100, G200, GIV-SP and GV) to what he said would soon be seven models: the G100; the G150 (announced at the same event); the G200; the G300 (a shorter range version of the former GIV-SP); the G400 (a longer range version of the former GIV-SP); the G500 (a shorter range version of the GV-SP, which was the in-development, next iteration of the GV); and the G550 (a longer range version of the GV-SP).

And there was room to grow in this newly branded product line. Gulfstream said at the time that the G450 designation was reserved for the still-under-wraps GIV-X (or –Next), though it did not then discuss the G350.

Before that year’s convention, Gulfstream offered me the opportunity to interview Boisture about the rebranding plan on a GV flight from Teterboro, N.J., to Savannah. We were the only passengers. After we’d finished the interview, Boisture, who is now CEO of Hawker Beeechcraft, asked me what I honestly thought about the plan. I told him I thought it was confusing. I speculated that not only would longtime customers have a hard time calling the GIV-SP, GV and GV-SP the G300, G400, G500 or G550–I had yet to understand the distinctions–but I also thought they would, as I did, have a hard time understanding how the GIV-SP could morph into the G300 and G400, and later the G450. The fact that the large-cabin Gulfstreams were all grandfathered on the GII type certificate made this all seem to me like smoke-and-mirrors marketing.

Well, I got over it. Seven years later I’ve grown to like the G-hundred designations, and I think so have most others in the industry. Now the G100-to-G650 designations seem as logical to me as the GI-to-GV designations. And waiting in the wings are at least two more new-series models that Gulfstream is not yet talking publicly about.

Perhaps fittingly, both the G250 and G650 are heading for new–not grandfathered–type certificates. So within three years time (the G250 in 2011 and G650 in 2012), Gulfstream will be able to say it doubled from two to four (including its first business airplane, the twin-turboprop GI) the number of original type certificates it has brought to fruition.
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© 2009 Aviation International News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.