How cool! Another air show at Catalina Island!  Check out www.catalinaairshow.com for details and some great pics of the 2014 event.

This is an interesting show because there is no admission charge. They rely completely on company sponsorship.  Arrive in your boat or plane, or take the water taxi to Avalon.  If you really want to get there quick, take a Helicopter from Long Beach!  Long Beach has several boat launch ramps and they charge only $12/day.

P51 Mustang flying over Avalon harbor

Grumman Albatross at Avalon Harbor

Now that Beechcraft, Cessna and Hawker are firmly part of the Textron Aviation family, Textron has a new logo, and a new motto; “Gaining altitude together”

In the 1920s, Cessna and Beach worked together as the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita, KS.  The third partner that time was Stearman.  10 years later, the companies split again.  It will be interesting to see how this new trio does under the Textron umbrella.

In 1999 a novel play was created dramatizing the last minutes of airplane flights which resulted in a crash.  This has now been re-imagined as a 3D movie.  I’m not sure why you would want 3D for this, as it’s not exactly a lush cinematic event, but perhaps it helps sell DVDs.  As a pilot myself, there is a particular fascination reviewing the events and things that were said in the cockpit prior to a disaster.  We like to hope that WE wouldn’t have made the key decisions which lead to a bad result, but in the heat of the moment, would we or not?

The movie is called “Charlie Victor Romeo” because CVT is the industry acronym for the famous “black box”, or “Cockpit Voice Recorder” – the source for the dialog re-enacted by the actors.

This has also been used as material for “Cockpit Resource Management” training which airline pilots must periodically undergo.  But even to a lay person who doesn’t necessarily understand all of the pilot jargon, it’s still a morbidly fascinating look at what happened and why.

This is now in the Netflix database, but it not available for streaming at the date of this writing.  The film is currently screening in New York and Los Angeles.

This is probably not a movie for everybody, but if you find it hard to look away from a train wreck, or car crash on the freeway, this might be right up your alley!

Here is an official trailer:

I have come to the conclusion the the FAA really doesn’t like aviation and is working on good ways to cripple it, mainly by making it even more expensive than it is today.  With rising fuel prices, maintenance prices, equipment prices, and instruction prices, we really don’t need the FAA “helping” in this way.

Their latest idea is to introduce a rule that pilots with over 40% “body mass index” would be subject to mandatory Sleep Apnea testing.  This testing is not cheap!  This would impact approximately 5,000 pilots.  If this is successful, it’s entirely likely that the scope would be expanded to include more pilots.

It’s all in the name of safety!  Or is it?  According to Aviation Week, The agency also cites National Transportation Safety Board data that shows 34 accidents, including 32 fatal accidents, involved pilots who had sleep apnea. However, sleep apnea was not listed as the cause of those accidents.

Interesting logic the FAA is using.  I’d be willing to wager that most (if not all) of the pilots cited above also had 5 fingers on their left hand.  It seems logical then that the FAA could reasonably propose “preventative surgery” to have one of those fingers removed, thus making the skies safer for all.  I’d also be willing to bet that a large percentage of those pilots drank coffee the very same day that they had their fatal accident.  Perhaps the FAA could ban coffee for pilots (no, wait, that would actually SAVE money, they wouldn’t do that).

So I just have to wonder… what problem are we solving here?  To randomly pick a medical condition which has not been proven to be a contributing factor to any fatal accidents seems irresponsible and foolish at best.  Why does the FAA want to burden pilots with yet another hefty expense just so that they can continue to utilize their hard-earned pilot’s license?  Perhaps my initial conclusion is correct: the FAA really doesn’t like aviation and would like it to go away.

Not only is the FAA proceeding with this questionable program, they are side-stepping rulemaking channels and are classing this as a “process enhancement” which does not require any of the formal rigor that new rulemaking requires (such as evaluating the rule for sanity, asking for comments from industry professionals and pilots themselves, etc).  Why are they doing this? What do they have to gain?