Page 39 - Volume 20 Number 7

one-time slap. How do we get there and do that? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall my friends: practice, practice, practice.
Entrepreneurial Gunslinger
“I could be president of Sikorsky for six months before they found me out, but the president would only have my job for six seconds before he’d kill himself.”
– Walter R. ‘Dick’ Faull, helicopter test pilot.
You do not just command the pilot seat; you are the owner of the seat. The airplane is Owner- Flown, the next descriptive term on the cover of T&T. It’s not a borrowed or rented machine and it’s not flown by a hired gun; you’re no pretender. Only in the movies can a novice be summoned from seat 28B or the board room, plop down in the left seat, don a headset, receive radio instructions from Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack, then fly an instrument approach to a survivable landing – inflatable autopilot assisted or not. As test pilot Dick Faull said, most would kill themselves in short order. Because of the complexity of the machine, its operation and the regulatory hurdles involved, the task of piloting and aircraft
ownership is no small undertaking. It’s your doing that put the airplane in the hangar and made it available at your beck-and-call; it’s you that is the entrepreneurial gunslinger. Ownership represents an ability and convenience easily minimalized if unfamiliar with the comparatively sacramental process of public transportation. Recent articles in this column describe some of the components in the ownership and operation of your high-performance airplane and how, in fact, the very complexity of the endeavor is one of the things that draws us to flying.
Classy Keys
“To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.”
– Otto Lilienthal
It was a magical time and they were all marvelous machines, but you’re no longer dangling below the high-wing of a trainer under the tutelage of an instructor. You’re not sitting atop a Hershey-bar wing droning along at 7,500 feet – new license in hand. And there’s no ballistic recovery chute to save you from fate or yourself. You’re likely not propelled by normally- aspirated, piston-produced horses
and you no longer have the luxury of a large fudge-factor from the engineers. Turbocharged recips or jet turbines are your power source. Your glide ratio is less, the air is dangerously cold and thin where you fly, fuel disappears by the hundreds of pounds and a mile is consumed in the time it took you to read this sentence. Your altitude is called a Flight Level and the strength of your engines is described by shaft horsepower or pounds of thrust. The decisions you make are influenced by speed, often measured in Mach, by weather measured in RVR’s, runways available by Mu readings and your fuel by time remaining in minutes. Expenses are not measured by dollars, but by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. The final descriptive words in the magazine’s title is Cabin- Class Aircraft. Not quite as exalted as ‘Galaxy Class’ like the Starship Enterprise, and while it’s gratifying to have a key in your pocket that says CAT, Jaguar, or Trinity Yachts, airplane keys that say Piper, Cessna, Beechcraft, Gulfstream, Citation, Lear, Falcon, Daher, Mitsubishi, Hawker, or Pilatus are in a rarified class of their own.
Born To Be a Pilot
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
– Ernest Hemingway
I wasn’t born a writer, or a pilot for that matter – I have to work at them both. Thank you for elevating the bar and making it seem as if you were born a great pilot, even though we all have to work at it. Thank you for not flying as if each flight should be a demonstration of the performance envelope and for enduring the ongoing education, training and expense needed to remain a good pilot. For doing it right and making the rest of us look good. For upholding the trust of friends, family and the public. For having the courage to divert or cancel when the pilot-hairs stand up
JULY 2016 TWIN & TURBINE • 37