Tag: aviation

Posted on by — Leave a comment

A conversation with two exceptional pilots

A few weeks ago, I made the lucky acquaintance of two formidable pilots. I am constantly looking to learn as much as I can from better and more experienced pilots. For this reason, I was thrilled to exchange some thoughts with Filippo Barbero, pilot of the Frecce Tricolori (the Italian Airforce Aerobatic Team) from 2010 till end of 2018 and solo pilot from 2015 , and Filippo Fontemaggi, helicopter pilot for Search-and-Rescue and expert of flight safety.

Together they started an online channel called Aviator Channel where they discuss with subscribers about aeronautical culture, airmanship and aviation safety. You can find it on Twitch and I strongly recommend you to subscribe!

The atmosphere of the channel is great! It quickly became the usual meeting point for a variety of pilots and aviation fans. After having discussed my incident with two RC planes in one of the live episodes, we decided to have a simple conversation on the channel on more general topics.

I find it truly great that two pilots of such standing spend so much of their private time for this initiative. Through the channel we all learn to make the sky safer and a more enjoyable place.

You find the full interview at the end of the article. It was done in Italian, but you can activate English subtitles.

Find here some afterthoughts about our chat:

The passion for flying

The passion for flying strikes everyone in different ways: Filippo Barbero told me that his interest in aviation started thanks to a course on aeronautical culture held by the Italian Airforce during high-school times. His contact with the world of aviation happened somehow late, but it was love at at first sight. He then followed the course to obtain the glider pilot license and this set in motion all the steps that followed and for which we all know him.

Filippo Fontemaggi had a different trigger. He admitted smiling that, like many of his generation, he was charmed by the movie Top Gun and similar Hollywood movies. At the same time, he had a genuine and deeptly-rooted passion, which his mother supported all the way.

Indeed, often parents with a different background think of aviation as a merely practical activity. They don’t consider that pilots must continuously train on a variety of topics and get tested regularly on their knowledge and skills.

Also, training as a pilot can become the way to to serve one’s country. Both pilots, indeed, trained with the Italian Airforce. After the first contact with an operative unit, they knew the Airforce was their natural environment.

The value of the military training

A few minutes into our chat, it became very clear to me to what extent the training and the professional environment are key distinctive elements. Military values revolve around the importance of the team to achieve complex goals.

Also, a constant stream of feedback characterises the environment in an operative unit. Its aim is to fine-tune the skills of each pilot to the highest standard.

As civilian and private pilots there is much we can learn from this world. Honesty, respect and transparency are simple qualities we should particularly observe and value when flying.

Stress and fear

Filippo Barbero served with the Airforce in theatres of operations before joining the National Aerobatic Team (in Italian “PAN”). Filippo Fontemaggi performed search and rescue mission for the Airforce in high-risk environments. Because of the nature of these activities, I wanted to ask about their relationship with stress and fear, a topic that many pilots avoid talking about.

It is normal and even healthy to feel stress when performing a complex task, especially when it’s something new. The stress is a way for our brain to keep alert. However, if a pilot feels fear before a flight, this should be taken as a warning signal about the quality of their training.

For military pilots, taking-off for a specific assignment is a duty. The mindset is therefore very different from that of a leisure pilot, who can decide whether to take-off or not depending on the spur of the moment.

Also, the purpose is very distant: an Airforce pilot has a concrete task to complete. Generally a mission which is critical for the life of others. A leisure pilot generally flies for more abstract -although merit worthy- reasons, like fulfill their own sense of achievement or simply enjoy the view.

Watch the full interview

The interview was conducted in Italian. However, you can activate the subtitles pressing the ‘CC’ button and then switch to English clicking on the ‘settings’ icon.

Click here to access the full interview.

More about the channel

Many of the past episodes can be found on the Youtube channel. This way you can also benefit of the auto-translated captions.

Here some of my favourites:

Posted on by

A very special passenger

A few times I have offered her old to join me for a flight. She generally declined in various ways, ranging from a diplomatic “oh today is not a good day, what about tomorrow?” to a more direct “No, I don’t want to!”

Still flying with her remained a big dream for me.

A few weeks ago, a friend with whom I was supposed to fly called me in the morning to say he could not join.

“Well” I thought “perhaps this is the time”. So without inquiring or explaining too much, I told my daughter and my wife that I needed to go to the airport and whether they wanted to come with me. Once there, I asked the little one whether she would like to fly with Dad and see our house from the sky. Her excited smile mattered the world to me. I walked her to the DA40, which was waiting for us out of the hangar, did the walk around with her, answering to any question she might have and then sat her in the plane.

She loved talking through the headset. It was so funny to see how she tried to act and talk through the mic as professional as a six year-old can. The day was relatively calm, but we felt a couple of bumps here and there. I explained to her this was normal and she wasn’t scared at all. She loved to watch the town and the fields from a 1000 ft. Eventually we flew over our home. When she recognised it, she could not contain her excitement. “Papa, that is our home! Look!”

We headed back and, after landing, completing the final checklist and removing the headset, she looked at me and told me the words that every pilot and father would like to hear: “Papa it was the most beautiful thing I have ever done! I want to come with you every time you fly!”…. she waited a few more instants and then again: “Papa, can I give you a kiss?”

I wanted to share with you this very emotional moment for me. Did you fly with your kids? How was it? Feel free to drop me a line!

Posted on by

Flying the knife edge

I have to apologise to all of you for such a long break. Unfortunately, this is the collateral effect of excessive work and study. The good news is that finally I found time to publish my review of a fantastic book. This volume, without any question, is now one of my favourite books about aviation and a must-read: “Flying the knife edge” by Matthew McLaughlin.

I cannot recommend enough this book to anyone interested in aviation, regardless whether they have a pilot license or have absolutely no clue about what bush-flying is. “Flying the knife edge” is one of the most comprehensive, entertaining and informative books on aviation.

It is basically about Matt’s experience as bush pilot in one of the most dangerous areas of the globe for a pilot, Papua New Guinea. However, there is so much more to this book: the story about the author’s struggle and challenges to become an airline pilot is accompanied by brief historical and technical insights and also some very funny accounts.

Flying in Papua, before turbo-prop planes became common, meant flying with very thin safety margins between short unpaved and unforgiving landing strips, “on the knife edge” one would indeed say. The descriptions of certain flights flight or approaches will take your breath away and ‘glue’ you to the pages until you know the not-always-positive ending.

Just to give you a flavour, imagine a place with little or no radio navigation aid at all, a deadly territory where entering the wrong valley means having no way out and on some landing strip there’s no go-around as a vertical rocky wall stand in front of you at the end of the runway.

As I said, I loved this book. I loved it because it’s a well-balanced mix of all those elements that I enjoy in aviation: personal reflections about the life and risks of a (bush) pilot, history, technics, beautiful planes and friendship. Also it is always explained in simple terms so that really anyone can read it and enjoy it.

In many parts of the book I thought about the internal dilemma of how much risk is worth taking in order to pursue one’s dream. Depending on your “risk appetite” and most likely what phase of your life you are currently going through you will answer differently.

Also, one may wonder how a new MPL airline recruit would stand compared to an old-school pilot.

Please read it and let me know if you share my opinion.

Posted on by

Partenavia, Tecnam and the Pascale brothers

Perhaps not every pilot knows the names of Luigi and Giovanni Pascale, but for sure every pilot knows the company Tecnam, which they founded.

Tecnam is an Italian airplane manufacturer of general aviation and ultralight aircrafts. Their planes in both segments are famous for the astounding performance and unique design. For these reasons and for their competitive prices they are very common among flight schools and private pilots. However, Tecnam is just the most recent chapter of a history of passion and tradition which started many years ago when the Pascale brothers were just a little more than kids.

On 17 March 2017, Luigi Pascale passed away at the age of 93 leaving a space that it is difficult to fill in the world of aviation. I had the chance to read a number of articles about him and his brother and came across a book that best collects and transmits their passion for aviation, “L’Aviazione dei Fratelli Pascale” (Pascale Brothers’ Aviation, published by Art Studio Paparo).

9788899130121_0_0_584_75

In the book, Stefano Mavilio, who later became Global Marketing and Communication Manager at Tecnam, collected a series of historical documents offering a wealth of details about the context in which the first aircrafts by the Pascale brothers were born. There is, however, much more to the book than a simple account of dates and technical details. The excitement of the two brothers comes out of the pages like fireworks during the narration of how they worked night and day on a new plane or when a finished plane had to be finally tested. Reading these pages and the first person accounts of the two brothers, you are brought directly in the middle of the dusty improvised warehouse where the Pascales, in the late 1930s, started the construction of their first manned flying machine and, in the same way, after a few pages you can sneak among the spectators of the first successful test flight of the P48 Astore.

Luigi-Pascale-e-De-Bernardi-P53-1954
The P48 Astore, Luigi Pascale and Mario De Bernardi

The P48 Astore was the demonstration of the potential for the passion and the incredible brain of the two brothers, which went unstopped despite the young age. Indeed, they had been working hard on the aerofoil of their first flying machine and, during last phases of WWII, a Messerschmitt crash-landed close to the place where the Pascale brothers used to spend the summer. They made a deal with the owner of the land to collect the plane if after two days nobody had showed up to claim it, and so they did. This gave them the opportunity to reverse-engineer the systems of the German fighter plane and learn a great deal of notions that were later put into the project of the P48 Astore.

What surprised most people in the world of aviation of the time was the fantastic design in terms of aerodynamics and balance of the P48 Astore, despite the lack of previous experience by the two young designers. The plane flew splendidly when Mario De Bernardi, a famous Italian military and test pilot, took it for the first flight.

From there on, a series of incredible successes followed. Every plane made by Partenavia (this was the name they initially adopted) had better performance than most comparable plane. Partenavia planes won several air races, like the Tour of Sicily (“Giro Aereo Internazionale di Sicilia”).

2504a5e890ddc2b6e39fc03ba7bd40b9

However, the success of Partenavia somehow slowed down when it was acquired by a large state-owned company (“Aeritalia”) with its complex and slow system of procedures. After a few years, the Pascale brothers felt frustrated by losing that family feeling that kept the company together and the company close to its clients and obtained to start a new company called Tecnam. Under this brand they resumed the production of GA planes and started the production of ultralights in 1992, with the P92 model. Today Tecnam is leader in the production of GA planes for training as well as ultralight machines.

I read “L’Aviazione dei fratelli Pascale” over a couple of sleepless nights and when I finished it I was thrilled about the narration of the brothers’ pure passion for aviation. I am sure that everyone who loves flying feels the same type of excitement. After closing the book it is impossible not to feel some feeling of affinity with the two ingenious brothers. At the same time, I felt rather sad thinking about the state of General Aviation in Italy. In facts, GA there is rather seen as a game for rich kids and local regulators fail to see its potential for supporting the network of small and medium enterprises on which the whole country heavily relies. In this context, the whole sector has been heavily taxed and had to muddle through a highly bureaucratic and hostile environment. This eventually pushed also Tecnam to focus on the ultralight segment inlands and to look further outside national borders to market its products. Indeed, ultralights manage to partially escape the labyrinth of Italian bureaucracy, although with heavy limitations, and the largest stake of Tecnam’s revenues comes form abroad.

I would recommend “L’Aviazione dei fratelli Pascale” to all pilots, although I believe it is available only in Italian language. It is at the same time a valuable historical document and a beautiful tale.

Posted on by

Learning to ‘Bush Fly’ (#1)

Aviation is a universe full of very diverse planets. Commercial aviation, for instance, is a highly regulated bureaucratic world where every minute counts, where computers are everywhere and where, despite the beauty and complexity of the machines used, ultimately what counts is to meet the purpose of transporting people and goods from A to B in the most efficient way.

But for some pilots the pleasure of flying comes from the ability to interact with nature, to fly free from ATC orders and, sometimes, to tame a difficult animal. I love all type of planes and all segments of aviation, but there is a particular one that caught my attention and fantasies lately and that’s ‘Bush Flying’.

We generally talk about Bush Flying referring to flights conducted in zones of wild nature, like Alaska or in Africa, and no paved runways to land. I link this to the highest degree of freedom a pilot can experience: fly where you want and land where you want. Because of the difficult terrains, bush planes need to meet strict requirements: they need to have a high take off and landing performance, they need to be robust and their gears need to be sufficiently elastic to absorb the shocks coming from the manoeuvres on the ground.

Private bush flying in Europe is mostly done with ultralight aircrafts, because, according to EASA regulations, General Aviation aircrafts are generally prevented from landing outside certified airports. Differently, Ultralights are not regulated by European regulations and fall under national jurisdiction.

 

 

 

So, I had to decide where to move my first step towards bush flying and the perfect choice sounded like Brescia, in Italy. Indeed, there is a bush flying school there featuring one of the finest pilots (Fabio Guerra, former military pilot, B777 captain and famous bush test pilot and instructor) and one of the nicest bush planes one can find around here, i.e. the Savage Cub from Zlin Aviation.
A nice story about Zlin is that about their appearance at Valdez last summer. Indeed, the ‘Shock Cub’ (an incredibly performing cubber with slats and slotted flaps) of Zlin Aviation made a great debut arriving third in Valdez last summer, but what a lot of people don’t know, is that Zlin’s official test pilot was not available to fly it in that occasion. So, it was flown by a pilot that had practised only a handful of hours before the competition, instead.
The other reasons to choose Italy were that ultralights can land wherever the pilot deems appropriate as long as the land owner agrees and that the beauty and variety of the Italian landscape is unmatched in Europe.

Renato, the President of Scuola Volo Brescia, guided me through the main differences between General Aviation and ultralights and then showed me the Hangar of the school were a nice selection of ‘Cubbers’ were lined up in different set-ups. Proper Bush Flying will start only after I feel perfectly comfortable on the Cub and after the instructor feels comfortable with me being alone on the Cub.

So, finally came the moment to hop on the yellow Savage Cub for our first mission. The set of instrument looked rather minimal to me, but given the weight restrictions and that most flights are local and conducted in good weather it makes sense.

IMG_20170924_235309_060

We started training with some taxiing on ground. This is, indeed, the real difficult part of handling taildraggers. The reason is that the center of gravity of the plane is located behind the main gear and this feature makes tailspins easy to happen.

After a few back-and-forths on the runway, increasing the speed to train the control on ground we went for a flight. The Savage Cub is a lovely machine. You feel in contact with every part of the plane: you can feel the RPMs with your fingertips and the drag of the airflow when pulling down the flaps. Fabio showed me the slow-flying capability of the machine which are simply astonishing. With full flaps and maximum power the plane can remain in the air with the airspeed indicator close to 0. When stalling, the Savage Cub drops a wing, but the control on the rudder remains very good.

I performed a few steep turns, which in that plane means being able to circle over a tennis court and then we headed back to the patter for some touch and goes.

Landing on the Savage Cub proved to be the training I was looking for. While most tricycle will forgive you a slightly sloppy alignment with the center line and, once on the ground, the pilot can generally relax the muscles, the Cub demands perfect alignment and until the plane is halted on ground, attention must be kept to its maximum.

45 minutes passed in the blink of an eye. We had a quick lunch in a local ‘Trattoria’ and then headed back to the airfield for another session.

I felt more confident and excited, but the task was made tougher by a quick shower that passed by. The rain covering the windshield and the low contrast of the grass runway made almost impossible for me to estimate the distance from ground. We went around, and at the following round I managed to use some more peripheral vision to calculate the distance and made a rather good landing for the standard of the day.

We trained traffic patterns until the rain became too intense and we had to stop. I was mentally depleted, but I had one of the most satisfying flight training sessions in my life.

I was happy, at intervals I managed to ‘tame’ the Cub.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on by

Re-reading ‘The Little Prince’ 20 years later

As father of a 4-year old, while looking for some new books for her, I stumbled across “The Little Prince”, the most famous book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

I remember reading it when I was 7 or 8. At the time, I found it pleasant, but very cryptic in some way. So, I thought that it would be very interesting to go through it again, now that I am a grownup and a pilot, using the sweet excuse of reading it to my little one.

In facts, reading it now, around 20 years after my first time, that little book transmits a completely different feeling. I could possibly say that it conveys some of the most private feeling of the pilot “Saint-Ex”, but clearing the story from every technical details that would possibly bore the young audience.

One thing of the book that I struggled to understand was why and how the Little Prince was travelling from a little planet to the other. It is difficult to understand what the different small planets that the Little Prince visits are if one doesn’t know that when Antoine de Saint-Exupery started to fly, one of his tasks was to open new air routes for the Aéropostale connecting towns and countries. At the time, a remote town close to the Andes could easily be seen as a different planet. And people could more easily close themselves, thinking to be kings, but without knowing of what insignificant realm.

However, a theme – if not the theme –  that is central to the book is that of death. It is somehow never explicitly mentioned. When the Little Prince agrees to be bitten by the snake, he simply wants to go back to his planet. When I was small and read this lines, part of me was convinced he did actually make it back. I still think it now somehow.
If you have the chance to read some of the articles Saint-Exupery wrote during the years of the Aéropostale and especially about what happened when a pilot assigned to a long and dangerous did not arrive, you will immediately understand why death is something that remains unspoken. In facts, when that happened, there was only the silence left by their absence but often no confirmation of what had happened. A part of each of the friends and colleagues waiting on ground hoped for some different epilogue.

The book has certainly many other meanings, but you can read about them in any anthology. Here I just sit with my imagination in the room were Saint-Ex wrote his masterpiece and listened to the pilot.

I am happy to hear what does the book represent for you. Feel free to use the contact form you find under the respective page!

I wish you all a nice reading.
le-petit-prince-the-little-prince

Posted on by

The reason to fly

It is quite hard for me to say what it is that I love most about flying. For some pilots it is the uniqueness of the point of view that you acquire when you fly, for others it has all to do with the acceleration and the ability to manoeuvre. I don’t think all these aspects are mutually exclusive, yet the propensity towards one or the other determines what type of pilot we become.
Indeed, aviation is a mix of very different concepts. Just to mention two extremes, the strict, tested and orderly world airliners is very different from that of bush pilots, who venture into unchartered areas.
Also, aviation is not confined to planes and airports. It starts with dreaming and expands to studying, designing, writing and sharing.
I believe that all pilots share a common feeling about flying, although slightly different one from the other because of our different characters. These thoughts touch deep and intimate sides of each one of us, like fear and sense of accomplishment. For this reason, we are part of a very special and elitarian club, which I deem of the purest type as it is not formed on the basis of wealth or political sides, but on the commonality of feelings.

IMG-20170710-WA0008