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[Cockpit audio intro]
This time on the show, we’re going to talk about flying a jet. But first, we’ll take a quick detour to talk about how we’re going to talk about flying a jet.
I hope that Airspeed appeals in a lot of ways to a lot of people. I’ve always hoped that the primary appeal is that I’m not Mac McClellan or Peter Garrison or Jeb Burnside or even Lane Wallace. I’m a lot like the average listener. I’m a reasonably skilled and safe – but rudimentary – pilot. When I have an experience and tell you the story, I want you to be able to experience it through someone who’s a lot like you. When I fly upside down, I want you to experience what it would be – or is – like when you fly upside down. It’s more relevant and you connect a lot more with the story.
So let’s talk about what I am – and am not – for a few minutes. This gets important later on.
To crack my logbook open for you, I have something like 280 hours total time, about 190 hours of which is pilot in command time. The cross-country time is coming along as I build hours for the commercial certificate next year. My airman certificate says airplane single- and multi-engine land, single-engine sea, and instrument airplane, and there’s a DC-3 (SIC) type rating on there. I also have tailwheel, complex, and high-performance endorsements.
I have a lot of different and exciting aircraft in the logbook. From the aforementioned DC-3 to the Ford Tri-Motor to the mighty F-16. But the larger-than-life tint that that adds to the logbook is largely a function of the aircraft themselves and my near-legendary ability to convince people to let me fly in them. Not my stick and rudder skills.
I’m not a mad-skilled pilot. In fact, I’m not even naturally wired for flying. I learned very early on that this stuff does not come easily to me and I’ve had to work very hard to build such pilot skills as I have. Often by flying the cookbook until I can internalize it to muscle memory. It’s no secret that I actually found the instrument rating easier than the private pilot certificate because I just don’t have the kinesthetic sense that I had when I was 17. Or 25. You get the idea. I don’t wear major’s oak leaves in Civil Air Patrol because I’m some ATP-qualified aviator. I took the easy way up. I’m the wing’s asst. legal officer. (And I’m here to help!)
And, speaking of CAP, two weeks before Oshkosh, I finished qualifying in the Civil Air Patrol glass-equipped Cessna 182T Nav III that’s based at Oakland County International Airport (KPTK), where I usually fly. I spent about 15 hours with Capt Tim Kramer, a factory-trained CAP instructor pilot, and another two hours with Maj Alex Craig, one of the Michigan Wing’s check airmen. In fairness to Tim and to me, the amount of time was largely driven by my desire to fly 50-nm legs so that the time would qualify for the commercial certificate. The new CAP 182s are all equipped with the Garmin G1000 and the GFC 700 autopilot, among other things.
Although the training helped to wring out the usual issues that a C-172 driver has with the transition to the bigger, more massive, and nose nose-heavy C-182, most of it focused on the G1000 and how to fully use the system.
CAP has the training focused just right. You use the avionics as little or as much as necessary to get the mission done. During much of the training, the GFC 700 had the controls from 800 feet AGL on departure to 200 feet AGL on the glideslope, but we flew it without the G1000, too, and with every level of simulated failure and partial panel in between. I feel completely comfortable at every level of automation and even took the airplane to Michigan’s upper peninsula and back IFR recently to prove to myself that I didn’t need a check airman in the right seat to really use the G1000 capabilities.
As far as my non-aviation life goes, I have a day job. David Clark has not yet called me up with wheelbarrows full of money.
I’m who you expected Alex P. Keaton to grow up to be. I worked full time as a banker and then at EDS and went to school at night full time until my eyeballs bled and I ended up with an MBA and a law degree. Now, ten years out of law school, I’m the leader of an information technology law team and an aviation transaction and finance law team at a 400-lawyer firm headquartered in the midwest. Still paying off those student loans, but pretty well established as a lawyer. I’m not made of money yet. But I might be in ten years or so.
Like I suggested, all of this might seem like more information about me than you require until you consider the phone call I got in late July on the way to Oshkosh.
I’m in the car loaded to the gills with camping equipment, audio and video equipment, musical instruments, shovels, rakes, and implements of destruction, and my seven-year-old son, Cole, callsign “FOD.” We had just finished taking a break visiting the Russell Military Museum on the Illinois-Wisconsin border and were back on the highway northbound when the phone rang. It was Rod Rakic of myTransponder fame and the consensus ringleader for a group of new-media personalities who were covering Oshkosh.
Rod said that Cessna had offered to let me fly the Citation Mustang, Cessna’s entry into the Very Light Jet, or “VLJ,” market and he wanted to know if I could make Appleton by 4:00 for the flight. Not being stupid, I immediately said “yes!” and notched the cruise control up a couple of miles per hour. I thanked Rod and hung up. Bite when you have the chance and chew later. That philosophy has gotten me a long way in stretching my boundaries.
Car time is my thinking time and I settled in to think about this opportunity. And the thinking was a little unsettling. Fly a jet? Really? Me? Am I in over my head here? I mean, yeah, there’ll be a mad-skilled Cessna demo pilot in the right seat, but am I going to make a fool of myself? Or worse?
And I guess this is where all that background about me comes in. Cessna – and, for that matter, all VLJ makers – focus on potential customers that are a lot like me. Pilots with advanced ratings and a reasonable amount of time in their logbooks. Probably more time than I have, but not a lot more. Pilots who want to fly their own aircraft. Pilots who want to fly their own aircraft single-pilot if the occasion arises. Pilots who have a need to get to faraway places with reasonable speed and who need flexibility about how and when they do that. Pilots who have the means, or might someday soon have the means, to afford a piece of an aircraft like this.
And there’s the G1000 thing. When Capt Kramer initially approached me about transitioning to the G1000, he made a point of telling me that getting glass cockpit experience would be good to prepare me for when I started flying jets and other high-end aircraft. In fact, I hear that from many different sources. Go get some glass training because it’ll be useful. You can fly more airplanes, the rental fleet is only going to get more glass in it so you’ll need it anyway before long, and you’ll be ready for transition to the more sophisticated aircraft on up the ladder.
I shrugged that off at the time. I did the G1000 transition primarily because the closest non-glass CAP aircraft that I could fly were a round-gage C-172 at Ann Arbor (KARB) and a round-gage C-182 at Flint (KFNT). Each at least 40 minutes away from my house. And the Flint aircraft would have meant another Form 5 qualify in the C-182. I really just wanted to be able to fly the Pontiac aircraft.
I’m not saying that the G1000 wasn’t intriguing. It was. But the G1000 doesn’t support targeting pods or AIM-9s, so it wasn’t at the top of my mind. And flying the G1000 with a couple of turbofans behind me never entered my mind.
But now I had the chance to put the G1000 training to the test. Can a guy with no more than 20 hours behind the glass really sit down in the left seat of a jet and have the C-182 glass training be relevant in a different airframe?
So, yeah, I was a little daunted by the whole “fly a jet” thing. But I’m in the middle of the target demographic in many ways. Skills, phase of life, and recent G1000 convert. Come to think of it, I was the ideal guy to fly this sortie. This would be an opportunity to put a lot of different ideas to the test.
Cole and I rolled into Camp Scholler an hour and a half later and stuffed all of the camping equipment under a motor home that I dearly hoped was Mike Miley’s on what I dearly hoped was the myTransponder campsite. I stuffed a business card into the door in case it wasn’t, and then pointed the car toward Appleton. If somebody wanted the tent or a low-end electric mandolin that badly, it was theirs. I was going to go fly a jet.
We pulled up to the FBO at Appleton about 40 minutes later and met the new-media horde, already in full swing with the various aircraft that Cessna had brought to the field. Rod, David Allen from The Pilot’s Flight PodLog, Jo Hunter from Futurshox, and Bill Williams from The Student Pilot Cast. They had already flown a demo in the Cessna 206 with Rod and David each taking a leg. Rod wishes to inform all of you that he greased his landing, thank you very much.
I don’t usually fly at Oshkosh. I had Cole along and media flights aren’t often the kind of thing that you can do with a seven-year-old in tow. The opportunities are usually in aircraft with a maximum of two seats. And the best ones require a parachute. So this raised an issue. What to do with Cole.
I’m sure that I could have had one of the new-media guys that I’ve known well for years, and in whom I have a great deal of confidence, watch him. But this was an aircraft with enough room, twin turbofans, and a mad-skilled Cessna demo pilot in the right seat. I asked Cole if he wanted to ride along and he, like his dad, said “yes.” Bite when the opportunity arises. Chew later. I love me my boy!
And this just adds to the perfection of the circumstances. This is a take-your-family-and-business-associates-places aircraft. Cole was in a position to evaluate the aircraft from his perspective as much as I was from mine. He’s flown commercially, but never in a GA aircraft. He has 0.2 taxiing around in the back of a Citabria, but that’s about it.
We walked out onto the ramp to see the aircraft and to meet Gordon Turner, the Cessna demo pilot who’d be in the right seat. Gordon gave us a walk-around and pointed out the features of the jet.
We flew N81WL, serial number 510-165. It received its certificate in March of this year, so it was a very low-time aircraft.
It’s a single-pilot certified twin-turbofan airplane. Power comes from a pair of Pratt & Whitney Canada PW615F-A engines mounted at the top rear of the fuselage near the tail root. It’ll true out at a max cruise speed of 340 knots and go to a certified ceiling of 41,000 feet with a sea-level max climb of more than 3,000 feet per minute. It needs just over 3,100 feet to take off and about 2,400 feet to land. Range is listed as 1,150 nm, presumably without IFR reserves.
It has nose and tail cone baggage compartments that let you take along 57 cubic feet of stuff. It’s unpressurized, so be careful of packing that bag of chips or six-pack of Leinie’s in there, but Gordon says that that’s not usually an issue and even says that it doesn’t get very cold in the baggage areas outside the pressure hull. And you can fit skis in the aft compartment, thanks to a recess designed for that purpose.
The Mustang has pneumatic boots on the leading edge of the wing and vertical fin and the airplane is certified for flight into known icing conditions.
The cabin is great. Passengers have six oval windows and club seating and it’s pretty roomy back there. I has a dropped aisle, executive tables, refreshment storage, all-leather seats, wool carpeting, and toilet, among other standard amenities. The back seats have a center console with storage, beverage holders, and a standard 12-volt outlet.
The front office of the aircraft is arrayed with the Garmin G1000 integrated avionics suite. As I alluded before, it consolidates all primary flight, navigation, engine and sensor data into three displays. There are two 10.4-inch Primary Flight Displays (“PFDs”), one each in front of the captain and the FO and a gi-normous 15-inch Multi-Function Display between the two.
The seats and controls all feel comfortable. You feel authoritative just sitting in the airplane. You can reach what you need with no problem. I put the HD camera on the dash with no trouble and had the MP3 recorder hooked up and sitting in the left seat’s beverage holder. I didn’t have a kneeboard with me, but had the sense that I could have had the kneeboard and a grocery bag’s worth of approach and en route charts stashed within reach without making the flight deck feel cluttered.
If you’re like me and you cut your G1000 teeth in the Cessna 182 or 400, things will be mostly familiar. I learned by using the right bezel of the left PFD and the left and right bezels of the right PFD. None of that in the Mustang – the other PFD is too far away. But it’s still pretty intuitive after a little time in the airplane. You’ll find that the altitude select and other knobs that you’re used to using on the left bezel of the right PFD are in a central location at the top of the panel. That makes sense because you don’t want dueling PFDs and inputs of those kinds are central to the flight so you want both the captain and the FO to be able to see the other hand going for those inputs and be reminded to double-check. And, if you’re a fan of centrally-located controls like the big red auto-feather buttons in the DC-3 like I am, you realize the value of requiring the captain to put his hand where the FO can slap it when the captain is about to do something stupid.
The Mustang has a three-axis digital flight control system that’s linked to dual flight data computers. The system is compliant with the Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum (or “RVSM”) requirements for flight at or above FL 290.
The engines deliver 1,460 pounds of takeoff thrust each. Full-Authority Digital Engine Control (or “FADEC”) makes engine operation a breeze. You simply have two throttle levers to worry about. In many ways, it’s a lot simpler than flying the average Apache. No mix and no prop to worry about. Just push or pull one set of levers. With an easily-felt detent for max cruise power. I’m sure that there are metrics that you have to monitor that we didn’t really get into on the flight, but I’m guessing that there are visual and aural annunciators that would keep you from doing anything thoughtless or stupid.
The aircraft has a ramp weight of 8,730 pounds and a landing weight of 8,000 pounds. Typically equipped, the aircraft has a 5,550 pound empty weight and it can carry up to 2,850 pounds of useable fuel. Do your own math for the passengers, baggage, and fuel to divide up a useful load of 3,180 pounds.
Cessna announced the Mustang program in 2002, flew the first prototype in 2005, and received the type certificate and made the first delivery in 2006. 2007 saw the first retail delivery and the granting of EASA certification. So this is still a fairly young program.
The program rolled out with initial pricing at $2.29 million a copy, something like half the price of a Cessna CJ1.
We loaded up and prepared to depart. Cole in one of the back seats and the others occupied by Rod Rakic, Jo Hunter, and David Allen.
So it’s time to light ‘em up and launch. A couple of notes here. Gordon handled all of the ATC calls. That was fine with me. I was pretty busy otherwise. I reached for the avionics whenever I could so that I could get a real sense of how transferrable by prior G1000 experience was. I handled most of the altitude, heading, and similar changes, including the FLC, VS, and other commands and about half of the radio changes. Other than the centrally-located altitude and other knobs, I found everything pretty much where I expected to find it. I hand-flew this demo most of the time. The exceptions were during one camera reposition, the time that we spent in RVSM territory at or above FL 290, and the descent and initial approach phases so we could demonstrate the coupled approach features. But it’s the piston-driver’s hands on the controls for all of the other phases of the flight, including the takeoff and the landing. And the steep turns and the – yeah, you guessed it – stalls. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Power-up was easy. One button per engine and a stroke each way with the throttle. There’s probably a little but more to it than that by the checklist, but not a heck of a lot more.
ATC had lost our IFR clearance up toward Iron Mountain and back, so we got a taxi clearance to reposition to the runway while a new clearance worked its way through the system. The airplane taxied like an Apache and was pretty intuitive.
Gordon and I had a quick discussion about north-up vs. track-up, or how the MFD is configured to show our progress. If you thought there was schism between glass pilots and steam-gage pilots, you need to overhear some of the discussions I hear between north-up and track-up glass pilots. I’m a track-up guy. North-up is fine, but I need to prepare mentally a little bit so that I don’t get surprised by the display if it’s north-up.
[Audio 02]
We have the flight plan set up in the G1000. The flight director is the part of the avionics system that says what control inputs are necessary to accomplish a given course through three-dimensional space, given airspeed and other performance parameters. The flight director displays a set of bars on the PFD that give you a guide as to what control inputs to command to make the flight happen. In fact, when you give the airplane to the autopilot, you’re merely letting various servos move the controls to follow the flight director.
I want to fly the airplane by hand, so we’re not going to use the autopilot just yet. Gordon points out the flight director display and reminds me to follow it. The display is the same as in the C-182T, so I have no problem figuring out what to do.
[Audio 03]
We turn on the windshield heater and take care of some other preflight items. Then ground comes on with tour IFR clearance.
[Audio 04]
“Expect flight level three-zero-zero . . .” Yeah, baby!”
Here’s the takeoff and the initial climb. Charging down the runway in a jet. Then we’re airborne and very quickly cleared to 13,000.
[Audio 05]
We set climb power. I trim up the aircraft so that the airspeed on the tape matches up to the bug that shows me best climb. We’re heading upstairs at something close to 3,000 feet per minute.
[Audio 06]
Gordon asks about Cole. Cole’s in good hands back there with Rod, Jo, and David. I gave Cole a quick lecture and stuffed a Sic Sac into the pocket of his cargo shorts, but pretty much relied on the others in back to explain anything that he didn’t understand. His eyes got a little wide when he first heard the gear horn in the stalls, but Rod explained what was going on and that phase quickly became Cole’s favorite part of the flight.
[Audio 07]
Side note: Cole is growing up with a severely distorted view of the world. He believes that it’s normal and common to drop by an airport that we’re passing and go ramp-fly whatever’s on the flightline. He’s used to seeing airshows from the EAA Radio balcony or the air boss’s trailer. I also have a real estate broker license that I use on occasion to help other lawyers in the firm buy homes. So he also thinks that it’s perfectly normal to take a Saturday afternoon and go walk through people’s houses when they’re not home. I don’t think he realizes that these walk-throughs are prearranged with the other broker.
Consistent with the view of the world that I’m mostly responsible for building up for him, Cole walked onto the jet like it’s something he does every day. After buckling in, he pulled out the retractable table, opened his backpack, and solemnly arrayed his toy tank and trucks on the table. Satisfied, he grabbed a Diet Pepsi out of the cooler and sat back, dangling a shoe from his toe, to see what further amusement might befall him. With a look on his face that said, “someday it will please me to remember even this.” No confidence issues with the boy, that’s for sure.
He and I will have a conversation someday about what’s normal and what’s not. But, then again, if he’s in the back of a jet, I’m in the front of a jet. And at the controls. I need to have that conversation with myself at some point, too. In the meantime, let the magic come on thick and strong. For him and for me.
Okay, back to the flight.
We’re cleared to FL 230.
[Audio 08]
After a frequency change, I’m futzing with the G1000 and note again that the knob I’m looking for is at the top center of the console and not on my PFD. Gordon notices and, further, notes where it would be on the PFD of, say, the Cessna 182 or 206. It’s pretty clear that he understands all of the G1000 implementations and, more importantly, understands what I’m seeing as I discover the minor but important differences in this implementation.
[Audio 09]
Okay, here’s another first for me. We’re passing through 18,000 feet, the boundary of Class A airspace. Every student pilot knows that you reset your altimeter to the standard 29.92 in Class A. But very few ever have occasion to actually do it. A display blinks to remind us of the impending change and Gordon points out a simple way to reset the altimeter.
I can’t resist leaning back and calling over my shoulder into the cabin, “Gentlemen, welcome to the Alpha.” T