Guy is currently one of the pilots flying the Erickson Skycrane that is assigned to the Stead fire-fighting base this year. I say currently because he is actually assigned to fly from one of Erickson’s bases in Greece this summer. They operate on a 3-week cycle of work and free time and  just arrived back in the U.S. for his break. He was enroute to his home in Northern California when he got a call that they really needed him as a crew member at Stead for a few days. It was just a lucky coincidence that we met yesterday. We talked in the hangar for a while and then he said he’d be happy to give me a tour of the Skycrane. I jumped at the chance. Of course, I had to call my wife and let her know. She has watched the Skycranes operate from Stead for years and has always been fascinated with their size and capabilities. When she heard about the tour opportunity she dropped everything, jumped into the car and headed for the airport. If you are a Twitter user, you may recognize her as @yaksierra .

To say that the Skycrane is big is  a bit of an understatement. It is almost 90 feet long and it’s main rotor has a span of 72 feet – that’s twice the wing span of a C-172/182 or Beechcraft Bonanza.  Erickson names each of it’s Skycranes. The most famous is “Elvis” which made an appearance at EAA’s AirVenture last year (This year the crowd there is seeing “Goliath”). The Stead Skycrane this year is named “Malcolm.”

This photo is of the fire-fighting water tank that is attached in the area normally taken up by the winch/sling apparatus. As you can see, the tank holds up to 2650 U.S. gallons of water. The actual amount that they carry is dependent upon their fuel load, the temperature and the density altitude (sound familiar?). The fitting you can see in the middle of the aft ’7′ is a fill valve for a 70-gallon foam tank. The foam can be injected into the water tank enroute to the fire. The foam is a detergent-based surfactant that, in effect, makes the water wetter.  The gray area at the bottom of the tank is one of the full-length doors in the fully open position.  The long hose is the pond snorkel. It has an electro-hydraulic pump at the bottom end that can suck water into the tank from any water source that is at least 18″ deep – and fill the tank in as little as 45 seconds. The tank can also be equipped with a sea snorkel that can be used to scoop up water while the Skycrane maintains forward motion – this eliminates the water spray up into the rotors that occurs when the filling process is done from a hover. The tank can also be filled with fire retardant very similar to that used by the fixed-wing tankers.  A control panel on the center console in the cockpit is used to set the amount and rate that the water is dumped.

There is also a water cannon that can be fitted to the left front of the Skycrane. It is capable of shooting a water stream up to 160′ to the front at a rate of 300 gallons/minute. It could be used to fight a fire in a high-rise building. You can see it demonstrated on the Erickson web site.

This photo shows the rearward-facing pilot seat. The crew complement for fire-fighting is two pilots, however when the mission is heavy-lift construction (placing large items on construction pads or erecting tall towers) a third pilot is added to the crew. This third pilot sits at a station to the rear and below the main pilots. There is a clear view from there of the load suspended from the hoist/winch. When the load is to be placed into position this rear-facing pilot takes control of the Skycrane and can position the load exactly where it needs to go.

The Erickson fire fighting operation is day, VFR only which is reflected in the relatively sparse instrument panel that you find in the cockpit. Here you can see the control sticks (cyclic) at both seats and the collective for the right seat. One of those switches you see on the collective controls the pump at the end of the snorkel. The amount of water in the tank is indicated on a digital display in the top center of the left instrument panel. The center console is home to a lone Garmin 500 navigator and the VHF and FM radios. The FM communications band is used to talk with the fire fighters on the ground.  The right seat pilot on this crew used an ingenious method to keep track of all the information they needed when they were last dispatched to a fire. The bottom right block has all the Stead frequencies.

For those of you who subscribe to the idea that a helicopter is 10,000 parts flying in loose formation in an oil slick. Here is a photo of a large number of those parts – the main rotor mast head and transmission housing. The bell housing in the bottom is where the rotating turbine shaft of the right engine is changed to the other-direction rotating, flapping, twisting, retreating and advancing motion it takes to keep a helicopter in the air. I am not a helicopter pilot but if I were that would still look terribly complicated to me.  Maybe some of you helicopter pilots out there can make sense of all those moving parts.

The EAA media people were interviewing the pilots of Goliath at the same time that my wife and I were touring Malcolm. This is the video that EAA put up on their site.

Half of the flights I make in my employment as an international airline pilot are completed at night.  That has it’s pluses and minuses.  The final leg of most of my trips is usually an all-night flight from Tokyo back to my U.S. base.  That last flight in June happened to coincide with a Lunar Eclipse. I had seen it mentioned by someone I follow on Twitter but had forgotten about it until someone on the overwater air-to-air frequency mentioned that the eclipse was starting. I was sitting in the right seat and a full moon was sitting right outside my window. I grabbed my camera and took a few shots as the eclipse progressed. I combined them into a single photo showing the progression.  As you can see, it was a partial lunar eclipse. I took the photos at FL340 while we were flying between 170E and 170W at 49N.  Luckily there was no high cirrus cloud cover that night and the shots were fairly clear.

Unfortunately, turbulence was an ongoing problem in my efforts to record the eclipse. I saved one of my more artistic attempts to take a photo while the plane was bouncing around. I quickly learned not to mess around with the shutter speed.  Maybe I could to license this shot to Google….

When the early mail and passenger routes were being developed it became obvious that some accurate means of navigation would be required to make the flights more reliable. The use of beacons shining lights or signal fires were acceptable first steps, but aviation leaders could see that flight in less than ideal weather would be necessary. The logical solution was radio-based navigation. The first iteration in radio-based navigation was the Low-Frequency (LF) Radio Range, also called the A-N Range and the Adcock Range (after the designer of the LF antenna array).

I had heard about A-N Range navigation but had not read much about them or how they were used. A-N Ranges were deployed in the 1930s and 1940s and were replaced with the more modern and accurate VOR navigation in the early 1950s.

A friend of mine lost his father about 6 months ago and in removing his father’s personal items from his house came across several aviation-related items. He was nice enough to pass some of them along to me. His father had been a military pilot and had kept flight manuals from a variety of aircraft. He also had among his aviation memorabilia 2-3 Low Frequency Radio Range navigation charts.  This section of one of the charts shows the area around Chicago, IL. while the one above it shows the section containing the chart legend.  these are sections of the CG to FV chart (Chicago to Ft. Worth, TX) that, according to the distance legend on this section was drawn in 1938 and redrawn in 1942. I have highlighted the area around Joliet, IL because in researching information about A-N navigation I found myself (of course) at the Wikipedia entry for the subject. One of the pieces of information I found there was an instrument approach chart for the Joliet, IL airport using the radio beacon shown on the navigation chart. The approach plate is dated 1957 and by then VORs were being placed into service.  The JOT VOR (114.4)  is visible on the approach plate.

Then, as a final push to get me to finish writing this article, the June issue of the AOPA PILOT magazine has an article by Barry Schiff on navigating the A-N ranges (Play it by Ear, p. 30) and related that an actual A-N Radio Range has been reconstructed and put into operation by Airline Transport Communications, Inc. and International Radio Station WWRB.  Their web site has a link in a YouTube video discussing the project and demonstrating it’s use on an actual flight. Here is the video for your added entertainment and education.

A 10-minute video with an actual flight on a reconstructed A-N low frequency radio range.

This first one is on the Southeast coast of Iceland. I took this photo from about FL350 . (I did a little enhancing in Photoshop, but not much.) Below it I have included a screen shot of the Google Earth view of the same airport (N65 17′ 42.75 W15 13′ 40.50) . It took a while to find it, but the view is almost identical.  Zooming out in Google Earth shows the town associated with the airport is on a peninsula directly south of the runway and that the airport is on the coast almost directly opposite (east) of Reykjavik. Zooming in shows the parking ramp on the north end with the two white-topped buildings and an airplane on the ramp.  According to Wikipedia, the airport is served by Eagle Air, an Iceland airline based in Reykjavik.  According to the entry on  Airport-Data.com the runway length is 4921′ (1500m) asphalt.  Not much more information is available about the airport, though I’m not surprised. I doubt that the traffic count is very high, especially in the winter months.

Every time we fly to Asia we fly close to the island and airport of Shemya, in the Alaskan Aleutian Island chain. If you take a look at the chain of islands in Google Earth you can see that the chain extends in a big sweeping turn from southwestern Alaska to just short of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Shemya is almost at the end of the chain of islands. The next island in the chain to the west is Attu, one of the islands occupied by Japan during World War II. The Japanese intended the attacks on Attu and Kiska Islands to divert the U.S. forces attention from the Japanese attack on Midway Island.  The U.S. had, however, broken the Japanese message codes by then and knew of the intended diversion. The Aleutian islands were later taken back by U.S. and Canadian forces.  While I was in the Air Force flying the C-5 our squadron often had missions that included trips to Shemya. To operate there you had to have a special airport qualification and your first landing on the island had to be observed by a Shemya-qualified instructor. I never made one of those trips.

Our flight that day took us southwest from the eastern coast of Shemya to the eastern coast of Agattu Island on our  way to Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.

It’s rare that we get a glimpse of either of these islands. I am always amazed that the majority of our ocean crossings either to the east or to the west are above a solid cloud deck.  I have never crossed any of the oceans on board a ship, but I’m curious how often a clear sky is visible as they make their way from port to port. Based upon the amount of time that we see the open ocean on a crossing in the northern latitudes I would think that ancient mariners taking celestial fixes would have had a very hard job tracking their position.

On the first of the two trips, a 9-day trip back and forth to Europe, the captain was a fairly quiet guy who kept to himself. I never saw him on any of the layovers, though that’s not really unusual lately. He was always friendly, he just didn’t appear to be a really outgoing type of person.  I noticed that on his breaks he was reading a book on spin aerodynamics. I tried to think positively and assumed that he wasn’t studying for something that  he expected to experience in our Airbus A-330,  so I asked him about his non-airline flying activities. It turns out that in his spare time he teaches aerobatics and flies airshows in his Pitts S-2B. He has an A&P license and is restoring an Extra 300. Most of the work is done on the Extra and he is about to replace the fabric covering on the aft half of the fuselage   He flies out of a small airport in the upper Midwest.

A couple of days into the second trip, a 12-day Asia jaunt,  the captain asked about my tie-tac(a small ceramic Swift). It usually takes another pilot 3-4 guesses to get the aircraft type correct or they just give up and ask. This captain got it right on the first guess. That started a conversation about small planes and general aviation flying. He lives in southern Nevada and owns both a 1960 Bonanza and a 1940′s vintage Cessna C-140. He said that he has had the 140 for almost 40 years. Throughout the trip we’d get back to talking about the Bonanza and the things that he has done to it since he purchased it – the new paint, interior, radios, engine instruments, etc. He is a big proponent of XM weather in the cockpit and now that he has it available finds it hard to imagine how it was to not have all the information available during a flight. He said that his wife doesn’t particularly like to fly but enjoys the destinations that they visit. He has provided her with a nice noise-cancelling headset and access to all of the XM radio channels and inputs for her iPod, so she passes the enroute time in her own little world of radio broadcasts and her favorite music.

None of the First Officers that I flew with on either trip were involved with general aviation flying. It could be a function of economics, though both captains had been involved in general aviation for their entire airline careers.  Pay scales today, however, are far different than they have been in the past and no longer result in any significant leftovers after normal bill payments and retirement planning set-asides are made.

It was nice to spend a couple of trips talking about fun flying, airplane equipment and places to fly. Too many times lately other pilots I meet are more interested in complaining about the latest ‘hot topics’ running around the airline rumor mill or how they think that the current airline operations have deteriorated.