That’s exactly what I thought and was going to post until I got to that part of yours. Haha, it’s a real thing!
I would never have guessed that either, and they probably didn’t think to consult the abnormal landing performance charts for gear-up landing distance required- oh wait…
When I had to land gear up the airplane stopped in less than 1/4 of its normal landing distance, with the occupants hanging in their shoulder harnesses the whole time. Aluminum on concrete made a very decent braking medium in my case. (No fault of my own, with the failure mode there was zero way to get it down and locked, despite two hours of trying.)
Won’t watch. But the blond “watch me fly” thing has been a mild irritant for years. If she survived the crash, I hope she’s ok.
EDIT: Still didn’t watch. But she’s not the “blond” I was thinking of. If that sounds sexist I can only say that it is the opposite. Women have been pioneers in aviation since 1920. It is maybe the first major technical skill where women were so prominent so early. But youtube has allowed a certain “type” to gain fame and wealth just for matching the type—flying was far secondary. In this case though, her MO was a shared love of flying with her dad. RIP to both.
Very tragic. Obviously, it is too early to get a definitive conclusion, but his analysis seems logical. Bottom line, if you find your autopilot is doing something unexpected, the disconnect button is your friend. It doesn’t matter if it is a malfunction or simply user error, just get rid of it immediately, fly the airplane and figure out what happened later.
Human-system interaction, again…
HDG and ALT is all I would ever use on that autopilot. Without electrical trim and autothrottle, the other modes would just distract me.
Fly it manually to the altitude and speed that you want, trim it out and then engage the autopilot. If you want to make changes, disengage the AP and repeat.
The AP is supposed to offload the pilot, not add to the workload.
Agreed. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be how it always works… how many times do we see one pilot flying and the other heads down in the box trying fix the “what’s it doing now?” problem, haha!
Me too. Not in any misogynistic way. Just the flying takes a back seat to the show of camera angles and pulling planes out of hangers whilst showing lots of skin. I genuinely find it mildly irritating. But that’s everything these days.
On one of the hummer forums i visit (but dont participate in) there is 45-50 yr old lady using hers every day. Mad adventures in the deserts and sleeps in it and does every single bit of spannering herself. She is amazing and its awesome. There is also a 20 something that has one that her boyfriend puts big wheels on and she tools around town and breaks it constantly through idiocy.
Guess who gets ignored all the time because shes not as pretty.
I used to belong to an Amiga forum a few years back. One day a member posted about her visit to an Amiga convention in Australia and she included some photographs. She was a pretty young lady and for the convention was dressed in some skin-tight camouflaged fancy dress thing.
The next day I found several pages worth of posts by the male members “replying” to her post, not a single one of which was about the convention or the Amiga and all of which were very obviously practically drooling over their keyboards.
I’ve watched a few of his videos and while I’m amazed by the type of flying they do, I’m constantly cringing at the apparent level of risk they accept every day. It’s jaw-dropping to me, from my perspective of a decade flying business jets into mostly nice airports, and I can’t help but wonder how long they will go without having an accident, and what his life expectancy is.
He’s obviously a very skilled pilot, flying very capable equipment, but man there is a lot to go wrong there. It looks like any significant windshear would be certain death, and makes me glad I’m not doing that. I hope he gets out of it before we read about him.
My other thought is: are roofing materials really of such a time-critical nature that 1600lbs of them need to be flown in on a Kodiak? I’d understand if it was medical supplies or something, but roofing materials can’t be delivered by boat and hiked in?
ETA: I noticed something facinating that I’ve never seen before. I was wondering what type of addon-equipment required the control panel on top of the glareshield, it reminded me of dispensing controllers on a cropduster. It’s actually an electronic checklist thingy:
It’s interesting… Checklists are a good thing, and I always used them when flying single pilot (old-school paper checklists), and in a crew environment (now using the aircraft’s built-in electronic checklist).
That said, the other half of my brain says bringing a physical ‘box’ and mounting it on the glareshield makes it seem like a crutch, and might indicate someone spends so much time addressing the camera that it’s hard to keep track of what needs to be done. It adds another step, and by offloading the cognitive ‘keep track of this’ from a brain to a piece of hardware, it creates another potential for error.
It’s interesting to see how some pilots like the built in checklists and others don’t. The Challenger 650 has built in checklists as well as Jeppesen terminal charts, but I never use them. I much prefer a paper checklist and charts on an iPad (ForeFlight), which leaves the MFD 2 available for the large moving map.
I would kill for a verbal checkoff feature on the Robinson. Holding a checklist while also holding the collective and cyclic (with hand or knees) AND managing all that without skipping a line is awkward at best. If I could just say “check line 13” and see the appropriate box filled on my ipad would be way safer. If you have a free hand, the “clicker” solution in the video is fine. I imagine that the reason for it is that many bush pilots fly multiple types and also deal with pax, cargo, not to mention wheels, skis and floats. A simple tool that helps you make sure you hit the killer items without floating into a log while squinting at a faded checklist is pretty clever.
I’d never used an electronic checklist before typing on the 560XL, and would have said the same thing: paper checklists all the way. I used to really like the Cessna/Textron checklist for the 525’s, they seemed really well done and easy to navigate. Mostly preferred iPad plates as well, although I usually had the chart pulled up on one of the displays during an approach.
When my company acquired the new jet, it had Primus 1000 (no electronic charts, back to the stone age! ) and an electronic checklist, which we used because the paper checklist had us checking everything 3x, and it was easy to lose ones place (considering the new equipment and pilots new to the jet). The electronic checklist has you pressing a button to check/uncheck individual items, so keeping place is easy. It also hit me how great it was that I could look over and see exactly where the PNF was on the checklist, and vise versa: better CRM.
When we got the G5000 flightdeck, it had the option to incorporate an electronic checklist, so I went ahead and submitted an electronic version of the manufacturer’s checklist to our FSDO for acceptance, and now we use that exclusively. Several other pilots resisted at first until they saw how easy it was to use, I can’t think of any of our group that would willingly go back now. Everybody likes what they like, nothing wrong with either, so I guess we’re lucky that it’s worked out so well for us.
You can kinda see it on the right PFD. I took this picture when we had an AOA failure, for maintenance to reference, I can’t find a better picture handy at the moment. You’re right that it does take away one moving map (can be pulled up on any of the four panes, but normally right seat/PNF), but in our case we’ve still got four others visible, and if we split the middle it could potentially be five. Normally on approach or during an RNAV arrival we’ll have the plate pulled up on the right half of the middle screen for easy reference. Nowadays pretty much the only time I pull my iPad out is prior to taxi when I finalize the W&B Manifest and transmit it to company. I used to use it for the TOLD calculations too, but we just got the TOLD upgrade so that the box comes up with V-speeds and performance numbers too.
The G5000 has the ability to use a CAS-linked Abnormal/Emergency checklist, so when a yellow/red CAS message pops up, it would automagically pull up the appropriate branch of the checklist tree. Unfortunately it’s not approved for our aircraft/Part 135 ops, so we still have the manufacturer checklists for Emer/Abnormal. The good news is Textron publishes a very nice electronic (PDF) checklist for iPad use, with linked TOC, clickable tabs and clickable annunciations so you can find the right checklist in just a few seconds. We still carry the paper ones in the (nearly empty) chart cases, but never use them.
Fair enough, well said.
ETA: Y’know, after typing all that and reflecting a bit more, we basically have the same thing with our electronic checklist. It’s a clicking this item off as “done” device too, just the same as his. There’s really no difference except his being a physical piece of hardware velcroed onto the glareshield. If that’s literally his checklist, then cool.
I wanna say that Foreflight has that ability, at least I think it does. I’ve never used it, but it has some kind of checklist feature that I think has voice recognition, or maybe reads it to you.
) and an electronic checklist, which we used because the paper checklist had us checking everything 3x, and it was easy to lose ones place (considering the new equipment and pilots new to the jet). The electronic checklist has you pressing a button to check/uncheck individual items, so keeping place is easy. It also hit me how great it was that I could look over and see exactly where the PNF was on the checklist, and vise versa: better CRM.
