Living in the small airplane world polarizes between a time warp where nothing changes and a techno-political maelstrom where everything flies around the barnyard tornado style. Lately, it seems there are plenty of sacred cows zooming past my windows, so it seems a good time to touch on several subjects.
ADS-B Privacy
Not that I want to say I told you so, but back in our February 2019 issue of KITPLANES I grumbled regarding the inevitable governmental misuse of ADS-B. And I repeated some of that in my May 2022 column. Now we see Florida pilots petitioning, with AOPA joining in, after airports began using ADS-B data for billing people over landing fees. More Orwellian, AOPA cites FAA abuses of ADS-B in cases where the feds have brought “questionable” action against pilots in what the organization described as “legal water landings.”
Particularly odious is that, in the case of landing fees, airports contracted third-party businesses to do the tracking, thus establishing a profit motive for ADS-B abuse.
Most disconcerting is ADS-B was sold by the government to us pilots strictly on the basis of ATC safety and efficiency—other uses, such as enforcement or tax collection, were proscribed. But as predicted, the ease with which ADS-B allows tracking private citizens has proven too tempting a catnip for bureaucrats looking for an easy new revenue stream. The government working for your safety and benefit turns out not to have the integrity to adhere to its own promises and eventually turned to working for its own benefit at your expense.
Outside of government, AOPA’s statement on ADS-B abuses mentions “frivolous lawsuits against pilots for nuisance, trespass, and emotional distress, despite operating at high altitudes and fully complying with FAA regulations.” In other words, we pilots collectively paid “over half a billion dollars,” according to AOPA, to comply with the government’s ADS-B mandate—a mandate that, while delivering useful ATC capabilities, has also doubled as a crackpot’s spy network on ourselves. All said, this seems a good time to write your elected representative in support of AOPA’s position.
The upshot is there is talk—finally—about decoupling the ICAO number from ADS-B data, along with making the N-number registration not quite so public. Both excellent ideas that retain all the ATC benefits but with greater anonymity for individual pilots. But it remains a mystery to me why so many of us failed to put up a fight regarding ADS-B privacy as a precondition to installing the expensive hardware.
Sport Turbines
Did you see that Sport class air racing has rewritten their rules? They’ve dropped the old 1000-cubic-inch engine displacement limit in favor of following FAI weight categories. In other words, run any engine you want as long as total aircraft empty weight meets the category limit. This certainly frees designers to develop innovative new airframe and engine combinations, something I certainly support.
On the other hand, Sport is allowing any engine attached to a propeller, including electric, turboprop, hydrogen, gasoline, diesel, and so on. About the only prohibition is pure jets.
This, too, certainly promotes innovation, but I’m hesitant about pairing turboprops and pistons in short-distance pylon racing. This is because the power-to-weight advantage of turbines is so great over piston engines that it’s hardly a level playing field. One counterargument is turboprops are so thirsty, especially at the low altitudes pylon races are run, that they’re fuel-limited in the small racing airframes to run truly high power for very long. Well, maybe, but running against the torque limit of the turbine is a more realistic low-altitude limitation. And as it’s tough to hot-rod a turbine engine—that was already done by Walter or Pratt & Whitney—there’s something of power, temperature, and fuel limits on the turbines.
The Sport guys say they’ve run the numbers and believe the turboprops are a fair fit, all things considered. For sure they know more about it than I do, so it will be interesting to run the experiment.
I guess it boils down to whether you want your racing to even remotely resemble real-world aviation where people want to fly fast and long in their hot-rod cross-country machines, or if you simply want to race and let the most powerful technology prevail. There’s nothing wrong with either philosophy, and given the formula libre thinking behind the forward-thinking, innovative Sport class, allowing any sort of propulsion with a propeller is the correct call. And I have to admit I’m a fan of anything goes, except maybe just this once I’d like to see the headlining Sport racers hone the same technology most of those watching can benefit from. As “affordable” and “fuel-economical” turbines still seem techno nonstarters, they remain distant from the piston reality you and I can aspire to. If the racers usher in a new turbine era for general aviation, then so much the better.
There’s also the much better reliability of turbines compared to pistons. Turbines promised to eliminate piston power in professional auto racing back in the ’60s before they were outright banned. And in Unlimited boat racing, the big hydrofoils almost universally run old helicopter turbines as they run harder and last longer than 80-year-old airplane engines boosted with big turbos. In short, where turbines are allowed in motorsport, they tend to dominate, but only because their drunk-sailor fuel consumption and heinous cost are tolerated in the win-at-all-costs racing environment.
We’ll see how the new Sport regulations pan out (mainly for the better, I say). It’s likely very few turbines will show, especially in the short term, if for no other reason than cost. Maybe the turbine hares that do show will spur power and reliability gains in the piston ranks. Or turbines could be tricked past the laws of physics to return greater fuel economy. Having been wrong before, I’ll happily be wrong again if the pistons and turbines happily coexist around the pylons.
AirVenture as a Pilgrim
As a West Coaster, it’s not unusual to run into an airplane type who’s never been to Oshkosh, much less AirVenture. In conversation recently with one so deprived, I was asked how to best attend on a budget. My short answer is fly commercially to Milwaukee or Chicago, rent a car, and camp. This is the least expensive, albeit luggage-intensive, option because you must schlep tent pegs, goose down, and a stove. But the weather always goes bad in any three-day period (frog-strangling rain), so a very effective step-up is to rent a motorhome. It’s far more weather-tight than a tent, and provisions are easily bought in downtown Oshkosh and not lugged as carry-on baggage.
The one alternative to camping is renting a dorm room at University of Wisconsin for very reasonable rates. There are shuttle buses to and from the event, and EAA’s AirVenture website has the details.
And Roswell
Speaking of pilgrims, everyone headed to Roswell for the National Air Races in September will be breaking in an all-new venue. We all know the few motel rooms were spoken for long ago, but with over 400 recreational vehicle parking spots (dry, no hookups) and daily arrival/departure windows for private aircraft right at the races (yes!), it seems there are workarounds to the traditional motel and rental car bundle. See you there!
