Friedrichshafen/AERO 2014

My plan is to fly back home Saturday mid-day. Today we are away from the show. It was great to meet up with a lot of people yesterday but I didn’t get to check out much hardware

It’s been brilliant to meet up with so many of you people, and I do apologise for not recognising most of your forum nicknames and definitely not recognising most of your faces. Most embarrassing

Anyway, here are a few brief notes I scribbled on the way back with a 25kt headwind…

Outbound flight had a 20-30kt tailwind. Very little traffic – here is the ILS

Got hard parking OK – back to back with another TB20GT, with a very slightly lower serial number than mine

The Alps across the lake – St Gallen LSZR is somewhere under them

As usual, very few new exhibits unless you are into homebuilt/light-sports kind of stuff. Cirrus had an SR22 packed with yet more gizmos and costing yet more money. A very nice cockpit, and so much functionality (and so much multi-layered functionality in the menus) that a serious “type rating” course is a de facto must for anybody who isn’t totally crazy (or stupid).

Cessna were showing the C400, with a few people looking at it. Pipistrel had the Panthera; the original IO390 one

Socata had the TBM900; a TBM700 with a bigger motor

and more gizmos

Sebastian’s satellite weather product is very neat. The wifi version is especially a good solution. Later someone else showed me the Ipad app. Very tempting – except I don’t fly with an Ipad so would need to make sure I can get a win8 app.

I checked out the new D-C Pro-X headset, which they are advertising for both piston and jet aircraft. The D-C man said confidently it is as good as the A20, so I tested it in a “noise” booth down the road. It’s crap. It is far worse than the Bose A20 (I tested those two side by side) and probably a lot worse than the old Bose X. It is probably as good as a typical €200 headset. Very comfortable though and very good at attenuating voices in a noisy room, so it is a pity that it doesn’t deliver in a real environment. Would be good for a night club DJ, or if your wife shouts at you No good for a piston aircraft, unless you like punishment. And at some $700 it costs too much to be used in a flying club environment.

Avidyne’s IFD540 does look very nice. The user interface is very well implemented, with a top class touch screen job. You can also pinch-zoom, which the GTN750 doesn’t do. The panning is similar to the GTN750; perhaps slightly smoother and with a better implemented inertia. The 540 can however do most (all?) things with the knob too, and entering a typical European airway route is very very slick, with the correct predictive logic at each step. One doesn’t really need the keypad, except for the departure and destination airport codes, because at each stage the logical choices are pulled out of the database. The man claimed that Avidyne bought every one of the ~150 bits of kit which the GNS530W is STCd for connections to, plus more, and tested them all for compatibility. It has lots of very nice features. Yeah, I told him they need to get their act together because the 3 year delay looks just totally silly; he reckons “summer 2014”.

The KSN770 demo unit looked crap in comparison. However the Bendix/King stand was pretty dead. I think that company is finished. They were showing a couple of obscure high-end products, plus an AoA sensor. I didn’t even bother to harrass them over the KFC225

An interesting snippet from the ACF50 guy was that they regard it as good for 2 years. I have certainly found that when I do it at the Annual, the old stuff still looks like new.

The PocketFMS stand was very busy. Dublinpilot here was working flat out.

Warter fuel (Poland) are very ebullient about 100LL not going away and there are no supply issues. As I have often said, all the pilot forum stuff about oil companies wanting to stop making 100LL (because they lose money on it, etc etc etc) is a load of crap. They have their own refinery and can make whatever the market wants. 100LL has an indefinite shelf life if in unopened drums and that is an option for airfields in say Greece where there is low throughput

I bought a pretty cheap kit of graduated abrasive materials for removing scratches from aircraft windows. Any maintenance work always produces scratches on the windows, and sometimes they happen from grit in the cockpit cover (no matter how careful I am in keeing it off the ground, etc).

I sent a few hundred EuroGA leaflets to the organisers who said they would leave them out on some literature stands, but they were either gone by Wednesday lunchtime, or I was looking in the wrong place, or….

Much smaller crowds than previous years. When I departed today (Saturday) 11:20 local, there was just one plane on the taxiway before me. This is about 1/10 of say 2007. It was a pressurised turboprop Cessna and initially it wouldn’t start; he evidently expected that so carried a starter pack which he plugged in externally (with the cables hanging out of the door) and then quickly unplugged in and climbed back in, with his wife presumably standing on the brakes Before that I found myself blocked in by a parked SR22 whose owner positioned it about 1m to one side so I obviously would not be able to get out. A lot of arm waving eventually brought a couple of blokes on trikes who moved the SR22.

I had not booked the departure slot (required for IFR) but a call was made to ATC who “found one” just 20 mins after my filed EOBT. Hey what a surprise, given the total lack of traffic. Had they not “found one” I would have been absolutely stuck there, no question about it. Or did a VFR departure, with various stupid restrictions about how soon one is allowed to elevate it to an IFR clearance. One old-timer suggested I just fly VFR, adding that there was no weather all the way back to the UK and that one could probably fly a DCT all the way back to Dover. In fact there was “stuff” from 6000ft to FL140, west of EDNY, so a VFR trip would not have been a good idea without planning it properly. My Plan B, if ATC had forced a VFR departure and there was trouble collecting the IFR clearance, was something involving a 7700 and a climb…

The stuff thinned out later – this is FL140

In France I dropped down to FL120, hoping to get less headwind, but I got more! How does that work?

The ancient Thuraya 7100 satphone

worked faultlessly with my win8 tablet. I think I have finally sorted out the “local” end of the troubles (the spurious data) which arrived with the “operating system” called win8, although on the way to EDNY the phone had to be power cycled before it would work. Thuraya is cheap and usually works, and when it works it works great, and fast, but is no good for a product you might be selling commercially. I have met some Thuraya dealers and they told me they just tear their hair out over Thuraya’s customer service.

Those who say you can get wx from ATC need to think again… when trying to evaluate a number of alternates intelligently, it’s just not feasible.

Return route had some massive shortcuts

including one of about 140nm back to the UK.