The Devil's in the Details

Leave it to the AP to bury the story of CBS's forged documents inside an apparent indictment of President Bush's piloting skills.

I wonder if AP writer Matt Kelly or any of the AP's so-called "editors" have ever been near the left seat of a private piston engine aircraft, not to mention either seat in a jet trainer or the single pilot’s seat of a military fighter jet. I suspect that a first class seat in a commercial airliner is as close to the front of the airplane as anyone associated with the story has ever been or ever will be--unless they were standing on the runway under the nose of the airplane at an air show.

As a former private pilot, I have a few things to point out to the non-flying public regarding flying in general and aviation logbook procedures specifically.

First, the standard operating procedure common in civil and military aviation is to do a controlled "go-around" and set up for another approach if you don't like any little detail encountered during final approach. No reason to risk the airplane, let alone your own rear end (and potentially those of your crew and passengers,) trying to finish an approach to a runway that isn’t going well. Cross-winds, fog, other air traffic, problems with the aircraft, having a bad day, or just being human can and will cause problems that require another attempt at the runway. There are a lot of dead pilots out there who’s egos got them killed trying to fix a botched final runway alignment in the last 50 feet of altitude.

My own flight instructors used to love to pull little tricks like killing the throttle in flight to practice emergency landing procedures or suddenly announce "go-around" only 100 feet off of the runway. They did it repeatedly until I could do it perfect every time. We never once made negative log entries relative to executing either a practice or actual go-around. If you were flying solo, without an instructor or co-pilot, you were free to write whatever you thought was relevant about the flight. I usually made little notes for posterity like “beautiful weather”, “crappy visibility”, or “blew second approach to RYY (McCullum Field-Cobb County, GA) Runway 27. It was my choice and the comments weren’t graded like a report card or test paper.


In the last months of his flying career, Lt. Bush flew both the Lockheed T-33 jet trainer and the Convair F102A “Delta Dagger” which as a post-Korean War era single-engine jet fighter interceptor. The AP article seems to want to make some unspoken “ominous” point in that Bush flew the F-102A less and less as he moved toward ending his flight status, instead choosing to spend time in the T-33’s.

Doesn’t that make sense? It has been reported that there was a glut of pilots returning from Vietnam and there were few airplanes to go around. In addition to being more readily available, the T-33 was obviously easier and more fun to fly than a hot front line fighter. Couldn’t Bush have felt that it was better for the pilots who were going to continue flying to have the F-102’s while he got his hours in the T-33’s?

Again, for those that haven’t piloted an aircraft, I would suggest that flying a T-33 is about like driving a factory Corvette, while the F-102A is like driving a Grand Prix race car with guns and missile pods. They both get you to where you are going, but latter requires a lot more work and concentration.

In the military, the way things work is that you go down to the flight line with your wings and your logbook, check out whatever is available that you are qualified to fly (and current on), they gas it up, you do your preflight check, start her up, and you go flying. My dad and his fellow pilots did it all of the time in the Army back in the 1950’s. Two of them would need to log hours, so when their duty would allow it they would grab an airplane and fly cross country to visit their respective parents over the weekend, returning the airplane a few days later with several dozen hours each in the logbook.

Of course you can reserve a given airplane or type of airplane in advance, but if I were President Bush I would not be taking chances in a high performance fighter when a little hot-rod trainer served the purpose of building flight hours at substantially less cost to the government and much less risk to his personal health. Military jets are complex assemblies of millions of parts, all bought from the low-bid contractor--and they are known to break more often than civilian aircraft.

And one last thing, being grounded as a military or commercial pilot is a mater of formality if you fail or miss an annual (or in my case--every three years) medical exam. As long as you are not caught flying without the appropriate medical certification, all you have to do is take and pass the physical to re-attain your flight status.

The media keeps harping on “being grounded” like it’s like being sent to the principal’s office or being expelled from school. I’m grounded right now because I haven’t taken a FAA 3rd Class Medical Exam since 1995. But I could take and exam for $75, get a half dozen hours of refresher training, and be right back in the sky for you all to worry about while I fly over your homes and offices.

Sorry Associated Press, but the devil is in the details, and the Internet Bloggers are checking facts and coming up with LOTS of details.