As 2024 draws to a close, it is an excellent time to reflect on the lessons the year taught us about aviation, aircraft ownership, and the art of airmanship. Here are a few thoughts from my year:
Putting your aircraft through a repainting process is an exercise in patience. Ask me how I know. There are three truths when repainting your aircraft: 1) the paint schedule is always optimistic; 2) it won’t be perfect, especially the first time you see it; 3) a successful outcome requires good communication between you, the manager, and the technicians doing the work.
After a couple of years of waiting for an opening at a reputable paint facility, we dropped our plane off for repaint earlier this fall. Lead times at the top paint shops in the country are still long, thanks to shortages of skilled labor, increased post-recovery demand, and limited paint facilities. Once the process started, our facility did a good job with progress photos and asking questions to clarify our vision for the paint scheme. Once the plane was “ready,” we showed up fully expecting not to take it home that day. Sure enough, there were several noticeable defects that the paint shop acknowledged needed fixing. Talking to the technicians directly helped tremendously in getting the plane to the quality level we expected.
Overall, no regrets. There’s nothing more satisfying than opening the hangar door and seeing that shiny, new paint and racy paint scheme.
Technology tools to enhance safety keep evolving. For example, ForeFlight continues to get better and better. This year alone, the company introduced several useful enhancements, including enhanced wake turbulence alerts. This feature provides visual and audio alerts using ADS-B data to calculate and display real-time risks. I saw this action on a recent flight as I followed a large business jet into my home airport. As the jet descended through my altitude ahead of me, the alert provided detailed information regarding wake positions and the intersection point.
Other new ForeFlight features I’m loving this year:
Graphical Weight & Balance: A visual tool allows users to easily input and adjust passenger and payload details.
Support for Civil Twilight: ForeFlight now provides accurate solar data, including morning and evening civil twilight times, to help pilots log day and night hours for FAA compliance.
Runway Analysis Expansion: Support for additional aircraft, including models like the King Air 360HW, Cessna Citation, and Piper M700, broadens runway performance analysis options.
Profile View Enhancements: Added layers for headwind/tailwind and ground speed in Profile View provide detailed route planning insights.
Two heads are better than one. This is obvious, but never more so when your autopilot fails during an approach in IMC. My airplane is certified to be flown single-pilot, and at the hands of a competent, well-trained pilot, it’s perfectly safe to do so. But given the choice, why not have another competent brain in the right seat?
I was glad that was the case when the aforementioned autopilot inexplicably disengaged. I didn’t bother troubleshooting; I uneventfully hand-flew the approach like we’re trained to do. While it wasn’t an emergency, it was nice having my PNF partner handling the radios, eyes outside watching for the runway lights, verifying “gear down,” and backing me up on flight instruments. After flying together for 32 years, my husband and I have developed an effective CRM system with clearly delineated roles and tasks that we’ve fine-tuned during hundreds of post-flight debriefs. I won’t hesitate to take off single-pilot, but flying with my partner-pilot is twice as nice.
Always be humble – we are never as good as we think we are. Every flight gives us a chance to improve our competency and our knowledge. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn something new or perfect your cockpit flow. No flight is ever perfect; only perfect practice gives us a shot at getting close. Being humble means you are open to constructive criticism from yourself and others you fly with. Commit to being better, but never stop being humble.
Bad things can happen to the best of us. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but even some of the best-trained aviators in the world crash. This year, this hit close to home when a U.S. Navy EA-18 Growler (a variant of the F/A-18 Super Hornet) crashed during a routine training flight near Mt. Rainier in Washington state. My daughter is an active-duty Growler instructor pilot and knew the crew well. While the investigation is ongoing, what we know is that the pilot was an outstanding stick and a decorated aviator who flew multiple strikes into Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen. It was a sobering reminder that even with the most sophisticated aircraft and the best training in the world, things can go terribly wrong.
As pilots, we must do what is within our control: keep our skills razor-sharp, train often, respect the weather and the capabilities of our aircraft, and always have an out, which sometimes means staying on the ground.
The perfect aircraft doesn’t exist. But we can keep striving to make it so. If we’ve learned nothing else from SpaceX and its groundbreaking Starship and Falcon 9 missions, it is that breakthroughs are found through the relentless pursuit of well-focused goals. In an industry famous for its risk aversion and slow adoption of innovation, general aviation must continue to move forward to make flying safer, more efficient, and more accessible. Potentially unpopular opinion: let’s stop dragging our feet on the inevitable transition to unleaded avgas and embrace viable fuels, such as G100UL.
Happy holidays, and fly safe in 2025.
