by
Darryl Phillips
Don't you just HATE it when an AD arrives in the mail?
I've received two ADs in two days, and neither one has anything to do with my airplane. This must be the classic case of mixed emotions. I'm sure glad these ADs aren't going to cost me a fortune, but at the same time I'm unhappy that they're costing the taxpayers.
This is the story of just one of those ADs: Docket No. 95-ANE-67; Amendment 39-9460, AD 95-26-02.
Airworthiness Directives, ADs, are orders with the force of law. When issued, they become part of the Code of Federal Regulations, in this case 14 CFR 39. Up near the top, this one says "Action: Final rule; request for comments." (The Mad Hatter would have loved that line. Off with their heads.)
Do you remember the flap over the jet fuel getting into avgas tanks at Sacramento in the spring of 1994? That's nearly two years ago. Now an AD arrives, ordering aircraft owners to tear down their engines within the next TWO HOURS of flight time.
It reminds me of the kid who said that dinosaurs roamed the earth six million years ago last Thursday.
The curious thing about this particular AD is that the FAA already knows exactly which aircraft are involved. Based on sales receipts, they know which planes bought the contaminated fuel. There are 174 aircraft, from N1004V to N9864C. The whole list of N numbers is printed in the AD. The engine types are listed too, and every last one of them is a Lycoming!
I suppose somewhere out there in the universe an AD is floating around for Continentals, too.
One hundred seventy-four aircraft, right? Wrong! FAA now says it's 177 planes, and the aforementioned Zero Four Victor isn't one of them. The typist who created this work of federal law made mistakes, it seems, and so the AD was corrected and mailed out all over again. There were six planes either added, deleted, or with N numbers corrected.
So did FAA send the new AD to those six planes? No. Did the FAA send the new AD to the 174 - er - 177 planes? No. This eight page document was printed and mailed first class to the owner of every plane with a Lycoming engine! The mailing label on my copy clearly shows my N number, and it's not on the list. So why is the federal government wasting money like this?
How many planes are Lycoming powered, anyway?
I usually write during the late evening hours, and probably there isn't anybody home this late at Lycoming. So I called my resident source of information, A&P/IA son Don. (He occasionally wakes me up with dumb questions, so I relish the chance to get even.) "What percentage of the opposed engines are Lycomings, Don?" (Yeah, I've caught him off guard, all right.) "Half of them" he answers, "plus or minus a bunch."
We talked a bit more about Lyconentals and Conticomings. I wish I could repeat exactly what he said, but I can't because one or the other of those fine engine manufacturers would be sending their lawyers to talk with Mr. Sclair's lawyers, and we don't want that. Don said "Pops, if it weren't for -----------, my tools would rust!" (I'll leave it to each reader to insert the brand of his choice.)
So I still don't know how many aircraft are powered by Lycoming. But some sort of a guess is 80,000. That's a lot of needless printing and postage for the cash-strapped FAA. And 79,823 needless cases of heartburn for the recipients.
If FAA is really interested in pilot health, they shouldn't scare us like that.
One more thing about that AD. The first time around, the FAA typist had the Lycoming O-235-L2C listed as -12C. This isn't exactly a rare or unknown engine, it powers the Cessna 152 and the Tomahawk and others. Yet after all the time and effort and expense of correcting and reprinting the whole document, it still contains the same error.
Oh well, maybe FAA will print it all over again, again. It's like midnight basketball. It keeps them off the streets.
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The second order of business this month is about that century thing. When I recently wrote that we're four years and counting from the new century and the new millennium, a number of readers wrote to explain that the next century doesn't begin until 2001 in the same way the first century began with 1. Well, they have a point but I'm not going to give up that easily.
When I submitted the copy for that column, editor Kirk Gormley suggested changing all the "fours" to "fives". We exchanged references to various dictionaries, encyclopedia, et cetera. Eventually I cajoled Kirk into going along with four years.
I understand the math. But various kings and potentates have "adjusted" the calendar down thru the centuries. Probably some of them managed to destroy the evidence, but others are recorded in history. Several years may have been added or may have been taken away. It's those guys who fudged the arithmetic.
In the science of measurement, there is a principle that any resolution in excess of accuracy is useless. It's just noise. Applied to this case, there is evidence that the cumulative inaccuracy introduced by those potentates is greater than one year. So it's reasonable to include other factors to help decide when the new century begins.
The big celebration will be when the odometer ticks over from 1999 to 2000. That's when the fireworks and champagne corks will pop. Does it really make any sense today for us to worry that the first century was short a year, when we know that some other centuries were long or short according to the whim of the guy in power? (Or his wife's astrologer?) I'm going to celebrate 2000. You can wait a year if you want, but I'm not going to save any firecrackers!
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On Compuserve AvSIG, some of us got to talking about the big sky theory, and how a particular federal agency that regulates aviation seems to believe their own PR about the crowded sky.
Every year at Oshkosh in the FAA building there is a big screen TV display of the real-time IFR traffic aloft in the 48 states. The traffic is colored to depict destination or something like that, and each plane is shown as a swept wing airliner. The sky looks really busy.
One of the interesting aspects of that display is the size of the planes. When I grew up in Kansas, I was forced to memorize that Kansas is 208 by 411 miles in size. (Mrs. Glenn said I'd need that fact someday.) Those airliners have a wingspan one-third the height of Kansas. That's a 70 mile wingspan. Talk about jumbo jets! If the planes were shown in scale, they would be too small to see at all.
How much distortion does the FAA display introduce? Suppose we assume that IFR aircraft, on average, have a wingspan of 100 ft. There are many singles and light twins mixed in with the Boeings, so perhaps 100 ft wingspan is a reasonable average.
To figure the incredible exaggeration, take 70 miles (the wingspan shown on the screen) times 5280 feet in a mile (Kansas kids didn't learn about nautical miles) divided by the 100 foot span. This means the wingspan of each aircraft on that TV is 3700 times too long. Areawise, the exaggeration is 3700 squared, thus the FAA is making each plane appear 13,690,000 times larger than it really is!
That FAA display travels to other audiences throughout the year. No wonder people believe the sky is crowded.
The AvSIG discussion talked about controllers' displays and the size distortions involved. The air traffic controller gains his impression of how crowded the sky is by looking at the scope, in the same way we gain our understanding by looking out the windshield. So if ATC scopes exaggerate aircraft size, the controller's impression is distorted.
There are a lot of numbers depending on the scale of the particular display and so on. Best case, on the controller's scope each plane appears 70,000 times larger than it really is! Worst case is in the large oceanic sectors, where the little datablock that travels alongside each flight is more than half the size of Massachusetts. No wonder they want to keep planes so far apart.
The big sky versus the big lie. Or, as the Mad Hatter might have put it: Final rule; request for comments.