Allergies,
Flying,
and Medication

What will you do
with a pilot license?
Fly The Hudson River Corridor!

The allergy season has started!

Currently, the pollen counts have been elevated. For those suffering from seasonal allergies, this can be an extremely uncomfortable time. If you use steroid nasal sprays, it is prudent to start using them now (pilots may use them, provided you have your doctor’s approval).

Airmen should be aware of the following regarding common over-the-counter medications remember:

• Benadryl is not permitted!
• Zyrtec users must wait 48 hours prior to flying, must not experience any adverse effects, and may not use it more than 2 times per week.
• Claritin is permitted, provided there are no adverse effects.

By: Robert M. Dodenhoff, MD
Senior Aviation Medical Examiner
Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine

Click to enlarge

One of the exciting things about flying in New England is our close proximity to world famous places in iconic American cities. Here are some photos for you to enjoy taken during a recent flight down the New York City Hudson River Corridor.

Matt Graniero was kind enought to share the pictures he took. Our thanks to him!

Approaching the construction site of the Freedom Tower.

The Manhattan skyline!

The Effort to Avoid Airport Control Tower Closures

Press Conference at Hartford-Brainard Airport (HFD)
March 18, 2013 WTNH - Channel 8 Hartford, Connecticut

Blumenthal unveils air traffic control plan

Premier flight Center was invited to a press conference on Monday, March 18, 2013 where our US Senator, Richard Blumenthal spoke. Premier's chief instructor, Terry Keller Jr. was asked to make a statement as well. You will find links to the coverage above.

Sentator Blumenthal's hope was for the bill that he has been working on to be acted upon by the Senate before Wednesday, March 20th. Senator Blumenthal's bill would have restored funding to the contract towers that were facing closure. However, the Senate rejected his bill and now, the FAA has continued with thier decision to close 149 air traffic control towers beginning in April 2013.

Updates will appear here when they come out, but for now, here are some other links to the recent news stories.

Click here to see Coverage on Fox CT here - Hartford, Connecticut

Click here to read coverage in CTPost.com

Click here to read coverage on TheDay.com

Sequestration: Shuttering Air Traffic Control Towers

FAA releases list of 149 Air Traffic Control Towers to be closed beginning in April 2013.
Click here to download the updated (March 22, 2013) list.

Click here to download the original PDF of the proposed control towers closures.

Let’s, first and foremost, be honest: Not every airport needs a control tower. But let’s be equally honest: There are many control towers, at small, general aviation airports, that provide services that are of great benefit to the airport, to pilot operations and to businesses. Many of those will be lost by April 1, 2013 due to the effects of the March 1, 2013 Budget Control Act – a.k.a. the “sequestration” law.

Some pilots spend most of their flying lives at airports that share one very important characteristic – there is no air traffic control tower regulating take off and landing operations, providing clearances and instructions to pilots as they operate in close proximity to an airport’s traffic pattern or as they taxi on the surface of an airport. Every pilot learns how to conduct themselves at “non-towered” airports safely and effectively, and these pilots can fly successfully without control towers. This is possible because of the relatively limited number of flight operations at those “non-towered” airports around our country.

Other pilots spend a considerable portion of their flying lives at airports that share a slightly different, but very important characteristic – they have an operating air traffic control tower staffed by intelligent, well trained Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certificated air traffic controllers whose jobs it is to regulate take off and landing operations, provide clearances and instructions to pilots as they operate in close proximity to that airport’s traffic pattern, and provide instructions to pilots as they taxi about America’s busy airports! Now, let’s be real: There are very, very few of these airports that we pilots are prepared to lose, yet that is the reality we face due to the cuts necessitated by the “sequestration” law.

If this country was burdened by numerous airports that existed along as a haven for control towers needlessly staffed by air traffic control tower operators uselessly interfering in the lives of pilots, I am quite confident that they already would have been the focus of successful closure efforts. But this is not the case! Instead, recent years have seen an increase in close calls at busy airports which have been met by new procedures that airport tower controllers are required to follow in an effort to enhance aviation safety.

Recently, the FAA decided that the growing prevalence of runway incursions (when a person, aircraft, or vehicle enters a runway when an aircraft is attempting to land on that runway) presented such a threat to aviation safety that the procedure used to issue taxi clearances to aircraft and permissions for vehicles to operate on the surface of an airport were changed in the summer of 2010. These procedural changes were NOT implemented only at the nation’s busiest airports. They were implemented at all of the nation’s airports that have control towers, and tower controllers and pilots at all of these airports are required to comply with the new procedures!

Perhaps it is reasonable to ask why airports that do not have airliners flying into and out of them would need a control tower. Simply put, air traffic controllers in control towers provide air traffic control “services” to pilots. These “services” are wide and varied, and while not technically essential, they are integral to the safe, smooth, efficient operations of aircraft throughout this country!

Let’s consider for a moment if the country was facing the loss of other non-essential “services” unrelated to aviation. “Services”, however, that are widely accepted as being integral to the smooth, safe and efficient operation of our daily lives.

Let’s imagine for a moment that the unwillingness of our politicians in Washington D.C. to do the job they were sent to Washington D.C. to do resulted in the loss of car towing “services”. Seriously, imagine with me that the sequestration resulted in not being able to have your broken down car towed to a repair shop! Could your car still get to a repair shop? Certainly! Perhaps you could lash a herd of oxen to it and have them drag it off the highway to a repair facility. Will this bring certain chaos? No, but it certainly will produce a less safe environment on the highway, and unnecessarily burden you and other drivers.

OK, that’s a ridiculous example (apropos though given the situation we find ourselves in) so let’s think about a different service. How about your community’s fire “service”? Let’s imagine that it got decimated by the idiocy of the sequestration “solution”! If you ended up with a fire in your home, fear not! Certainly you have neighbors. And let’s be real: Bucket brigades probably work just fine – we’ll just step back a century and figure that all of the progress our nation’s firefighting professionals have made in skill and understanding of how to protect our citizenry isn’t all that worthwhile!

Still not convinced? What if it was traffic signals? Snow removal services? You get the idea!

Surely, you all join me in seeing the absurdity of these analogies, and in the situation we face. But, if you still don’t believe that America’s air traffic controllers provide an essential function to pilots consider the following, written by Craig L. Fuller, the president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA):

“Those of you who fly and require the assistance of air traffic controllers may be the first to feel the consequences of sequestration.
“Controllers at towers and en route facilities help pilots avoid trouble every day—something most of us know from first-hand experience. And that’s where sequestration may really hit hard.”

It is possible that not everyone will be on “my side” of this issue, and critics will accuse me of being a flight instructor “prophet of doom”. Clearly, I believe that neither pilots nor the general public should accept pointless cuts that result in the removal of services that are safety related. In fact, many elected officials actually consider the cuts “dumb” and “arbitrary”.

Inarguably, the sequester cuts were meant to be “dumb and arbitrary” and were instituted to loom large before the eyes of our legislators in Washington D.C. as a shield against the nonfeasance that has brought this foolishness to fruition! Essentially, these “dumb and arbitrary” cuts were created, to spur them into action, to inspire them to find meaningful, appropriate solutions to our country’s budget and debt situation.

BBut alas, this is not intended to be a political column or forum. Instead, I hope that this article will call you to take a few moments to consider the ramifications of this series of cuts. Any efforts you can contribute will be greatly appreciated. We missed our goal with the petition, but if you would contact your Congressional representative, that will keep the idea alive. Thank you for your time.

By: Terry Keller Jr.

Look No Further...

When the Successful
Outcome of the Flight Is In Doubt

Any pilot who has taken a check ride – and reviewed the requirements of the Practical Test Standards (PTS) – likely will have seen that among the benchmarks for “Satisfactory Performance” is the requirement that you “demonstrate mastery of the aircraft with the successful outcome of each TASK performed never seriously in doubt.” Emphasis added.

Of course, that is quoted from the old version of the PTS. Now, that very requirement has been incorporated into the new definition of “Single-Pilot Resource Management (SRM)”, which has been included now as a “TASK” in the new versions of the PTS. Specifically, we are told that SRM is, “[T]he art and science of managing all the resources (both onboard the aircraft and from outside sources) available to a single-pilot … to ensure that the successful outcome of the flight is never in doubt.” Emphasis added … again!

A while ago, a serendipitous series of events experienced by a friend of mine, a fellow pilot, really got me thinking about that line, especially since so many pilots seem to continue flying long after the successful outcome of the flight should have become “seriously in doubt”. Here’s an odd example from the Northeast, where I teach:

“On January 15, 2012, about 1010 eastern standard time, a Piper PA-24-180 [Single Comanche], … crashed into Cape Cod Bay near Brewster, Massachusetts…

Read more...

Is Flying Really Safe?

Any person who is fearful of flying will be shocked to hear that Premier Flight Center logged nearly 3,500 flight hours in 2011! The inspiration for this article came about when several people at our flight school were having a discussion about how to advance awareness about how safe flying really is and how to combat the general public’s negative perceptions of flying.

During the discussion, one person remarked that, “We know flying is safe because we at Premier fly a lot, and we do it safely. I mean, clearly we couldn’t fly as much as we do without problems if flying wasn’t a basically safe activity.” Still: How to present that…

Then, I realized we should present just that: The numbers! And when I got them, we were pleasantly surprised by them! We found our airplanes flew 3,491 hours in 2011. What made it so surprising was that, here in the Northeast, most people’s recollection of the year 2011 is best summed up as, “Wow, can you believe all that weather?!?”

What amazed us even more though was Read more...

Ever Wonder: Which
Airline Has Which Call Sign?

Have you ever been on frequency with air traffic control (ATC) and heard an airliner’s call sign and wondered just which airline it is? I sure have!

Premier Flight Center, where I work, is a busy flight school based out of Hartford-Brainard Airport (KHFD) in Hartford, Connecticut, and we’ve got Bradley International Airport (KBDL) just north of us. We regularly receive VFR flight following, and we also do a lot of IFR training, so we are on Bradley's frequency quite often. Beyond that, from our corner of Connecticut, it’s not too tough to end up in the airspace owned by Boston or New York. Accordingly, I hear an assortment of call signs. Oh yes, and I’m a LiveATC.net fan as well…

Continental Airlines (pictured above) is pretty straight forward. They're called “Continental”... I figured out “Cactus” is the call sign for US Airways, but that only came to me through the media coverage of the comms between ATC and the highly skilled pilots of “Cactus 1549”, the flight that landed in the Hudson River in January 2009. I think “Brickyard” is another awesome call sign, but I never could figure out which airline they are.

Who knew?

It was a dark and rainy night... I was bored and at home so I began rummaging about the FAA’s web site (yes, I’ve been told I “really need to get a life”). Regardless, I found out that
Read more...

FAA Changes Regulations for Renewing Instrument Currency!?!

Did that headline catch your eye? A remarkably similar statement certainly caught my ear while milling about our flight school’s office! I couldn’t fathom having missed such a sweeping change to the FARs, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.
Read More...

Amazing
Miniature Airport

If you have ever marveled at a miniature creation, this video will leave you awestruck!

For the story behind this amazing model and to view some still photos, click here.

Lightning Strikes Passenger Plane Sitting on the Ramp

Mother Nature can be the source of the most amazing performance around, especially when it's the power of thunderstorms that is used to provide the display. Watch carefully, though the lightning strikes the tail of this jet, it exits through the nose gear and sends an object that appears to be a manhole cover, next to the nose wheel, soaring toward the approaching tug operator. Fortunately, it appears all of the ground crew were uninjured!