By Rod Douglas 

Remember affordable safety? One of those fantastic truths that simply didn’t stand up to the harsh reality of political life. There is nothing truer than affordable safety, but it didn’t play well on the front pages of the national papers and it was used incredibly well by Dick Smith’s enemies within the bureaucracy to completely undermine the package of reform that was set to reinvigorate aviation within Australia.

Well that was the ‘90’s and the world has changed in oh so many ways.

Wander out to any airport and have a look around the airport. What’s changed? The obvious answer would be, not a lot, at least on the outside. The aircraft look fundamentally the same. Many of them are getting a bit older, but then there’s a smattering new aircraft that have integrated new materials, new thinking and new ideas that are also starting to be well represented on the fleet. Lots more helicopters, an ever increasing fleet of bizjets and many more single engine turbines share the tarmac with the still ageing piston fleet.

So the question is just how willing is Australia to embrace the changing technologies of safety in aviation? Australia is an interesting culture when you explore curves relating to the adoption of innovation. Australians are great inventors and often lead the charge in the early adopter curve. Then something weird happens after the initial spurt of early adoption and often there seems to be a deep lag in moving the conservative masses forward. It’s a perplexing challenge. It doesn’t just challenge aviation, however; you see it everywhere when it comes to technological adoption.

Look at the national broadband debacle. The adoption curve for Australians to the internet was amazing. When it comes to the big spend on the big infrastructure that needs to follow, it doesn’t happen. There are third world countries that are rolling out more advance wireless solutions than the best provided in this country and the Mexican standoff of the National Broadband Company with Telstra is simply a major failure in leadership.

So what’s really changed in the aviation world when it comes to safety?

And the answer is not much if you’re talking airframes and power plants.

The airframes still look the same and the majority of aircraft being built today were certified before the great aviation canyon of the ‘80s product liability debacle. In that space, new aircraft are emerging simply with better refined packages. The fuel injection systems that are de rigueur on any of the high performance pistons that are being built today were from times gone past, and the FADEC systems finding their way onto many donks emerged, not in aviation, but in the drive for fuel efficiency in cars. Turbo chargers have for the most part been replaced by turbo normalized engines and are as easy to manage as the old reliable normally aspirated donks that good old conservative Australian LAMEs love with a passion.

Of course, we are seeing the emergence of composites. The first major composite program was such a disaster that Beechcraft withdrew the Starship program altogether after producing about 50 units. The 787 is years behind time. To contrast the challenges of composites we discover that the best selling high performance single engine aircraft today, the Cirrus SR22, is built of composite constructions and with the fleet putting three quarters of a million hours on every year around the world, the reliability is standing tall. A new design, emerging from the hot pit of the homebuilt world, it proved the point that real innovation rarely comes from the incumbents.

And they let their wheels hang out as well. That sounds like innovation in reverse!

Of course, if you want to go really fast then it’s old technology that will get you there in certified comfort, (if you call a Porsche comfortable then I’m sure you’ll be happy in a Mooney), with Al Mooney’s little sporty speedster being represented in the Mooney Acclaim S. The world’s fastest single engine piston with a speed of 242 knots delivered, it has long, long legs that reach all the way up to there for an incredible 1852 nm of endurance that will undoubtedly beat any healthy bladder. All from a derivative of the M20 which was first certified in 1955!

That thing that they said would never happen is now coming true. Yes, the single engine turbine has emerged as the leading turbine solution for the 6 to 8 seat cabin class egg beater. Even the trucks have got them with the Cessna Caravan replacing many of the old piston twin load haulers. The reality of course is that two engines were supposed to provide redundancy, but that only works if the pilot is up to scratch and the engine isn’t. Of course turbine reliability has continued to improve and the accident rate for single engine turbines is dramatically better than for piston twins and very nearly equivalent to that of those much more expensive to run turbine twins.

So if nothing much has changed outside the aircraft, what is changing within and how will it affect your level of personal safety?

Here’s my list of the seven technologies that will (and are) making your life dramatically safer. But first I must warn you that this safety, like good quality life insurance, will come at a cost. But then, in an abundant country where it’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to dig all the wealth out of the ground and where the flying conditions are nothing short of perfect, let’s splash out and spend a little for a much longer and happier life.

No.1 The Ballistic Parachute

One of the innovations that really bought Cirrus to the forefront of certified sales was the inclusion of a ballistic parachute system. Now it should be said that there is some debate about the safety of Cirrus aircraft, (read high performance, big donked, IFR platforms), compared to the slow and docile world of the post gap Cessna’s. No matter how you cut it, the technology for giving pilots a second chance has saved 35 lives from a vast range of emergencies and added a redundancy that is skill less… with the exception of having the mindfulness to know when to pull the handle.

Would I pull the handle? I’ve got upward of 300 hours in Cirrus’ of many varieties and I arm the handle every flight.

What would my decision criteria be? Catastrophic failure, medical emergency or IFR over tiger country. Otherwise it’s pretty clear that, whatever happens, the plane is going to fly just like every other plane and if the engine has just stopped and I’ve a perfectly good field below me I’m happy to take my chances at landing it. The bill for a deployment is upward of $150,000 and you have to do a fair bit of damage on landing to match that. In addition, an uncontrolled descent under the canopy will see you hit the ground at about 17 knots vertical (or 1,700 ft per minute) while a controlled glide will see you touch down at about 65 knots horizontal with a descent rate of 350 ft per minute.

The real advantage of the CAPS system is the inherent redundancy for hard IFR flying. Most people know that the accident rate for twin engine pistons is no better than that for single engine pistons, yet they have been the aircraft of choice for hard IFR missions. The CAPS system creates an alternate path for those who choose to use GA as a business tool. That doesn’t mean take more risks. Just take the risks fully informed.

No.2 Spatial Awareness

I’ll never forget the first time I climbed into an aircraft with a Loran installed. I had no idea what a Loran was, and it was a double treat to climb aboard a brand new Cheyenne III at Palomar and discover that this new turbine rocket had this neat little box which meant that if we could just get the clearances we needed  we could go direct from one place to another. I’d flown RNAV’s before but for the amount of mental gymnastics required it hardly seemed worthwhile.

Well, I heard at the end of last year that they’d finally shut down the terrestrial Loran stations as the world was finally filled with GPS navigators. A nautical technology that was adapted in the US for aviation use and nowhere else, it taught a generation of pilots to value ‘direct to’.

I also vividly remember my first cross country when, after what seemed like an eternity, and was probably only half an hour of checking every road and land mark off the map, my instructor took the map away and told me to enjoy flying the plane for a while. Then he gave it back. Do you think I had any clue where I was? The harder I looked the more possibilities there were.  When I finally gave up I well and truly had captured the point he was making. If you’re flying by dead reckoning alone, don’t ever lose track of where you are on the map, cause you may never find yourself again.

Those days are long gone now. I can’t remember the last time I flew an aircraft without a GPS. Some great, some not so great, but all capable of telling me where above the earth I was at any particular moment. 

How does it help safety? Lots of options for this one. The first is the simple fact that when you’re flying an aircraft you’re always more relaxed if you know where you are. Relaxed (and alert pilots) are better pilots. It makes position reporting much more accurate and takes the confusion out of radio calls. It ensures that those silly little mistakes that sometimes add up to finding yourself at the wrong airport on the wrong frequency and sometimes lined up on the wrong runway are much less likely to occur.

You can spend more money or less money on a GPS. Many pilots I know have redundant GPS’ installed in their aircraft and then carry a hand held just in case, in the same way as we all used to carry a hand held transceiver. Accurate spatial awareness has gone from being the mark of a good airman to a requirement to be able to fly safely.

No. 3 TAWS and Synthetic Vision.

In the ‘70s Jaws scared a generation away from the beaches. Around the same time the FAA decided that it was time to develop a technology to scare pilots away from one of the major causes of fatal accidents in both the general aviation and airline world – CFIT or controlled flight into terrain.

While the logic behind CFIT is simple – if a pilot knows where she is (see spatial awareness) and knows what altitude she’s at, as well as the lowest safe altitude for her sector then a CFIT incident can’t happen – yet they still do. Or at least they did until the world’s aviation legislators started to impose the TAWS standard technology upon the airline community. It’s now a requirement for all turbine powered aircraft with more than 6 passenger seats to have a TAWS compliant technology aboard.

To add to the confusion TAWS is a catch all for a basket of technologies to avoid CFIT. In general these technologies are either GPWS (ground proximity warning systems) or EGPWS (enhanced ground proximity systems). The technology is excellent with there being no CFIT accidents in the last year for any aircraft using second generation EGPWS.

Go one step further and you discover that there are Class A, B and C TAWS systems available. For your GA aircraft you need only really worry about Class C which is a category of devices that very often combines the standards of both Class A and B, but delivers it with a set of standards that make it affordable for GA.

TAWS systems provide you with both visual and aural warnings should you stray into a state which is predicted to result in your trajectory turning you into a smoking crater. The first time you discover the clinical voice commanding you to ‘pull up, pull up, pull up’ you might be wondering what exactly you’re supposed to be pulling up. The nose is always the answer and this is another technology that lays upon us all a new level of safety.

If you’re lucky enough to have a full glass cockpit then the integration of TAWS with SVS (synthetic vision system) is an enormous enhancement to safety. Not only does it give you absolute clarity on the actions required in a CFIT situation but it also provides a large format synthetic horizon to support instrument flight and give absolute clarity of situational awareness.

This amazing technology will just continue to develop as more and more databases integrate the satellite laser mapping of the world wide topography. Every moment of doubt that is removed from a pilot’s mind is a step closer to ultimate safety when flying.

No.4  TCAS

It would take but a moment for anyone from outside aviation to discover that our particular form of delight (flying) was intensely influenced by the military, just by looking at the ludicrous amount of jargon and abbreviations that are used to describe perfectly obvious things.

TCAS is short for ‘don’t run into other aircraft’. Hang on that doesn’t look right. Let’s try again. TCAS is ‘traffic alert and collision avoidance system’.  As either of these definitions would indicate the goal of a TCAS is to provide you, the fallible pilot, with a clear set of instructions as to where to look for the aircraft that you’ve missed in the sky, and its relative altitude. When two aircraft are fitted with TCAS II systems, the systems will negotiate collision avoidance instructions between them.

TCAS, like the other technologies mentioned before have all been developed as the result of the clinical analysis of why accidents happen and the desire to develop technologies that deal with the unforgiving nature of flight. It’s been assessed that airline flight is 22 times safer than driving on the roads. One of the reasons for this is that consequence of failure in the air is often fatal. The more consequential the outcome, the greater the value in investing in technology to reduce the risk. In the case of TCAS it’s been suggested that it improves the safety to aircraft using the system by a function of 3 to 5 times.

As with the other acronyms TCAS comes in varieties. The variety that we generally experience in GA is TCAS I. It’s that cool ‘traffic, traffic’ warning that tells you there is traffic, with a requirement to discover from whatever display you’re using the location of the traffic and then to decide what to do about it.

TCAS II is the current standard installed in most airliners and gives a greater range of options which are coordinated by the systems in each aircraft to ensure that each aircraft has a different instruction occurring. The commands start with ‘climb, climb’ or ‘descend, descend’ and then move on to monitor vertical speed changes and advisories as to whether your vertical speed change requires amendment.

TCAS III takes the technology one step further and includes horizontal as well as vertical guidance.

Naturally all these options, as well as the less costly and simpler PCAS (passive collision avoidance system), need all the aircraft involved to have a mode ’C’ or mode ‘S’ transponder fitted and operating to receive the broadcast information and to be able to decode that information to present the information and  determine instructions.

No.5 ADS-B

Now here is a controversial choice. ADS-B is the holy grail of the aviation infrastructure providers worldwide as it will dramatically reduce their cost base by allowing them to abandon the incredibly expensive radar systems that power all air traffic control systems and will shift the capital expenditure from the provider to the user.

So how do we feel about that, aircraft owners?

The answer is not very keen. Especially as for the system to work properly you need all the aircraft within the system to be appropriately fitted and the estimated costs is about $25,000 per aircraft!

So what is this next acronym and why am I including it here? Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast is the next generation of efficient and effective control of the airspace and brings a new level of accuracy to the information that will be provided to air traffic controllers. Using ADS-B each aircraft will provide a significant amount of information from onboard navigation systems using GPS standards on location (geographic, altitude, speed) and change of state (climbing, descending, turning) to allow for significantly reduced separation and other operational improvements that will increase the capacity of  the airspace.

This technology actually has an amazing array of layers that allow an extraordinary amount of data to be both pulled from and pushed to the aircraft involved. The standards are in place for an integrated approach to ADS-B roll out using current primary and secondary radar to provide for data on unidentified aircraft. It also allows for operation information including Notams, weather (both text and graphic), ATIS and potentially even clearances to be provided direct into the cockpit.

So why is this one controversial? Well whether aircraft owners like it or not the government has not only determined that they are moving our airspace into an ADS-B environment, they have already rolled out 57 ground stations at 28 locations and are the first country in the world to have complete ADS-B coverage for the whole continent. The only real question is when they will tell us just how much it’s going to cost us to keep our privilege of flight alive.

No.6 406 MHz ELT’s

In the event of a traumatic event the first 24 hours are called the ‘golden day’. That’s because if the people who are affected are found and treated within 24 hours there chance of survival is dramatically higher.

 In the good old days (pre 1st February 2009), all aircraft were fitted with ELT (emergency locator transmitter) that used 121.5 MHz and were monitored by the Cospas-Sarsat, the international satellite system for Search & Rescue (SAR). This system used a trilateration (intersection of three spherical surfaces) to determine the location of the signal (and we thought we had it hard when trying to calculate great circle distances). This system gave accuracy to about a 20 km by 20 km grid and took 4 – 6 hours based on the passage of satellites. Many of Australia’s aircraft still have 121.5 MHz beacons as the lead time to get the fleet reequipped meant that many were not complete at the time of change over.

So what’s the real benefit of changing to 406 MHz ELT’s? Well apart for the fact that 121.5 MHz will simply not be satellite monitored in the future, the 406 MHz digital standard allows for a significantly wider data transmission, including GPS generated data, which means that the signals can be immediately identified to a specific beacon at a specific location. It effectively reduces the ‘search and rescue’ requirement down to a ‘get to and rescue’ opportunity with GPS equipped units giving location accurate to 100m, and 5 km for unregistered beacons without GPS. All this occurs within 10 minutes of activation of the beacon.

Now I’m not keen to ever have to activate a beacon, but should I ever have to I’m very keen to ensure that all the help that can be mustered is mustered and delivered to me as quickly as possible.

Better still; using a 496 MHz registered beacon supports our friends at CENSAR. For them 7 out of 10 false alarms can be resolved with a phone call to the registered owner of the beacon, therefore significantly reducing the cost of dealing with false alarms.

No.7 Specific Type Training for whatever Aircraft you Fly

One of the most delightful flights I can ever remember was the delivery of a Riley Rocket P210 to a very well know American aviator in Texas in about 1990. We flew the beautifully prepared Rocket down from San Diego to San Antonio, which was a fantastic flight, and exchanged the aircraft for his trade in, which was a very nice Mitsubishi MU2 Marquise.  

Now I only knew the MU2 by reputation and it wasn’t a good reputation. The aircraft was known for its amazing performance but, to be blunt, it killed a lot of people. Mike DeSalvo, my erstwhile aviation mentor had joined me for the flight and I was bloody glad to have him there.

Reputation is an interesting thing. Often it has little to do with the truth and more to do with perception than anything else. Before we jumped in the aircraft, which Mike had already told me I’d be flying back, he took me for a tour of the aircraft. It was unusual. Mike had briefed me on many aircraft that we’d flown together. The briefing typically focused on the specific systems of the aircraft, performance calculations and handling to ensure that I flew it well.

In this case the approach was very different. The first thing that he did was to get a step ladder out and put me up it to look at the wings. The first thing that I noticed was how small they were. He put out the flaps and I was amazed by just how much area and lift the complex design of the full span double slotted fowler flaps added to the wing and its aerodynamic complexity. Next he rolled the control column and to my amazement I discovered that instead of ailerons the MU2 had spoilers. After a full walk around with a detailed discussion of the systems for the aircraft, we headed back into the FBO. Mike took me into the briefing room. We did the numbers on the trip and they were impressive. Close on 300 knots with a range of 1,400 nm.

Before Mike let me in the cockpit I got a major grilling on what I thought might be the implications of the unusual wing plan form and the use of spoilers. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this aircraft was going to be like no other aircraft that I’d flown before, particularly if we lost an engine and needed to operate in an asymmetrical configuration.

Specifically, any use of the spoilers to ‘roll’ into the dead engine was going to significantly increase drag and if I decided to clean up the airframe on climb on one engine I’d dramatically reduce the lift produced, probably inducing a high speed stall. So I’d have to fly differently. Any compensation for the rolling motion of asymmetric thrust would need to be delivered through the rudder and I’d have to sacrifice climb for airspeed to ensure a safe margin for handling while maintaining the lift of the flaps. Very different, in fact counter intuitive over what I’d been trained to do in every other twin and much more like flying a jet.

I flew about 10 hours on that MU2. It was one of the nicest flying aircraft I’ve flown. The spoilers give fantastic roll control especially at low speed, and the small wing meant that the high wing loading delivered a great ride specifically in turbulence. Landings were a delight with the low approach speed ensuring everyone was a greaser and life was good.

Yet in one 18 month period there were 11 accidents and 12 fatalities. So what’s the safety message here?

I got lucky. I got taught the differences between the MU2 and my other twin steeds. I also didn’t have an engine out emergency. Not as lucky as all those pilots who now fly the MU2 and are treated to regular recurrent training in the aircraft under the SFAR (Special Federal Air Regulation) that requires a type specific initial and recurrent training, including the requirement for currency to be maintained on this particular type.

In the past 12 months the MU2 has moved from having a horrible safety record to having the best safety record of any turbo prop for the period.

And my message? Whatever you fly, train to fly that specific aircraft superbly.

Back in 2003 there were 2 fatal accidents within 5 days in Cirrus aircraft. The company immediately instigated specific training programs for new owners. The accident rate fell. Robinson Helicopters did the same after a similar crop of accidents. The accident rate fell.

Training is the recurrent opportunity to improve safety and stay sharp in an environment where one simple mistake, or one poorly timed health issue, has the possibility of ending your life. Spend your money to lengthen your life.

And so, if I had the option of spending some of my hard earned dollars for a little more life I’d be out looking at the many options that are now available for fully integrated glass cockpit systems that allow me to bring all the technologies we’ve explored together into a package that removed doubt, lifted my competence and had me ready to fly many more years safely in this beautiful country that just cries out for more committed aviators.

Safety is a constant investment. When you don’t think you need to invest more is exactly the time your most at risk. Fly safe, fly free. Never do it on the cheap. Value yourself like you matter.

Aviation is the most thrilling and fun world you can occupy. Occupy it well for all of us.

ADS-B is coming with more airspace choices and better safety. Who should pay and why? Are you spending to update your avionics? Why? Why not? Let us know what you think?  Email me at rod@aviatormag.com.au