An Innocent Abroad

‘No sweat,’ he said. The man on the telephone was one of the F.A.A. ‘s ‘Golden Boys’, the corps of elite Flight Operations and A. T. C. personnel who watch over the busiest, and most complex piece of airspace in the world.

He was a senior controller handling the O’Hare Terminal Area at Chicago, and I had just asked him how he felt about a 105 kts 100 h. p. lightplane making a non-radio penetration of O’Hare’s TCA.

I explained that I was trying to get from the lower Michigan peninsula, across Illinois into Iowa. I was non-radio, and (like 90 per cent of US lightplane flights) I had not filed any flight plan.

However, travelling south-west down the shoreline of Lake Michigan I had encountered increasingly poor visibility, and lowering ceilings which finally had me scud-running at 800 feet in VFR minimums. Ahead somewhere in the milky haze beyond the bottom of the Lake lay what the locals call the ‘strobe light farm’ – a whole mess of microwave towers scattered over a thirty square mile area and stretching their near-invisible lattices up to 2300 ft AGL.

To divert around them I faced either a long and tiring 270-degree path through two adjoining States and an additional fuel stop. Or I could make an uncontrolled transit right across the widest sector of the O’Hare TCA without radio or ATC guidance. I elected to land at a field near the bottom of Lake Michigan and phone O’Hare for advice.

It is not an implied criticism of Australian ATC staff that I did not have high hopes of any reply more useful than: ‘Sit on the ground where you are until the clag lifts. ‘ Australia’s airspace guardians just think differently.

I was quite unprepared for the rapid and practical response to my query, that followed the two-word pronouncement: ‘No sweat. ‘ Where was I tracking? ‘Uh huh . . . and you have at least a half-mile visibility at present, huh? Yeah well, that will get better in the next five miles or so as you get clear of the lake . . .

Ceiling was 800 feet all the way to the State border but from there west it was CAVU all the way to the West Coast. ‘Now let’s see, Sir, where were you thinking of entering our TCA and I’ll give you a few major landmarks to keep you on the right track across Chicago’s southwestern suburbs?’

But, I protested, I was VFR and that meant I’d be down to around 600 feet and wasn’t it a rule that I had to maintain 1500 feet over towns and cities?

‘Oh yeah,’ came the voice through the phone, ‘but we’d sooner you stuck at 600 feet and stayed VFR than tried to satisfy the rule book and end up spinning out of the clouds into some supermarket parking lot. ‘

The voice then proceeded to instruct me to fly such and such a heading until I reached a large sports stadium beside a major railway freight yard and then turn onto a new heading. ‘If you stay below 900 feet all the way you’ll be well below the descent of climbout paths of any of our airline traffic (which was estimated at 138 arrivals and departures in the period I would take to fly across the TCA). Like I said, the visibility will improve the further west you go and the cloud will thin. No sweat. ‘

He went over the description of four sets of landmarks again and then, with a cheery: ‘Have a nice flight,’ hung up, leaving me with a healthy respect for whoever briefs FAA staff on PR and a new insight into one of the factors which makes US General Aviation such a vibrant field.

That incident with the O’Hare controller revealed attitudes that I saw repeatedly displayed in many parts of the USA at all levels of the General Aviation scene during four months of wandering as a kind of gypsy-aviator through twelve mainland States.

Whenever I flew, whether at a sleepy Grass Roots strip among the firs and aspens or from the smooth mile-long runways and shining tarmacs of some of the nation’s busiest airports, I talked with pilots, owners, FBO and FAA personnel. I was surprised how often their views and attitudes agreed.

Oh, I don’t mean that American pilots don’t feel antagonism towards the FAA bureaucracy – they do, and they get a darn sight more vocal about it than Australians.

And the FAA makes no secret of the fact that it would like to, see tighter control of some aspects of General Aviation operations.

But behind all the day-to-day sniping there is a refreshing acceptance of one simple fact – a fact which is too often overlooked by aviation authorities in this country and in many others.

Simply put it is this: If a man buys or builds or restores an airplane he must want to fly it, and should be able to do so.

That simple fact is at the root of most of the growth and power of General Aviation in the United States. Acceptance of the statement colours the thinking of all FAA operations staff.

The most visible sign of this is the ‘equality’ of aircraft within the ATC network, where a Cessna 150 is handled exactly the same as a 747 and in strict priority.

At John Wayne Airport, in Orange County in the Los Angeles Basin, I saw two CalAir Boeing 737s holding patiently while a student in a Grumman Trainer drifted in on a mile-long final at 68 kts.

Unless there had been a possibility of traffic conflict it would not have occurred to controllers to ask the light plane to orbit until the airliners had departed (as so often happens at Australian airports). To them he was just another aeroplane and, like the Boeings, he would be dealt with on the basis of his traffic priority – not his size or mission. The hallowed proposition that all men are created equal extends to include aeroplanes!

Much of this easy intermixing of light private and charter, medium commuter, corporate and heavyweight APT flying works smoothly because operators, flight crews and controllers see no logical reason why it should not.

And for the reasons why they cannot, one must look further into the attitude of American society to the aeroplane. Look first at the south-west of the country where the aeroplane population is higher than anywhere else in the world.

It’s not hard to see why there are so many aeroplanes in the south-west when you discover that, of the total populations of the States of California and Arizona, one person in every 30 has at one time or another worked in the aerospace industry or in some aviation-oriented support industry. One family in seven has a member associated with aviation.

Private ownership of lightplanes by Americans has changed the face of world aviation and the American private owner must surely be the most active of all private owners. At a small town (population 7000) I called on the local barber for a haircut. On his wall was a colour photograph of the barber standing proudly beside a yellow and black Aeronca Chief. Beside it were four other photographs, depicting in black and white, the same proud fellow beside (or in) a Fairchild PT-19, a Cub, a Piper Comanche and an Ercoupe.

‘I rebuilt the Aeronca in my garage over two years,’ he told me, between snips. ‘She’s a real cream puff now but it was a mess when I trucked it home. ‘

How many aeroplanes had he owned?

‘Those four there – the PT-19 was my first. Bought that for $200 military surplus. I have a half-share in a Cessna 210 with the doctor down the street and I use that for going places and the Aeronca for fun and fly-ins. ‘

He had learned to fly in a Cub in 1952 and now averaged between 300 and 400 hours a year. (How many Australian owners do you know who would top 200 hours a year?) ‘I’m thinking of taking an aerobatic course this summer and might get around to building me a Pitts just for the hell of it,’ he said.

He was a good barber. He was also 72 years of age.

At another airport, during a fly-in that just seemed to happen for no better reason than that the weather was nice, I yarned with a couple of airline captains – one a big Texan who flew for United and the other a PanAm 747 skipper. Both owned private aeroplanes and flew them several times weekly to commute from their homes to their work bases.

On off-duty days, they flew to fishing spots, to the mountains for a day’s skiing, or just airport hopped for some gum bashing with other owners and pilots.

Now before you point out that senior airline skippers can afford to indulge their whims with expensive ‘toys’ I should point out that one of these jet-jockeys owned a 1951 Piper Tripacer converted back to ‘Pacer’ (taildragger) configuration. The other flew a very sweet early model Bonanza which he’d bought in rather doggy condition four years earlier for less than $12,000.

Also attending that fly-in aboard their own aeroplanes were a University Professor of History, a number of schoolteachers, plumbers, doctors, shoe salesmen, housewives and teenagers.

A well-kept Cessna 180 was flown in by two FAA controllers, and a whole family emerged from an Aztec laden with picnic tables and food hampers. Dad learned to fly on the G. I. Bill of Rights scheme and now had 8000 hours. His wife, Peggy, told me she learned to fly about three years earlier and owned her own 65 hp Piper Vagabond which she now shared with eldest son Mark, who’d soloed only last week.

They ran a small family grocery store at a town 150 miles east and had not known there was a fly-in that day. ‘We usually just load the plane on Sundays and pick an airport on the map and fly there for a picnic,’ Peggy told me.

Private owners come from all levels of the community and represent all salary groups and occupations. A very high proportion of aviation professionals are aircraft owners and it is these two factors – the representation of aviation throughout the community and the understanding of practical operations at professional levels – that is the real strength of General Aviation operations in the USA.

That is not to say everything in the garden is rosy, for it is far from that. Increasingly both State and Federal authorities are raising taxes and fees for owners and operators. Increasingly smaller airports are being taken over by developers and recycled as tract housing.

Increasingly the rule-makers in Washington are dealing out unpopular decisions that are meeting growing resistance from a formerly fragmented industry, now uniting to oppose many FAA decisions.

First there was the User Charges dispute, then the matter of an unnecessary profusion of control towers (subsequently proved by the industry during the PATCO strike).

More recently there has been a strong backwash of opinion concerning the Biennial Flight Review (due to be introduced to Australia in September).

Many areas of General Aviation claim BFR requirements are doing nothing to improve air safety or sharpen pilot skills. They are, however, helping an ailing flying training sector to get back in the black at the expense of licensed pilots and their bankbooks.

Opponents and critics of BFRs claim many operators, authorised to conduct testing, are failing competent pilots in order to sell them ‘refresher’ courses. There is mounting evidence that the system is of dubious value in the areas of flight safety and pilot proficiency.

In Arizona, I was told how a very senior instructor, claiming to be a low-time private pilot, requested a BFR from a flying school and was seriously faulted on nine points of technique and procedures. He was told to ‘come back in a couple of days and we’ll test you again. ‘

Meanwhile, he was offered a course of dual instruction to cure his ‘faults’. Cost? Around $200.

This particular candidate held Airline Transport and Certified Flight Instructor ratings with a total flight time approaching 18,000 hours. The instructor who ‘failed’ him was 20 years of age and had been flying just two years.

When, on the following day, the pilot returned to the same flight school, he was wearing his airline uniform, complete with its Senior Training Captain’s bars. He was told, by the manager of the school, that there had been ‘ . . . some kind of foul up. . . ‘ His BFR was signed out on the spot.

One of the enigmas of the American aviation scene is the fantastic growth rate of the commuter airlines, despite the much-publicised and agonised landslide to disaster suffered by so many of the RPT companies.

It is certainly beyond the abilities of a ‘visiting fireman’ to divine the reasons for this – even American industry observers of long-standing are unsure.

However, it is possible to observe one or two operational factors that could contribute to the startling growth of commuter operations.

The American air traveller flies for two principal reasons: (a) it is too far to drive; and (b) he can’t spare time to go any other way.

Of course the backbone of domestic airline operations is the short haul, high-load factor service which offers few frills. A 727 will load 150 passengers as quickly as a Sydney suburban bus, shunt off the terminal finger, be virtually airborne by the time the last passenger has the seat belt snapped, yet be down and parked at its destination finger within 35 minutes, ready for another 150 inter-city passengers.

The average airline passenger uses airliners as a bus service and many require little else than that they run on time. Miss one of these inter-city shuttles and there is another in twenty minutes. If you shop along the airline traffic counters you will probably be able to switch to a line that has a flight even sooner.

At the nation’s major traffic centres – New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles – the traffic flow is staggering.

At Detroit one airline company alone had 19 jet arrivals and departures in an hour and Detroit is served by more than 14 airlines.

There is no question that American RPT operators offer the travelling public ample frequencies. And in four months of hopping domestic airliners throughout the USA I can testify that those services are well patronised.

Where, I kept asking myself, are the cripplingly low load factors one hears so much about? All the planes I flew in were either full or carrying at least 60 per cent seat occupancy.

So how come the US RPT operators are losing so much money? It seems a great deal if income is channelled into promotion of the line. Full page newspaper and magazine ads running nationally don’t come cheap. Neither do national network 30 and 60-second commercials, yet most principal domestic carriers constantly conduct what almost qualifies as ‘saturation’ TV campaigns.

The next point obvious to a foreign observer is that RPT operations seem to be top-heavy with airport and cabin staff. Where Australian domestic operators manage to process, load and despatch a hundred or so passengers from Melbourne to Sydney with a total of around 12 staffers, US operators employ a team of 20 or more.

Aboard the airliners one notices, particularly on the highdensity short haul ‘shuttles’, that most of the cabin staff can do little but raise and lower the rear stairs when requested by the captain. There just isn’t time and the travelling numbers are too great for the smile-school set to really show their mettle.

Much of this is a result of an industry that is somewhat overunionised. But a great deal is the result of boardroom decisions to make sure the line is giving the impression of service that it is not physically capable of delivering.

In sharp contrast, the commuter industry has never tried to tell the public it supplies anything more than a bare-bones feeder transportation service linking ports, too small for viable servicing by the big guys, and major RPT access ports.

Initially spawned from the charter industry, early commuter companies were forced – by public distrust of ‘little’ aeroplanes – to move to progressively larger and more complex aircraft and somehow find the market to justify their financial outlay. Many did not and went under. But those which did survive are now highly-professional and profitable operations.

One commuter line I travelled with had a fleet of 90 aircraft of which the Navajo Chieftain I flew in was the sole reciprocating type and was due to be replaced by a turboprop Beech 99 within weeks. The fleet included Merlins, Super King Air, Twin Otters and two DC-9s, operating from flight bases in four States on 18 hours a day schedules.

Today the American travelling public has accepted the small airline operating small aircraft (but not ‘little’) to such an extent that people living only 30 miles from major trunk route ports are flying in by commuters rather than drive their car.

With smaller, more flexible route structures the commuters can readily tailor their services to suit the travelling demands of the communities they serve. And they can simply and rapidly alter those service frequencies should traffic flows demand it.

Thus the customer feels he is getting good service allowing him to travel when he wishes, rather than when (as with some RPT operations) traffic demands elsewhere in the country dictate network scheduling times.

There are other more personal and less tangible reasons which please commuter travellers.

‘I spend at least three days of every week in an airliner,’ a computer salesman told me. ‘The regular airlines treat you like one of a herd of cattle. They bundle you in and bundle you out, bim barn! With the smaller companies you are treated like a customer and because there are not many passengers in the plane the attention seems to be more personal. ‘

Another regular traveller told me he enjoyed flying commuters because they operated at lower altitudes.

‘I never realised how interesting the country was because I’d always been locked in an aluminium tube way up there above the clouds.’

Among the more practical comments were that when you buy a commuter ticket you buy a seat on the aeroplane. Buying an RPT ticket only gives you a seat if you report 30 minutes (or whatever) before boarding time. . . one minute late on heavy trafficked routes and you’ll find yourself ‘bumped’ and your seat taken by somebody from the standby list.

In practice, of course, commuters ‘bump’ latecomers too, but your chances of that happening are fewer.

And then there was the elderly lady in Indiana who told me she thought commuter airliners were cleaner than RPT planes.

‘I think the big ones are too busy to be cleaned properly,’ she told me.

Not one of those reasons would make an acceptable reading to any airline board of directors yet they are all valid statements by people who fly both classes of domestic airlines in the USA. How much bearing they have on the phenomenon of commuter growth and RPT decline is anybody’s guess.

My bet is that their impact on the marketplace is rather greater than the market analysts appreciate.

Indeed the whole short-haul scene in the USA is a fascinating subject for study. From Britt Airways, grinding a Beech 99 150 miles and four stopovers into Indianapolis, to the remarkable CalAir ‘shuttle’ services, which link Los Angeles International with the six or seven outer suburban airports serving the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan sprawl.

This operation uses Boeing 737 and Macdonnell-Douglas DC-9s around the clock, simply lifting people from one part of Los Angeles to another.

Imagine, if you will, a 24 hours-a-day string of Boeings operating at 30-minute frequencies between Tullamarine, Moorabbin, Avalon, Geelong, Fisherrnens Bend and (say) Scoresby and Dandenong.

To stand, as I did, at Orange County Airport (oops, John Wayne Airport) in the southern L. A. suburb of Santa Ana late one cairn summer afternoon is to see the remarkable spectacle of American domestic aviation unfold.

For, operating at peak hour frequencies from John Wayne’s parallel runways, was a marvellous mix of homebuilt, training, private and corporate aircraft, medium twins, pure-jet business craft and a constant stream of RPT jets.

At one point, that afternoon, I sighted along the approach paths of those twin runways and counted a total of 19 aircraft on finals – six of them pure jet airliners. Not an unusual sight, I was told. At holiday times it really got quite busy!

And, as if to set the seal on the equality of aircraft in America, came the quite remarkable (to me) sight of an airline, pilot in full uniform, bonedorne in place of peaked cap, climbing out beside a Seneca and a DC-9, strapped to the aluminium and dacron frame of a 20 hp ultralight.

Inquiries yielded the information that he was a commuter line pilot who lived in the hill country some 30 miles distant and daily commuted to and from work in his very own chain-saw-powered homebuilt.

After that, a visit to Disneyland seemed anticlimactic.