Page 4 - Volume 18 Number 10

2 • TWIN & TURBINEOCTOBER 2014editor’sbriefing“One ship sails East, and another West, by the self-same winds that blow. ‘Tis the set of the sails, and not the gales, that tells the way we go.” This bit of profundity was written almost 100 years ago by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and it’s just as inspiring today as then. You can see a problem, or an opportunity, depending on the attitude with which you approachthe situation.A flying friend of mine who has lost his hair to chemotherapy has taken the attitude “I don’t have to worry about getting it cut or how to comb it”, lightheartedly seeing the advantage in his adversity. He’s not about to let cancer take the wind out of his sails. Mind you, I don’t like fighting a headwind or having destination weather fall below minimums, but I know responding to challenge is part of the game. It’s all in how you look at it.This discussion about attitudes leads us around to basic aviation. When I first introduced students to the three-foot-wide attitude indicator above the panel--called the windshield--I always had to stress “when I refer to adjusting ATTITUDE, I’m not talking about your attitude. I’m talking about the airplane’s relationship to that horizon out there.” In everything we go to do with the aircraft, attitude plays a basic role. Get it wrong, and performance lags, goals aren’t met, and we’re struggling to keep up with an airplane that’s gotten away from us.Colonel Joseph B. Duckworth, an experienced airline pilot who saved a lot of lives during World War II by developing standardized full-panel instrument flying technique, rather thanthe “needle-ball-airspeed” method used before, wrote the book on “Attitude Instrument Flying”. He knew that relying on human senses was not sufficient to control an aircraft in the clouds, and scanning the whole instrument panel to establish and hold attitude was vital. Young pilots were dying equally as much from weather mishaps as they were from combat losses; Duckworth’s system changed that.In today’s age of twelve-inch PFD’s that portray not just attitude but scenery, charts and track information, we may not think about controlling attitude, but we must never lose sight of the basic pitch-and-roll that makes everything work. The famous heavy-jet accidents that resulted from frozen pitot tubes could have been prevented, by understanding that the bogus airspeed indications couldn’t possibly correlate to the attitude being flown. When all else fails, adjust your attitude.In This Issue:Piper’s turboprop PA-31T Cheyenne was only in production for about a decade, but it remains a good value for fast, dependable business transportation. For October, we’re profiling Lyddon Aero Center’s use of the speedy Piper in its charter operations, and we spotlight the good service provided by the family-run FBO.We couldn’t resist sharing Gary “Waldo” Peppers’ account of “Leaving L.A.” in an F-15A Eagle, which is about as awesome to witness as it is to experience. Kevin Dingman gives an excellent comparison of the airline-vs-G/A travel experience, Tom Turner warns about the pitfalls of loss-of-control during a missed approach or go-around, and David Miller tells about taking the long way around to AirVenture Oshkosh.Hope you enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed puttingThe Way To Goit together!LeRoy Cook. Editor