Before a pilot takes a plane into the air he/she is required to do a preflight inspection of the aircraft to make a determination of the aircraft’s fitness for flight. This is primarily a visual inspection, though some systems are operated if that operation would result in a better determination of airworthiness. Wing Flaps are usually extended so that a visual inspection of the operating mechanism is easier to accomplish. Landing and position lights and pitot tube heaters are turned on to make sure they are operating.  The aircraft manufacturer (of modern aircraft) will have provided a checklist of the items to be inspected and a suggested order for accomplishing the inspection. I won’t attempt to teach you how to do a preflight on an airplane since there are several very good sites already available for that. One text-based site is at weekendcfii.com, while a video presentation may be found at expertvillage.com. Both sites use the Cessna 172 as the airplane subject.

Airline crews are also required to do a preflight inspection of both the interior and exterior of the aircraft. The crews are taught ‘flow patterns’ to accomplish the process in the most efficient manner. These flows are just a way to accomplish all the items on the inspection without referring to a written list. This is then followed up at the appropriate time with read and response checklists. The First Officer normally reads the checklist items while the aircraft is on the ground and each person affected by the item responds orally with the observed position of the appropriate switch.

The exterior inspection of the aircraft is accomplished by the First Officer, normally while the Captain loads the flight route into the onboard navigation system. The only items operationally checked on this exterior inspection are the aircraft position lights, which remain on all the time. The majority of the time when this inspection is accomplished there are at least a dozen people working on other parts of the plane. Refuelers are filling the fuel tanks with the required fuel load, mechanics and baggage handlers are moving loaders around the plane to lift and position cargo containers and baggage into the various compartments, fore and aft, and caterers are bringing their trucks up to the various aircraft doors to load whatever meals and drinks might be offered during the flight. Under the plane, servicing crews are servicing the aircraft lavatories and potable water is being added to the aircraft water tanks for coffee, drinking and lavatory sinks. Air conditioning hoses may or may not be plugged into the bottom of the plane to provide warm/cold air to precondition the passenger compartment temperature.

I took a couple of quick photos with my iPhone during a recent exterior preflight that show some of the things going on around the bottom of the plane.

Two things you learn very quickly while doing the exterior inspection:

• Never turn your back on a baggage cart, and
• Never walk under (or downwind from) a lavatory sink drain.





Preflight looking aft from nose.

Preflight looking forward from under tail.

I was minding my own business, very uncomfortably squashed under the instrument panel of my plane a couple of days ago when I heard in the distance the unmistakable sound of a Rolls-Royce engine coming to life.  Well, that’s not something that an airplane nut can ignore, so I carefully extricated myself from the floor of my plane and hurried outside to see what was going on.

John has a hanger in the row behind me.

He is an ‘older’ man who spends almost all of his time building a replica of the Martin-Baker MB-5. Martin Baker is best known as a company that builds ejection seats, but the company originally started as an aircraft manufacturer. The MB-5 was one of their aircraft models that was never manufactured and the prototype was destroyed. John has taken it upon himself to educate the world about the Martin-Baker aircraft and has dedicated himself to building a replica of the MB-5.

You can see John in the cockpit during this engine run. In the first photo the camera stopped the props almost in exact alignment. The aircraft has a Rolls-Royce Griffin engine with contra-rotating props. You can see the fuselage structure aft of the cockpit with the metal panels removed.

John is in his hanger every day working on the plane or another of his projects and has a crew of volunteers who help him. Today’s project and engine run was to determine if recent work had cured a vibration problem they have with the front prop. Unfortunately the vibration was still present and restricted the engine RPM to below 2000 RPM. So, work continues.  For a little more background you can read Wikipedia’s article on the Martin-Baker MB-5.

Stead Airport is continuing it’s transition to the site of the National Champioinship Air Races.  The temporary bleachers are almost completed with only the top two rows of seats remaining to be assembled on the last section on the east end. The semi-trailers of tents, seats, carpeting, etc. are starting to appear behind the grandstands. Next week the transformation will accelerate as vendor tents start popping up all over the airport. The large Air Race Banners were installed on the back side of the grandstand recently.

These have beautiful graphics of some of the race aircraft. It’s too bad that they can’t stay up all the time.  I’m out on an Orient trip again and will be gone from the airport for 7-8 days. By the time I return there will be only a week until the racers start arriving. They will be on site by September 6th with practice runs beginning the 7th and qualifying runs on the 8th, 9th and morning of the 10th with the first heat races the afternoon of the 10th, the official opening day of this year’s competition.

For those of you who may be interested, as I was driving out to the airport on the airport on August 22nd, I caught another glimpse of Rare Bear sitting outside of it’s hanger.

They’re making progress, but it’s slow. The hardest part of painting an aircraft, especially a quality paint job, is the prep work . Lots of sanding, priming, sanding and repriming to get the most defect-free surface possible before applying the finish colors.I’m sure that the finished product will be beautiful… and fast.

My local airport is going through it’s annual change from a semi-average uncontrolled airport to the site of the National Championship Air Races. This change begins every year in the end of August. The permanent grandstands are joined by four sets of temporary bleachers.

The area behind the grandstands slowly fills with vendor tents for everything from t-shirts to DVDs and dog earmuffs. Then the last few days before the races start, the food vendors fill all empty spaces, selling bbq, corn on the cob, hamburgers, hot dogs and all the requisite stuff on a stick and goop in a cup.

This year the airport manager has added more to the mix by scheduling some repaving of taxiways on the airport. This has not been just a project adding a layer of asphalt on top of the existing taxiway, but has involved digging down to the base layer, recompacting and then paving up to the previous level. Half of the airport was done three weeks ago and the half I am on has been in progress for the past two weeks.

It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t getting my plane out of the hanger during the process. We were advised that the project was going to prevent aircraft movement and were given the option of parking out on the ramp if we needed to use our planes. Since I have just spent the past month polishing the fuselage, I had no desire to leave it out in the elements.

Unfortunately, the mix they were to lay down as pavement didn’t pass the quality control test, so the project came to a standstill last Thursday, leaving this view for the past 4 days. Wonder of wonders, when I got to the hanger this morning, the paving was complete, so recently that it was still a bit sticky to walk to my hanger door. They ran up and down the new pavement with rollers for most of the morning. As I understand, tomorrow they make relief cuts and do some striping and then we will be back in business.  Now all I need to do is finish my annual. I just talked to my IA and scheduled for September 1st.  Yeah, that’s a while away, but I have a 7-day trip to Japan and Taipei that leaves Saturday. Besides, that gives me another full month on the annual, since they’re good through the last day of the month in which they are completed.

As I was leaving the airport the other day, I spied one of the home town Air Race favorites peaking out of it’s hanger. Rare Bear (Race 77) was purchased a couple of years ago by Rod Lewis of Houston, but he has elected to keep it hangered here  in Reno and have LOTS of work done to it. Before it raced last year it had been completely overhauled. This year the crew has stripped it of all paint and bondo (considerable bondo according to airport rumors).

From the view in the photo it almost looks like a composite fuselage now. You can still see the old paint scheme on the rudder with the first of the 7s partially visible. I was sent a drawing of the proposed new paint scheme by one of the team members but was asked not to post it because the details of the final version have not yet been decided. It’s enough to know that it will not be the same as last year’s design which was often described as ’sperm chasing a pilot.’

This picture is from the 2007 race season, “borrowed” from the Rare Bear Race Team website . Photo credit is shown in the larger version. Clicking on the small photo will take you to the larger version.

The in-progress photo was taken on August 1st, three weeks ago. At least a half dozen cars are at the Bear’s hanger every day and I see them cooking meals on a BBQ set-up each evening, so progress is continuous. I believe that they’ll be ready for the races, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the paint was still wet during the qualifying runs.

I have been spending the past few days working in my hanger, but yesterday I took a little break and sat at a local coffee house, had a designer coffee and read a few aviation blogs and email newsletters.  At the end of my last trip I had started this post, but had not finished it, deferring instead to work that needed to be done on my plane. After reading those other posts though, I decided to finish what I had started writing since other people appear to be experiencing some of the same things that I have been.

Once your aviation career advances to jobs on the larger aircraft, you find yourself in a situation where you are required to work closely with other crew members both pilots and non-pilots and interact more often with ground personnel who service the aircraft and work with the passengers. Working on a multiple-person aircrew can often be a very rewarding experience. When your crew is professionally trained the process operates almost like clockwork, smoothly and professionally. Occasionally, however, you run into an individual (or individuals) who, for some reason, have decided to make the process hard.

These individuals appear to have a skewed attitude toward life in general. I’m not sure what the reason is. Perhaps somebody really screwed them in the past and they’re taking it out on those around them. Maybe on the inside they’re just unhappy people and try to pass it along. Maybe they feel like they’re ‘entitled’ and aren’t beeing treated as they deserve to be treated, or maybe they just feel trapped and frustrated at what has been going on in the airline industry the past few years. I’m sure these sorts of people are found in any profession. I seem to run into them once in a while as I’m out and about.

It is often said by non-rev travelers that they are treated better at other airlines than on their own. Does that make sense? Aren’t all the people at a given company in the same boat with a common goal to keep that boat floating upright? Did a few ‘entitled’ individuals generate a stereotype of the other workers that turned feelings agains those who followed them? Possibly.

Recently I had two trans-Pacific flights during which we, as the flight deck crew, were treated in completely opposite ways by the cabin crew. Both cabin crews were based at the same hub. On one flight we received a call from the cabin about every two hours asking if we were doing all right, needed anything  or had to take a break. (With a two-pilot crew and the extra pilot(s) on their break out of the cockpit, a cabin crew member must come into the cockpit to man the door while one of the on-duty pilots takes a ‘physiological break.’) If there were extra meals or snacks available after the passengers were satisfied, they were offered to the flight deck workers. Everyone was happy, we got to know who we were working with and the time went by quickly.

The other flight, however, took forever. Three and a half hours after takeoff we had still not heard from anybody in the back. The captain called back and finally asked for a crew meal so that he could eat before he went on his break. He asked for the chicken and was told it would be ready in 20 minutes (click). Forty minutes later he called back again and was told it would by up in 2 minutes. He got up, checked the door, saw the meal on it’s way and opened the flight deck door. The tray was handed to him through the open and the individual  turned around and waked away with not a word spoken… and he got the steak. Since we had a single additional pilot, we cut the flight time in thirds for our breaks and used those changeover times for our runs to the bathroom.  At about 7 hours into the flight we made another call to the back to get the remaining crew meals. Same process. No verbal interactions at all from the cabin crew. We took the meal trays back to an empty galley after we had reached the destination gate, the cabin crew nowhere to be found.

Why the big difference in the two crews? Part of the tone is set by the lead cabin attendant/purser, but individuals interact according to their own attitudes. Some cabin crew members have no desire whatsoever to interact with the flight deck crew and, for whatever reason, they seem to be the ones who bid the positions that include providing flight deck service. Maybe they’re trying to ‘get even’ for some past events. Who knows.

I can’t imagine that these people are enjoying their jobs. And if they aren’t, then why are they still in them? Or maybe it’s the animosity that keeps them going on a day-to-day basis, gives them something to brag about to their fellow workers with similar outlooks. The danger is that these attitudes can begin to poison the whole organization, slowly growing through the workforce and end up being passed along to the customers who pay the bills.

Yes, the aviation business and specifically the airline business is not the same as it was ten years ago. We’re working longer and getting paid the same or less. Bit we’re all in the same boat, people. If you want to get mad at somebody, make it the company management or you local politician, not your fellow workers or the unsuspecting passengers. We’re all in this together.