– Steve Hitchen
Standard business practice dictates the fastest possible return on investment (ROI) period; mostly that's around five years. In aviation, when it comes to investing in developing new types, 10 years is not unknown. Vickers Aircraft is now 15 years into the Wave development, possibly the longest gestation period of any new type in recent memory. And CEO Paul Vickers is not apologising for that. From the inception, Vickers has always stated that he wouldn't set milestone deadlines, not even so much as an estimate, because he wanted the space to develop the Wave without the pressure that too often leads to shortcuts and a final product that is short of the original ambition. It's a gutsy approach; his investors must have patience and belief in biblical proportions. But time erodes everything, and that includes patience and belief. The Wave is now expected to market next year, and I think Vickers now needs to deliver the product before the market gives up on it. Patience and belief need returns on investment as well as money.
Piper Aircraft is trying to head off an Airworthiness Directive (AD) that, if taken to the extreme, could ground the world's PA28 Cherokee series of aeroplanes, and with them, the flight training industry. The AD will require the wings of nearly all PA-28 and PA-32 aircraft to be removed and checked for cracks around the bolt holes. That will be expensive and time consuming, and you can add the cost of correction onto that, which may mean replacing the wings completely. For many of the early PA-28s, that's a death knell because the cost will exceed the airframe value. The FAA is concerned that wings with cracks could separate in flight, which brings into focus once again Australia's ageing aircraft fleet. It came to light during the Cessna SIDs program that the aircraft manufacturers never thought their aeroplanes would still be in service over 40 years after they were first rolled out. That means we are navigating a great ughknown; one with a central contradiction. Piper has pointed (and the FAA agreed in 1989) that the inspection regime is actually capable of doing more damage to the wing spar connections than any extant cracks. That fact that the FAA wants to push ahead with this despite agreeing with past arguments leads me to believe they've run out of patience with old airframes. The AD may not come out exactly as proposed, but something is likely, and we can expect that CASA will adopt the final AD wholesale. For Australia, that's a bigger problem: our dwindling engineer population just doesn't have the capacity to deal with a sudden workload of that immensity.
Graphical weather forecasts (GAF) were introduced to simplify interpretation, and yet we can still get it wrong sometimes. That's probably because weather is not a definite thing; forecasts are accurate only to a degree and anything outside that degree is anyone's guess, sort of like flying an aeroplane outside its tested limits. Sometimes our desire to fly can cause us to read a forecast through CAVOK-coloured glasses, which I suspect is what led to the C210 tragedy the ATSB reported on this week. I can remember times when I launched happily having decided the weather would not be a factor, only to have clouds and viz spoil my day. Then, when I looked back later on, I could see that the GAF did contain hints, I just didn't see them clearly enough. Who else has done that? I doubt my hand is the only one raised. Aviation weather forecasts are always going to need interpretation; there's too much information to be delivered in anything but code. What's needed is better education on reading the codes and, more importantly, understanding what the information is telling you about the flight conditions. CASA has scheduled a webinar called Mastering Aviation Weather Forecasts, slated for 15 November. I've signed up in the hope that this will close what may be a large gap in my understanding of GAFs.
Nine days. That's all you have. Nine days to complete and lodge your 2024 CASA Wings Awards nominations. We're closing the collector on 10 November, so if you haven't done your submission yet, I would advise you to get it in this week. The judging panel will get to work immediately the collector closes because we're have a tight schedule to meet, and that means it's unlikely there'll be an extension to the deadline this year. Keep that in mind if you still have some work to do.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch