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From the Editor
New CFI
Maintenance officer needed
Insurance Excess Rules - NB
Achievements
Club party
African Skies 4
General
- Challenger 605 in CT
- "Temporarily uncertain of position, the F-22 way"
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Dates to Diarise
2-4 March : FASX Fly in
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From the Editor
Hi all
As you may be aware, there have been some problems with the newsletter (if you are getting this for the first time in a while, no doubt you know what I mean!).
The problem has been tracked down to spam fliters, even though the word for a drug made by Pfizer has been mention exactly zero times.
I'm hoping to resolve the issue shortly - it seems to fluctuate weekly - until then , remember that our website is up and running, and you can find all the previous newsletters there.
Happy flying
G
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New CFI
The committee is very pleased to announce that we have at last found the perfect CFI, right under our noses.
Jaco van Zyl, a full time instructor at CTFC, was appointed last Friday, and has knuckled down to business immediatly.
Expect more from him shortly (saves me writing the bio....*hint*)
In the meantime, congratulations and welcome!
Jaco on Friday night
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Maintenance officer required
The club requires the services of a full time maintenance officer to look after the fleet. The person should have some mechanical knowledge and will be responsible for the upkeep of the fleet as well as maintenance scheduling and breakdowns.
Please send a CV to Hilda or Beverly who will arrange for an interview
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Insurance Excess --> The Committee
A few members have made enquiries regarding payment of insurance excess. Many members fly outside of Cape Town Flying Club and are required to provide their own personal insurance excess. Technically, this should also cover them for the use of club aircraft. However, the reason why the committee made the issue of Insurance Excess compulsory was in order to keep the costs to members as low as possible.
The amount of R350 per year is very little, and the only way we can keep it this way is if everyone contributes. If not, the cost will go up to remaining members.
The committee has debated this point on more than one occasion. Another reason for this is that although the member may well provide proof of his/her insurance excess, we cannot check up to see that this is renewed timeously and we then run the risk of a member who has no cover, flying the aircraft.
Therefore the committee has taken the decision that despite having your own insurance excess policy, if you fly CTFC aircraft you will have to contribute to the insurance excess fund of the club.
Your understanding in this regard is appreciated.
Achievements
| Date | Name | Achievement | Aircraft | Instructor | Examiner |
| 02/01/07 | Jarred Seymour-Hall | PPL | KKC | W. Watkins | B. Barnes |
| 16/01/07 | Grant Gardner | Comm IF | KSS | P. Wesselman | G.Smith |
| 28/01/07 | Grant Huskisson | Night rating | KFV | A. Russel | P. Erasmus |
| 02/02/07 | Dewald Visser | PPL | NCG | J. van Zyl | - |
| 12/02/07 | James Carlyle | 1st Solo | KKC | E. Cornelisson | JP.Rossouw |
| 12/02/07 | Nick Maasdorp | Comm IF | KSS | B.Barnes | G. Smith |
| 19/02/07 | Marius Smit | Comm IF | KSS | B.Barnes | J. Pocock |
Club solo and wings pictures David Barnes and Schalk Burger
On Friday the club held a party, where those who had advanced their flying were celebrated. Vossie and Christian manned bar and braai to help the celebrations along.
Russel Wolson getting his wings (note the cut tie from his solo)
African Skies 4 --> Schalk Burger
Saying that there is nothing out here in the sticks to keep yourself occupied with, is not completely true in Chad. See, there are actually very few sticks out here. The sticks that are around, are either eaten by goats (I could write a whole volume on goats in Africa and how I loath them), or cut down to cook the said goats. Circle of life and all that you know. Suffice to say that you’d rather not want to come back in your next life as a goat …or a stick.
Having not really had time to pack for Chad, I didn’t bring any ATP study material along. With all of this nothing around to do after a days flying, studying towards passing the ATP exams would possibly have been considered… entertaining. It’s situations like these when the difference between ISA and JSA become fascinating and you could spend hours on the intricacies of those “essential state of the art” systems we use daily in aviation like MLS, RNAV and Doppler.
Yes, being able to calculate drift angle is so much quicker and easier using my calculator and 7 formulae, than just looking at what the instrument tells you…if you could actually still find one in an aeroplane that is…
All this is brings me to my actual thread amazingly enough. This being GPS… or GNSS as we should be calling it these days. That honest to goodness piece of magic in a box without which I personally don’t think contract flying in African Skies would have been viable.
If Air Traffic Service in Africa is in a state of disarray…terms that come to mind describing Navigational Aids could be things like; black hole, hurricane Katrina, the never-ending pit of despair… you know, disasters.
Out where I am right now, the controller sometimes wants to know which radial we are on. That’s all well and good if the VOR was actually working. In Juba, Sudan, the VOR does work, but to save the trees and hug the mosquitoes, they decided to make it solar powered. Yes, solar powered. What a nice idea. Now, when the sun shines and the weather is CAVOK, the VOR works beautifully. Unfortunately, the sun doesn’t always shine and usually that’s the time that you actually need the VOR…and of coarse this is exactly when the darn thing doesn’t work as the sun is not available to power the thing.
No comment.
This is where that gorgeous little magic box that tells you where you are comes into play. Never mind that Uncle GW has a big fancy (probably red) button sitting on his desk in the oval office with the words “OFF, screw everybody” printed on it. Look at it as you want, GPS/GNSS is today what the sextant was to Columbus. Without it the world will most probably deflate and go back to being flat again.
As much as nobody would like to admit it, GPS is being used as the means of primary navigation everyday, in the vast majority of cockpits around the world. And why? Because it works…well.
We still fly with maps in the flightbag, but I must admit that they hardly get stirred. This obviously isn’t the same with regard to those wonderful Jepp enroute charts. They still get a good workout regularly (and those sneaky buggers at Jepp know it so that’s why they make them so thin…so they’ll tear and you have to buy new one’s!).
In the contract environment, paperwork takes up a lot of your time, and anything that saves paperwork is welcomed. Nothing is easier than just having a pre-programmed route in your magicbox and copying down the distances, times and even fuel usages onto your Navlog, in stead of sitting down and plotting the old fashioned way.
And then there’s that all important GO TO function for when you get to your second destination and the HF blares in your ear that you have to cancel the next leg and go pick up a med-evac at point X and take him to place Y. Push the button, turn the aeroplane until the arrow points up, and wait for the thing to beep and tell you that you are there. What a pleasure.
Same is true in an emergency. Hit the NRST button, and hey presto, you might even have a real airfield within your reach in stead of choosing that nice smooth looking riverbed in the middle of the rebel occupied savanna as an emergency landing field. I have heard of guys force landing aeroplanes in the bushes, when less than a kilometer away there was a perfectly good runway. Hey, it happens when you’re under pressure.
I don’t really need to sing the praises of GNSS as a system, we all know about it.
Amazingly, this same piece of magic has created some real problems too. Now that we are ALL flying accurately, on direct tracks criss-crossing the airways, the risk of two aeroplanes occupying the same piece of sky at the same time has actually increased! Especially in and around CTR’s where aircraft are climbing and descending through opposing levels constantly. Descending into Juba a few month ago through broken cumulus, a Let 410 popped out of a cloud very close to us on the reciprocal track. Luckily in Sudan, we had received the traffic information and one of us altered our track…but it very clearly demonstrated the point. Something to watch out for back home too.
Once “they” combine a GNSS with a transponder/TCAS system and put it all into a nice small and affordable package… life would be a dream indeed, but until then I guess we’ll just have to work on that situational awareness thing some more.
I have had the wonderful news recently that I’ll be going home to SA soon. In the last 7 months I have had 4 weeks and 4 days at home. I need a break now.
I don’t know where my next tour will take me, but I’ll be sure to keep mailing these off to Gareth, for as long as he’d like to use them.
Safe landings,
Au revoir!
runway at Guereda
Doctors without borders, the real deal NGO
The noonday sun in a sandstorm
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Aircraft Incidents & Accidents 6/20: Famous people – Astronaut Yuri Gagarin --> Danny Buitendag
Seven years after his historic flight into space, Yuri Gagarin and co-pilot Vladimir Seryogin were training for the spaceflight called Soyuz 3. They
had just taken off from a field in a MiG-15 training airplane on 27 March 1968.
It is unclear whether they have received the bad weather forecast for their flight with the wind extra gusty as they flew at high speed between two cloud layers at relatively low altitude.
Approximately a minute after take-off, a pair of faster MiG-21 jets took to the air, overtaking the MiG-15. They were followed a minute later by a second MiG-15 whose pilot didn't see the MiG-15 carrying Gagarin and Seryogin. The two planes were brought in dangerous proximity to each other less than 1,640 feet apart, according to a team of investigators in 1987.
The radio callsign of Gagarin's plane was 625. The conclusion was made that 625 got on the tail of 614 (the other MiG-15) and whilst following it, found itself in the trailing vortex of the aircraft in front, sending the plane into a spin. The crew tried to stabilize the plane but didn't have enough time to avoid the crash. The MiG-15 was fitted with two extra fuel tanks which may have made it less stable. A contributing factor to the accident was that the clouds probably prevented the pilot from seeing the horizon.
The investigation report concluded that the crew's actions aimed at regaining level flight were correct in the highest degree.
Mig-15 from United States Navy Aviation Museam
General
Challenger 605 --> Russel Wolson
Last week saw the African Launch of the Challenger 605 in Cape Town.
She is the first to come off the production line and was 2 weeks old when she touched down at FACT.
The 605 is equipped with laser gyros and 21 inch screens. A true beauty with amazing brute force - the seatbelt cuts your tummy in half on take-off.....if you happen to be sitting backwards.
Russel was lucky enough to be on board and take these pictures.
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Mishaps on a long cross country
F-22 first foreign deployment mishaps --> By Justin Wastnage (flightglobal.com)
Navigational software glitch forces Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors back to Hawaii, abandoning first foreign deployment to Japan
Lockheed Martin is rushing a software fix to Hawaii after 12 US Air Force F-22A Raptors en route to Japan for the stealth fighter’s first
overseas deployment had to turn back because an unspecified problem with their navigation systems.
The F-22s, of the 27th Fighter Squadron from Langley AFB in Virginia, were en route from Hickham AFB in Hawaii to Kadena AB on Okinawa for a three- to four-month deployment. They are expected to try again by the end of the week, after the software fix is incorporated and tested.
Asked to comment on rumours the problem related to crossing the international dateline, the USAF said: "The aircraft experienced a software problem involving the navigation system en route from Hickam to Kadena. For operational security reasons we will not discuss specific aircraft systems or locations."
Taking delivery of the first F-22 for the Pacific Air Forces at Lockheed’s Marietta, Georgia plant on Monday, USAF Gen Paul Hester said the reason for sending the Raptors to Kadena is “to learn how to deploy with the F-22. We get a manual with the aircraft and we are learning every day the capabilities built into the aircraft.”
PACAF’s F-22s are being delivered to Langley for training, with the first eight aircraft to arrive at Elmendorf AFB in Alaska in August and two squadrons to be operational by the end of 2008. Eventually, Raptors will also be based at Hickam.
ED: As with any new complicated piece of machinery, teething problems are expected. You may recall the hapless pilot who was trapped in his Raptor for 5 hours, after the cockpit locked itself due to software malfunction (he was eventually cut out of the cockpit by fire crews).
See that story here ( http://www.f-16.net/news
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posted by Cape Town Flying Club at 10:04 PM
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