Doe Mac McClellan Write For EAA?

[Kyle Boatright]

The sum of the thread drift here is epic...

<not picking on anyone at all, just commenting>

[WLIU]

Well, to get back to the original topic, reading about how airlines operate safely leaves me quickly skipping to the next article. An airline captain shows up at the airplane knowing that dispatch has calculated the weight and balance, the maintenance department has gone over the airplane, the first officer has done the preflight walk around, the ramp crew has loaded on fuel and bags, and the cabin crew will make sure that all of the pax are seated, belted, and briefed. Both crew members up front have been through their 6 month sim rides where they get to try to handle fires, system failures, and other breakdowns after they try rolling the sim on their first takeoff. If ATC needs to change their routing it pops up on the ACARS screen. Airline operations are like recreational aviation how?

Best of luck,

Wes
N78PS

[Jeff Boatright]

Read the wiki entry and pay close attention to the part about Hamilton University....

Which is why I wrote what I wrote very carefully. His experience in the industry is a matter of record. Beyond that, I don't know nuttin' about nuttin'...

[Victor Bravo]

Getting back to the question of Mr. McClellan's relevance to EAA....

Recently I posted a comment that included the idea that all of this is probably not all Mac's fault. I stand by that, which is why I offered an apology. My reasons for this are that when Rod Hightower came to my area on his grassroots tour stop (Van Nuys, CA, a couple of years ago), he made a comment in response to someone in the crowd.

The person had asked Rod about a large number of the members being upset with EAA's focus shifting away from Paul's original vision, and those members' annoyance over everything that came with that shift.

Mr. Hightower's response was that he saw EAA as a living, growing, and evolving organization, and that he personally had put in place or personally supported some changes that would broaden EAA's appeal, and address other groups within aviation that EAA had not been fully represented within EAA. Not a verbatim quote, but this is pretty accurate.

Most of us in the audience took this to mean that he defended or supported the EAA focus shift (in the direction that the Mac question represents). I don't remember whether Mac was brought in to EAA during Rod's tenure, or at the end of Tom's tenure, or under Jack.

So there is a perfectly good possibility that someone from EAA called Mac McClellan on the phone one day, and said to him "Hey Mac, we want to steer EAA in a new direction to include more IFR Baron drivers, and pontificate about fifty grand worth of glass panels, and tell turbine cross country stories... and we want YOU to come in and start writing about all this stuff, and we're going to remove a bunch of small homebuilt content in the magazine to make room for you, and they're all going to love you !"

If I were Mac McClellan and I got that phone call, I would afterburner myself right out of Flying and right over to Oshkosh, and start writing about Barons and leather interiors and flying with epaulets on your shoulders... and I'd sit there all happy and proud that I was doing the right thing.

So before we (including myself) point any blame directly at him personally, we really ought to have the intel on where this shift came from.

If Tom or Rod or Jack made the decision to change EAA away from the original concept, toward being more like AOPA, and start appealing more to Mac's audience... and poor Mac is just doing what he was told to do, then we need to address our "opinion" to Tom or Rod or Jack.

If Tom or Rod or Jack wanted to return EAA closer to Paul's version, and publish more articles about carving your own propeller for your Volksplane... and Mac came barging in and told them to get out of the way because he knew what was best for aviation, and all EAA members should start becoming less interested in homebuilts and more interested in turbine cross country... then our problem is with Mac personally.

So, in fairness, I think we need to know what Mac was told, and what he did or didn't "push" on EAA.

[miemsed]

Getting back to the question of Mr. McClellan's relevance to EAA....

Recently I posted a comment that included the idea that all of this is probably not all Mac's fault. I stand by that, which is why I offered an apology. My reasons for this are that when Rod Hightower came to my area on his grassroots tour stop (Van Nuys, CA, a couple of years ago), he made a comment in response to someone in the crowd.

The person had asked Rod about a large number of the members being upset with EAA's focus shifting away from Paul's original vision, and those members' annoyance over everything that came with that shift.

Mr. Hightower's response was that he saw EAA as a living, growing, and evolving organization, and that he personally had put in place or personally supported some changes that would broaden EAA's appeal, and address other groups within aviation that EAA had not been fully represented within EAA. Not a verbatim quote, but this is pretty accurate.

Most of us in the audience took this to mean that he defended or supported the EAA focus shift (in the direction that the Mac question represents). I don't remember whether Mac was brought in to EAA during Rod's tenure, or at the end of Tom's tenure, or under Jack.

So there is a perfectly good possibility that someone from EAA called Mac McClellan on the phone one day, and said to him "Hey Mac, we want to steer EAA in a new direction to include more IFR Baron drivers, and pontificate about fifty grand worth of glass panels, and tell turbine cross country stories... and we want YOU to come in and start writing about all this stuff, and we're going to remove a bunch of small homebuilt content in the magazine to make room for you, and they're all going to love you !"

If I were Mac McClellan and I got that phone call, I would afterburner myself right out of Flying and right over to Oshkosh, and start writing about Barons and leather interiors and flying with epaulets on your shoulders... and I'd sit there all happy and proud that I was doing the right thing.

So before we (including myself) point any blame directly at him personally, we really ought to have the intel on where this shift came from.

If Tom or Rod or Jack made the decision to change EAA away from the original concept, toward being more like AOPA, and start appealing more to Mac's audience... and poor Mac is just doing what he was told to do, then we need to address our "opinion" to Tom or Rod or Jack.

If Tom or Rod or Jack wanted to return EAA closer to Paul's version, and publish more articles about carving your own propeller for your Volksplane... and Mac came barging in and told them to get out of the way because he knew what was best for aviation, and all EAA members should start becoming less interested in homebuilts and more interested in turbine cross country... then our problem is with Mac personally.

So, in fairness, I think we need to know what Mac was told, and what he did or didn't "push" on EAA.

Could it be the vast majority of members think there is room for many different types of interests and most members do not have any problem with Mac, Tom, Rod or Jack.

[martymayes]

Airline operations are like recreational aviation how?

There is no commonality Wes, but you already know that.
Besides, when I want to read a publication on professional flying, the authoritative publications are Pro Pilot or B/CA, not Sport Aviation. Those publications are written by people at the professional level, not a wannabe.
When I read Sport Aviation, I expect to find articles about Joe the Plumber building & restoring airplanes as a hobby or for recreation, because that is what EAA has represented for past 60 yrs.
This format change reminds me of the Coke/Pepsi battle back in the '80's. The taste of Pepsi is preferred by a large segment of consumers, so Coke reformulates it's product to taste like Pepsi. We all know that was one of the largest marketing failures of modern times. I would think that's not exactly a model I would want to follow.

[rwanttaja]

So Ron, DOT claims that there are about 223,000 aircraft in the general aviation fleet, and 10%, or 22,000+ are experimental, presumable amateur built. By your analysis, somewhere around 9,000 E-AB's are likely to be go fast, well equipped aircraft.

So we can guess that somewhere around 4% of the of the GA fleet is well equipped E-AB's. If the DOT assumptions that all of the GA fleet is active are off by 25%, that puts the well equipped go fast E-AB's at just over 5% of the GA fleet.

With that view, we can ask the question whether the E-AB's comprise more or less than 5% of the weather accidents. Do your analysis tools allow you to easily pull that info from the data? If so, that might give us an insight as to whether we think that DOT and NTSB are looking at the E-AB community fairly, or whether they are mis-analyzing the data.

My analysis consists of a reading of the accident narrative and an assignment of the accident to one or more of 51 categories. I haven't performed that analysis on the GA fleet as a whole, since there are typically ~2000 accidents per year. I like to have a minimum of ten years data, so that'd be a long process.

What I *have* done, at various times, is evaluate specific airplane types. Here's a summary of them over a ten year period:

Homebuilts:
Data period: January 2001 through December 2010 (ten years)
Registered examples as of 31 December 2010: 32,682
Number of accidents due to Continued VFR flight into IMC: 27
Percentage of total accidents: 1.3%
Percentage of total fleet: 0.082% (This is over the ten-year period)

Cessna 172:
Data period: January 2001 through December 2010 (ten years)
Registered examples as of 31 December 2010: 25934
Number of accidents due to Continued VFR flight into IMC: 30
Percentage of total accidents: 2.5%
Percentage of total fleet: 0.115%

Piper PA-140, PA-161, PA-180, PA-180:
Data period: January 2001 through December 2010 (ten years)
Registered examples as of 31 December 2010: 14785
Number of accidents due to Continued VFR flight into IMC: 32
Percentage of total accidents: 5.8%
Percentage of total fleet: 0.216%

Cessna 210:
Data period: January 1998 through December 2007 (ten years)
Registered examples as of 31 December 2010: 5417
Number of accidents due to Continued VFR flight into IMC: 17
Percentage of total accidents: 4.3%
Percentage of total fleet: 0.313%

The 210 to homebuilt comparison is interesting. The 210s should almost universally be equipped for IFR flight, but a greater percentage of its total accidents is due to Continued VFR into IMC. The fleet rate is interesting as well... even if you assume only HALF the homebuilts are active, and ALL the 210s, homebuilts still have half the fleet rate of the big Cessna! And note that the median flight hours is *higher* for the 210s... 1400 hours, vs. 1000 hours.

Ron Wanttaja

[Dan Johnson]

Add one more member who thinks Mac's articles are irrelevant to "sport" aviation. EAA has been on a path away from its roots. I used to enjoy Sport Aviation magazine but I may not bother renewing it anymore. It's become a monthly disappointment.

[Gil]

Just the opposite opinion here. I was thinking of abandoning my EAA membership two years ago, but the incredible improvement in Sport Aviation changed my mind. If one writer's articles bother me, I just move on, but the magazine overall is so much better than it used to be that it is now the first one I read each month.

[Infidel]

I cancelled my membership a few years back when Hightower was in operation as I didn't like the Corporate business approach EAA was heading. But since then, I've found EAA appears to be slowly getting back on track. It's a delicate trek and I suspect EAA is trying its best to appeal to the whole market and membership pool. Retaining long time members without becoming redundant and appealing to the next generation of Pilots/aircraft enthusiasts isn't an exact science.

I enjoy the SA monthly read and each new monthly arrival becomes my porcelain companion. I've yet to read any of Mac's entries as they don't interest me. Would I like to see something else occupying the space his writings occupy? You betcha. Then maybe I could stretch my companion's usefulness a little longer instead of re-reading articles until the next copy arrives.