Marc Liebman's Blog, page 50

Proofreading and Book Block Blues

It seems that something always happens during the last stage of converting an edited, proofread manuscript into finished/published book. At this point, the proofreader turns the book over to the author for one last read through.

As the writer, I read it one more time and send any changes back to be incorporated in what is known as the “book block.” The book block is the first step in converting a Word or Pages document into a format that looks like an e-book. As an author, it is the first time you see it with the ISBN number, all the printer info that is on the book, the type face and how it appears, page by page.

Again, the publishing house sends it back to the author for another read through. At the end, if you like it, you complete the sign-off form and send it back to the publisher. Two to three weeks later, it is released in both e-book and hard copy.

I’m super sensitive to the proofreading aspect of it because I am a terrible proofreader. When Cherubs 2 first came out, it was an unmitigated disaster. There were hundreds of typos and reviewers hammered the book (that means me) for it. Furious, I had Fireship pull it off the market. We got most of it fixed, but in my mind, it needs another read through and proofing.

After I’ve written the first draft, edited it several, sometimes a dozen times or more and then gone through the editing process, I don’t “see” what’s on the page. Version control is critical throughout the editing process and even more so at this stage. If someone doesn’t maintain the “golden copy,” things can get bollixed up in a hurry.

What I’ve tried to do at this stage is make sure that only one person is working on the manuscript at a time. That’s easy for me to say and do, but not so with the publisher. They have editors, proofreaders and technicians who create the book block and one would think that there is a linear flow through the company. At least it should be, but it is not.

Now, each time I get a book block, I force myself to read it out loud to find any typos or sentences that don’t read well. It forces you to look at the page with a different part of your brain. Then, when the book block comes back with the changes, one has to go through it again and make sure the changes are made. So again, version control is key. He or she who has the golden copy is the ONLY one who can make changes. When that person is done, he/she passes it on to the next person in the production chain.

It took four versions of the book block of Inner Look to get it right! There should have been only two. Version control, or the lack of it, bit us in the butt.

The good news is that Inner Look made its debut on March 12th, 2017. YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!

Marc Liebman

March 2017

Proofreading and Book Block Blues

It seems that something always happens during the last stage of converting an edited, proofread manuscript into finished/published book. At this point, the proofreader turns the book over to the author for one last read through.

As the writer, I read it one more time and send any changes back to be incorporated in what is known as the “book block.” The book block is the first step in converting a Word or Pages document into a format that looks like an e-book. As an author, it is the first time you see it with the ISBN number, all the printer info that is on the book, the type face and how it appears, page by page.

Again, the publishing house sends it back to the author for another read through. At the end, if you like it, you complete the sign-off form and send it back to the publisher. Two to three weeks later, it is released in both e-book and hard copy.

I’m super sensitive to the proofreading aspect of it because I am a terrible proofreader. When Cherubs 2 first came out, it was an unmitigated disaster. There were hundreds of typos and reviewers hammered the book (that means me) for it. Furious, I had Fireship pull it off the market. We got most of it fixed, but in my mind, it needs another read through and proofing.

After I’ve written the first draft, edited it several, sometimes a dozen times or more and then gone through the editing process, I don’t “see” what’s on the page. Version control is critical throughout the editing process and even more so at this stage. If someone doesn’t maintain the “golden copy,” things can get bollixed up in a hurry.

What I’ve tried to do at this stage is make sure that only one person is working on the manuscript at a time. That’s easy for me to say and do, but not so with the publisher. They have editors, proofreaders and technicians who create the book block and one would think that there is a linear flow through the company. At least it should be, but it is not.

Now, each time I get a book block, I force myself to read it out loud to find any typos or sentences that don’t read well. It forces you to look at the page with a different part of your brain. Then, when the book block comes back with the changes, one has to go through it again and make sure the changes are made. So again, version control is key. He or she who has the golden copy is the ONLY one who can make changes. When that person is done, he/she passes it on to the next person in the production chain.

It took four versions of the book block of Inner Look to get it right! There should have been only two. Version control, or the lack of it, bit us in the butt.

The good news is that Inner Look made its debut on March 12th, 2017. YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!

Marc Liebman

March 2017

Tomahawk Roll

No, it is not a type of Indian – native or Southwest Asian – type of bread.  The Tomahawk was the name of a primary trainer designed in the 1976 -1977 to compete with Cessna’s 150/152 series of aircraft.  One of the complaints about the Cessna products were that the high wing restricted visibility and they were hard to spin.   Spin recoveries is a part of the private pilot training syllabus.

To recover from a spin in the Cessna, all the student had to do was release the controls and the airplane would fly out.  This forced the instructor or student to hold the airplane in a spin that is not a habit pattern one wants to develop.

If you stalled the Tomahawk and let it fall off on a wing, it would enter a spin.  To recover, the pilot had to lower the nose, push opposite rudder until the rotation slowed or stopped and then ease back on the yoke to raise the nose and stop the descent.

The roll rate of the Tomahawk and its overall responsiveness also led Piper to consider an aerobatic version.  After all, Cessna marketed an aerobatic version of the 150 and 152 and Piper needed a competitor.

Piper beefed up the wing spars, reduced the span by a couple of feet to increase the roll rate, and made other modifications to one of the Tomahawk prototypes to strengthen the airframe.  For awhile, this particular prototype had the yoke replaced by a traditional stick, but it was quickly removed.  As Piper’s Director of Advertising and Sales Promotion, I got to fly the prototypes during product comparison tests and photo shoots.  Several times, I’d flown this particular airplane and spent a pleasant hour or two doing aerobatics.

Wingovers, barrel and aileron rolls were a delight.  Loops and Immelman’s were a challenge because the plan only had 125 horsepower and would run out of airspeed as you neared the top of the loop.  To complete a nice round loop, one had to dive to close to the airplane’s maximum airspeed before pulling back the yoke (or the stick).

One of the aerobatic Tomahawks made it into the company’s employee renter pool.  To fly it, one had to get an aerobatic endorsement in one’s logbook from one of the company’s instructors.  It wasn’t a big deal.

Late one nice day, I looked across the runway toward the part of the ramp where the planes that we could check out and saw the aerobatic Tomahawk.  At that moment, one of my subordinates who was working on his private pilot’s license and was learning to recover from spins walked into my office and rather than talk about whatever business purpose, I said, “Do you want to fly the aerobatic Tomahawk?”

The yes was almost automatic so I called over to reserve it for noon.  What better way is there to spend a lunch hour than doing aerobatics.  When we pre-flighted it, I noticed that the stick had been replaced with a conventional yoke and the seat back parachutes were already in the seat.  Perfect.

One of the joys about flying out of Lock Haven, PA is that there’s no controlled airspace for miles around.  The closest is around the airport inWilliamsport, PA, home of the Little League World Series and twenty-five miles to the east.  Once you are above the Appalachian Mountains that rise up to about twenty-eight hundred feet, you’re free to do what you want.  Just keep a sharp lookout for other airplanes.

We climbed up to about seven thousand feet and I let him do a couple of steep turns and then talked him through a wing over.  He wanted to spin the Tomahawk so we climbed up to eight thousand feet and he let the wing drop in a deep stall.  The airplane rolled over the top and entered the spin.  We both counted one turn, two turns, three turns and then he executed the proper spin recovery.  The airplane lost about a thousand feet so we climbed up and did it again.

I asked him if he like me to talk him through a barrel roll or an aileron roll?  To use a Texas saying, “does a bear poop in the woods?”  I described what he had to do during the roll and how to move the controls.  For a nose heavy, piston engine airplane its relatively simple.  Raise the nose 10 – 15 degrees above the horizon, apply full yoke along with a boot full of rudder in the direction you want to roll.  And, then as the airplane rolls inverted, take out the back pressure and apply forward “stick” to keep the nose above the horizon.  Then as the airplane passes through the inverted position and starts to come out right side up, you take out the forward pressure on the yoke.

There’s a lot of stick movement throughout the maneuver, but it is still really simple.  If done properly, the airplane doesn’t lose altitude or change headings.

I did one to the right.  It wasn’t perfect because I was describing what I was doing but it was acceptable.  Then I did another the other to the left.  I suggested he try one to the right.

My student lined up the nose on a road to use as a reference and promptly applied full right aileron and rudder along with almost full back “stick.”  The airplane drunkenly rolled well out of balanced flight.  Worse, as it approached the inverted position, the controls are reversed and my “student” never took out the back pressure.  The nose came down through horizon as we “split-S’d” out of the roll.  Unfortunately, he didn’t neutralize the aileron and we were headed straight down in a tight spiral.

We were already past the yellow line airspeed and approaching the airplane’s never to exceed speed to say nothing of having about two and a half g’s on the airplane.  Rolling pullouts put more stress on the airplane than just normally raising the nose.

I screamed at him saying “I’ve got it.”  He was frozen and his arms locked.  I yanked the throttle back to idle and then slammed my fist down on his left elbow in an attempt to break his death grip on the controls.  Thankfully, he let go and I stopped the roll and eased back on the yoke to get us out of the dive.

I looked down at the “g” meter.  The tell tale which shows how much g we pulled was over six, well over the plane’s 5 g limit.  We’d overstressed the airplane and luckily, nothing came off the plane.  I already knew that in the dive when the airspeed indicator passed the red line and he started to pull back on the yoke.  How badly could only be determined by a visual inspection of key components once we got back on the ground.  Worst case, the airplane was a write off.  Best case, no damage other than the time a mechanic needed to inspect the Tomahawk and make the appropriate entries in its airframe log book.

He didn’t say a word on the way back to the airport.  After we shut down, he shook his head and said “I’m sorry” several times.  Calmly, I explained that his over use of the controls was not the problem.  Freezing on them was and it could have gotten us both killed.

We wrote it up and the good news was that the airplane wasn’t damaged.  One of the company test pilots confessed that this one was beefed up to sustain nine g’s.  They never told anyone because they afraid someone would get really ham handed.

The really bad news is the that one of the company test pilots flew it back down to Piper’s plant in Vero Beach.  I saw on the ramp there several times in the coming months and the stick was back in it.  When I inquired as to if I could fly it again, I was politely told that it was now a test mule and only company test pilots could fly it.

Oh well.

Lobster Run

Way back in the late 1970s, I was assigned to a helicopter anti-submarine squadron based at Lakehurst, NJ.  Our annual training syllabus in the H-3 required that we take cross-country flights to practice navigation under visual and instrument flight rules.

We –that’s my co-pilot and me – decided to fly to the Naval Air Station at Brunswick, Maine, get gas and come back.  Brunswick was just under 400 air miles and, as a practical matter, as far as we could go without having to stop and refuel.  The H-3s we flew carried about four and a half hours of fuel and at 100 – 110 knots, you could fly somewhere around 450 – 480 nautical miles before one ran out of gas.

Brunswick made a lot of sense.  It was a Naval Air Station so if the H-3 broke and couldn’t be fixed by the base’s transient maintenance folks, we had a place to stay while waited for parts or the mechanics from our squadron to come fix it.

Another reason Brunswick was a popular destination was that you could call a local lobster fisherman who had access to the base and he would meet you at base operations.  Once it was known where we were going, several of our squadron mates placed orders and gave us the cash.  Another order came from my father who lives on Long Island.

We took off early on a Saturday morning and flew the usual route from Lakehurst direct to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, up the Hudson River (along with the zillion other helicopters in the New York Area) to the northern end of Manhattan.  As we turned northeast, the controllers would ask us to stay below 100 feet over the East River (why would we go higher?) until we were well clear of the approach path to LaGuardia’s Runway 22.  Then we would parallel the Connecticut coast to the base of Cape Cod, cross it and hug the coast until we got to Brunswick.

It was a bright summer day and the trip north was routine and fun.  We refueled, had a greasy hamburger at the Navy Exchange and most importantly, picked up the cardboard boxes stuffed full of lobsters packed in seaweed to keep them moist.

On the way south we had to make a slight detour to deliver the lobsters to my dad.  He told me where he would be in his thirty-foot sailboat.  Finding the yellow-hulled sailboat in Long Island Sound about a half mile north of the Long Island Power Company plant wasn’t a problem.  When he saw us approaching – we didn’t have radios that operated on the same frequency – he dropped the sails, fired up the engine and turned into the wind going as fast as the boat would go which was about 10 knots.

We – in the helicopter – would hover over the sailboat and lower down the lobster in the rescue basket.  Sounds simple.  It wasn’t.

Challenges came one right after another.  First, we thought that hovering at eighty feet would give us plenty of clearance above the sixty foot mast of the sailboat.  That meant we were hovering out of ground effect that meant we were burning a lot more fuel than we would if we were hovering at forty feet.  Twice as much to be accurate.  We were consuming at almost two thousand pounds an hour.

Second, in the swells of Long Island Sound, the sailboat bobbed, pitched and rolled a lot which made it difficult to get the basket down to the deck without getting tangled in the wire stays that kept the mast up

Several times, the wind and motion got the box and the hoist cable wrapped around the stays.  Thankfully, it was only one wrap and, thanks to the skill of my air crewman, it didn’t get serious.  It did, however, cause a major tightening of the growing knot in my gut.

Third, my dad had to deal with static electricity.  The rotor blades generate about 40,000 volts and while its not enough amps to kill you, it can give you a nasty shock. He was, as briefed by his son, well prepared.  My dad had wrapped the handle of his metal boat hook with extra rubber and ran a grounding wire down into the water.  The good news he didn’t get shocked.

So you have to imagine this scene in the middle of Long Island Sound, about a mile off Northport, NY.  Yellow hulled sailboat, mainsails draped over the boom, the jib lying on the foredeck bobbing along and almost hidden in the helicopter’s rotor wash.  Boaters could see a a nineteen thousand pound helicopter with gray and white paint and a fifty-five foot rotor diameter attempting to lower a small box of a dozen lobsters down by a hoist cable.

From the cockpit, we couldn’t see the boat.  All we could see is the spray from our rotor wash and the people on their boats taking pictures as they watched this spectacle.

In the H-3, the pilots could turn over control to the hoist operator and he had limited lateral and fore and aft control of the helicopter.  He used what we called the swizzle stick to keep the H-3 over the sailboat. I had to keep the helo at a steady eighty feet.  The rotor wash caused too many problems for the rescue basket and its box of lobsters so we tried 90 and finally at 100 feet off the water.

We were hovering well out of the cushion of air known as ground effect.  The closer to the ground, the stronger the cushion and the less power is needed to hover.  At a hundred feet, we were hovering in an area known as out of ground effect.  And, we were near the edge of the helicopter’s performance envelope.  If one of our engines faltered, even for a second, we would have crashed.

At a hundred feet, we needed a lot of power and that meant we were consuming a lot of fuel.  The fuel burn rate was now well north of two thousand pounds an hour.

Technically, lowering the lobster’s to my dad’s sailboat wasn’t illegal.  Unusual, yes.  Unauthorized, maybe.  Illegal and against FAA regulations, no.

What I thought would be a simple transfer of a box of lobster turned out to be a fifteen minute exercise in flying skill which created our fourth and last problem – fuel, or the lack of it.

The H-3 burned so much fuel hovering first at eighty, then ninety and finally at a hundred, that when my dad pulled the box out of the rescue basket and we started to fly away, we had less than twelve hundred pounds of fuel.  An H-3 burns one thousand pounds of fuel an hour at normal cruise of ninety knots.

From where we were, as the crow flies, it was about ninety-five nautical miles back to Lakehurst.  Assuming no wind, no detours, I figured we would land with about two hundred pounds.

About fifteen minutes out of Lakehurst, the low fuel warning light came on telling us we had about, emphasize, about three hundred pounds left.  H-3 fuel gauges are notoriously inaccurate as one nears empty.  When we landed, the fuel gauges indicated we had one hundred and fifty pounds left.

Just as we started the shut down checklist, the number two engine began to unwind.  We finished the checklist, applied the rotor brake and finished the flight “normally.”

BTW, all concerned enjoyed their lobsters.  But, I never tried to transfer lobsters to a small sailboat again!!!

Whaddaya mean no ice?

This story begins when I was about 11 years old and my dad, a career Air Force Pilot, was stationed in a backwater – at least in those days – called St. John’s, Newfoundland. In 1949, Labrador and the island of Newfoundland were combined to become the easternmost province of Canada.  Before then, it was a British colony and in the mid-1950s when we lived there, the world was passing it by.  St. John’s was the province’s largest city and became its capital.  Fishing in the Eastern Atlantic and in an area what as known as Grand Banks was its primary industry.

In 1901, on what is now known as Signal Hill, Marconi set up the first radio station to transmit and receive radio signals to and from the U.K.  And, in June, 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown took off from a field near where the current airport is and made the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic in a modified World War I bomber called a Vickers Vimy.  When Lindbergh made his solo crossing, he flew past Marconi Tower.  It was his last sighting of land until he crossed the Irish coast and the act was immortalized in the move Lindbergh starring Jimmy Stewart.  During World War I and II, St. John’s and its deep, protected harbor got its fame as one of the jumping off points for convoys headed to Europe.

When we lived in St. John’s, the Air Force had two bases, one on the eastern end of the island called Torbay –now St. John’s International Airport– and Harmon AFB in Stephenville, at the southwestern end of the island.  The Navy had a base on the southern part of the island at a small town called Argentia where Churchill and Roosevelt met in August 1941.

So much for history…  One of my many memories of living in Newfoundland happened one evening.  Earlier that day, my dad took off in a C-47 on a flight to Harmon and Argentia to do what is known as “flight check” the airfields’ instrument landing systems (ILS) and their ground controlled approaches or GCAs.  The Air Force had (or maybe still has) specially equipped airplanes that could evaluate the quality/accuracy of the radars for the GCAs and the signals for the ILS’s.  After they were “flight checked,” they were certified for instrument approaches.

When he returned, the twin-engine C-47 taxied up in front of base operations.  My mother and I walked onto the ramp and I ran to greet my dad.  He came out of the back door with a long screwdriver in his hand, a grim expression and didn’t acknowledge me.  It was as if I didn’t exist.

Dad climbed on to the C-47’s large main tire and jabbed the leading edge of the wing several times.  A huge block of ice fell down and it had a large crescent that was the shape of the leading edge of the wing.  Like a man on a mission, dad marched past my mother and me and headed into base operations.

I followed and watched him dump the block of ice on the weather forecaster’s desk.  It landed with a loud clunk.  He banged down the screwdriver and glared at the weatherman….  “Whatdayya mean no ice?”  Dad stormed out leaving a grim forecaster with a block of ice that probably weighed about ten pounds melting on his counter.

Years later, when I started flying, I asked him about that night.  He said that what made him so mad was that the forecaster had told him, during their weather brief, that there was virtually no chance of airframe icing that night.  He’d spent six hours in the air battling rime ice.  The chunk of ice was proof that the forecaster was wrong!

That was my introduction to the dangers of ice forming on the wings and fuselage of an airplane.  Little did I know later, I would be saying those same words!

Fast forward to 1977.  I was droning happily along in a twin engine Piper Aztec flying from Lock Haven, PA to our destination – Tulsa International Airport.  It was cold and snowy when we took off from the headquarters of Piper Aircraft in north central Pennsylvania.  Hundred knot headwinds reduced our groundspeed to, at times, 80 – 90 knots and it took us over four hours to get to Nashville, TN where we stopped for gas.

When we took off again, the FAA’s forecast for Tulsa was overcast with the cloud bases reported at one thousand feet and layers of clouds up to eighteen thousand feet.  The forecasted noted that it was supposed to start raining two hours after our planned arrival AND when asked, said there very little chance we’d encounter any icing.  We took and climbed to our assigned altitude of twelve thousand feet was we headed west.

A little bit of meteorology will help those who are not familiar with the phenomenon of ice forming on airplanes.  I could simply say that ice and airplanes, particularly general aviation airplanes is not a good mixture and you would ask, reasonably so, why?  What follows is a distillation of the essence of what is known about icing.

Airframe ice attaches itself to the airplane or helicopter when you have three conditions:

Visible moisture, i.e. clouds, rain, snow, etc.;
A “supercooled” surface such as the wing, fuselage, propeller or rotor blade of a helicopter; and
The ambient air temperature is in the “right” range for icing.

Airframe ice comes in three types.  Rime is a medium gray, gloppy mix, until it freezes solid when it becomes course and rough.  It normally starts forming on the leading edges of the wings, air intakes, antennas, the nose of the plane and the windscreen.  Its color makes it visible, even at night and forms at minus fifteen degrees Centigrade (5° F) to minus twenty Centigrade (- 4°F).

Clear ice is much more insidious.  It is called clear because it looks like a shiny new finish on the airplane and is almost impossible to see at night.  Clear ice coats everything and builds very, very quickly.  It starts to cover the skin of the airplane between minus ten degrees Centigrade (14°F) to plus two degrees Centigrade (36°F) to

Rime ice changes the shape of the wing’s airfoil.  The result is additional drag, reduced lift and worst all, increased airframe weight.  More weight and drag mean you need more power to maintain airspeed and altitude and that means you will be burning more fuel.

Clear ice forms very quickly and adds weight just as fast.  Think of clear ice as spraying the airplane with a thick coat of paint or freezing rain coating a car or road. Suddenly, one has to add power to maintain altitude and airspeed.

The third type – mixed ice – is even worse.  It is a combination of rime and clear and creates drag faster and adds weight quicker.  The good news it that it starts attaching itself to the airplane in the very narrow range of between minus ten degrees Centigrade (14° F) to minus fifteen degrees Centigrade (5°F).

Ice increases the weight of the airplane and increases its stall speed.  Rime ice also changes the aerodynamic characteristics of the wing.  Pick-up enough ice and the airplane will start to descend because you don’t have enough power to maintain altitude.  Or, it will suddenly stall and you wont have enough control to recover.

Suffice it to say, one should avoid conditions in which airframe ice could occur.  A discussion of anti- and de-icing systems is beyond the scope of this story other than to mention “hot props” on the Aztec.  These are propeller blades that have an electrical heating element on the leading edge and when working, ice can’t stick to the blades.

The other pilot, who had flown air cargo in the Northeast before joining Piper, had seen ice before and so had I.  John (I wont use his last name) is now one of the top three executives in one of the largest airframe manufacturers in the world.  When we took off from Nashville, we were confident we would get there ahead of any risk of icing by staying in air cold enough so ice wouldn’t form and then descending quickly through the air warm enough for icing conditions.

The winds hadn’t abated much at any reasonable altitude so we stayed at 12,000 feet and instead of covering the ground at 180 – 190 knots, we were poking along at a ground speed of 130ish.  As we crossed into Oklahoma, the clouds thickened and at our altitude, we were out of the icing temperature range.  About every hour, we checked with the FAA’s Flight Service Stations to see if they had any reports of icing.  There were none.

Both John and I knew that as we descended it would get warmer and the chance of picking up some ice would increase.  Before we started down, we listed to the recorded information for Tulsa’s weather and it said nothing about rain or snow.  The weather was was overcast with a 1,000 foot ceiling and a temperature of thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit or one degree Centigrade.  There was no mention any precipitation or local icing conditions.  On our initial contact with the approach controller, John asked if there were any reports of icing and were told that there were none in the Tulsa area.

The rule of thumb is that the air temperature increases or decreases by two degrees per thousand feet as you climb or descend.  As a precaution, we turned on the electric prop-deicers and the heaters for the pitot static system when we completed the descent check list.  The electrical heating elements in the pitot static system that includes the airplane’s airspeed, altitude and vertical speed indicators should keep any ice from forming.

I remember that as we were passing ten thousand feet, the temperature was fifteen degrees Fahrenheit.  It was too cold for ice to form.

Since I was the pilot in command and flying the Aztec, John monitoring the instruments and looking out side for, you guessed it, ice.  By the time we passed eight thousand feet, the temperature probe for the outside air temperature probe had a ball of rime ice.  I glanced at the wing and could see ice starting to form.

I asked the approach controller if we could descend as soon as possible to two thousand feet.  He had to clear some traffic, but about a minute or two later, he cleared us to descend at pilot’s discretion to two thousand feet.

By this time, the windshield was coated with rime ice.  Out the side window, I could see ice starting to block engine cooling intakes.  Rather than ease off the power and lower the nose when I started down, I trimmed the nose down to maintain descent rate of between 500 and 1,000 feet per minute down and let the airspeed increase.  Speed will get us through the icing layer faster and be helpful if we pick up a load of ice.

The vertical speed indicator had crept up to almost two thousand feet per minute down without me doing anything so I raised the nose and added power to reduce it.  By now, the rime had turned to mixed ice and the windscreen was opaque.  The small heated section of the windscreen in front of me had been overwhelmed by ice.

By the time we passed about four thousand feet, the beat of the propellers tossing off chunks of ice was just part of the noise.  They started slinging bits of ice around six thousand feet.  The sound of the first few banging off the plates on side of the fuselage designed to take this abuse was surprising at first, and then I ignored, concentrating of flying the airplane and maintaining my instrument scan.

As we leveled off, the Aztec mushed and wallowed.  It was struggling to stay in the air.  We were indicating about 150 knots instead of 180 and to maintain our assigned altitude, I had to go to full power!  Even then, I had to trade a little airspeed to maintain two thousand feet.  Thankfully, the ILS glide slope locked on and we did the landing checklist.  When my co-pilot put the landing gear handle in the down position, there was a groan and then a cracking sound before the motors got the gear doors open and the wheels down.

With the wheels hanging out and the extra drag, the Aztec started to descend.  With full power on the airplane, we were barely able stay on the glide slope.  There was no way the airplane was going to climb or fly level.  The question in my mind was I going to make it to the runway that I couldn’t see?

Flaps weren’t an option.  First, I wasn’t sure if they would go down and what if one side went down and the other didn’t.  Second, if they went down, I had no idea of what they would do to the way the plane flew.

Mixed ice had worked its way past my side window.  Glancing over John’s shoulder confirmed what the tower was now telling us.  They had freezing rain!!!

Gently, I herded the Aztec down the glideslope.  Flying it would be imply that I was in full control.  I wasn’t.  We – the Aztec and I – had come to an understanding.  It would go in the general direction that I wanted and we agreed to land on the runway!

At about 700 feet above the ground, John looked out one of the cabin windows and said we had popped out of the clouds.  I kept flying the ILS and kept the needles centered hoping that the flight check aircraft had them calibrated.  There was no other choice.  I remembered my dad and all the flight check flights he made in Newfoundland, Labrador and Greenland flashed through my mind.  He made it and so will I.

I didn’t look up because there was nothing to see.  The windscreen was covered with gray mixed ice.  At a hundred feet, John said we just crossed the runway threshold.

Luckily, we had a radar altimeter.  I had set the bug so it would warn me when we got to twenty feet off the ground.  It went off and I raised the nose slightly and the Aztec shuddered.  It stalled and landed with a thump on the runway.  The airspeed indicator said we were going about 100 knots.  The normal landing speed is about 70!

The Aztec banged down hard enough so chunks of ice fell off the plane.  One that came off was in front of the heated portion of the windscreen.  Now I could see to taxi and the nose of the airplane.   The windscreen had two solid inches of mixed ice!

As soon as I was on the runway, I pulled the throttles back to idle and taxied to the fixed base operator to park.  When we pulled in, I could see the trail of chunks of ice we left on the taxiway that looked like breadcrumbs.  Out on the runway, there was a bigger pile where we touched down.

Both of us got out and stood there in the freezing rain looking at the Aztec.  It was covered with at least an inch of clear ice on the wings and two to three inches of mixed ice on the leading edge of the wings, elevator and rudder and nose.  I couldn’t have lowered the flaps if I wanted to.  And, I didn’t have full movement of any of the control surfaces.  Later, we guestimated, based on the power settings, that we carried somewhere around 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of frozen water.  John admitted that  he’d never seen so much ice on an airplane.  Neither had I.

At dinner that night, I told John the story about my dad and his ice covered C-47.  Now I knew what he was so mad.  It happened to me too.  Two people – the weather forecaster in Nashville and the approach controller all said there were no reports of ice.  So we forged ahead.  The moral of our two stories is that forecasting icing condition is an “inexact” science.  Sometimes there’s ice there and sometimes, even though the conditions are ripe, there isn’t.  Unfortunately, often you don’t find out ice is there until you fly into it.

There’s what on the deck?

Right after I joined my first squadron after getting my wings, I started hearing stories about what happened on first flights as a helicopter aircraft commander (HAC).  Some were funny, some were scary and some were, well, just stories.

They all seemed to happen sometime late in one’s first cruise right after you get a check ride and voilà, one is designated a HAC.  Again, the custom is that the junior HACs either fly together or with more senior ones for a few weeks.  The idea is that it is a transition period so they don’t do something dumb and bend a helo or crash.

About a halfway through my first cruise, my annual NATOPS check was due.  NATOPS is an acronym for Naval Aviation Training and Operations Procedures Standardization that is a set of rules, standards procedures that govern how Navy aircraft are operated.  Every airplane has its own NATOPS manuals and there ones for every aspect of carrier and air station operations.

NATOPS came about as a way to reduce Naval Aviation’s accident rate back when it was implemented in 1961.  Its effect was dramatic.  In 1961, the Navy and Marine Corps had nineteen major accidents every ten thousand, non-combat flying hours.  By the time I made my first deployment in 1970, it had dropped to nine and shortly thereafter to two per 10,000 flight hours.

The NATOPS “check” consists of an open and closed book tests, an oral quiz and a flight check.  Back in the old days, the flight checks were done in the helicopter.  Your grades on each element went into your training record and your annual fitness report.  NATOPS also dictates the minimum amount of flight time both total and in the particular helicopter one needs to be designated a co-pilot and a HAC.  To make a long story short, I passed along with three other 2Ps.

Right after I made it, my best friend in the squadron – also a newly designated HAC – were told to take some mail, parts and two people to the guided missile cruiser U.S.S. Oklahoma City stationed about twenty-five miles off the coast of Haiphong Harbor.  The cruiser was about a hundred and fifty miles north northeast of the carrier U.S.S. America located at Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Other than dodging armed sampans and fishing boats, it should be a routine flight. Take off, climb to a thousand feet and head toward the Oklahoma City.  Just before the America lost us on radar, she gave us what is known as “pigeons” – bearing and distance from our position to the last known position of the cruiser.

My friend flew the outbound leg as the HAC and we landed, discharged our passengers and cargo, picked up a sailor going on emergency leave and about a half a dozen bags of mail.  It was a nice fall day and we took off and headed back to the America. 

About halfway back to the America, our aircrew man –we were only flying with one because it was a logistics flight, not a rescue mission – keys his mike.  “Ahhhh, Lieutenant Liebman, we’ve got jet fuel all over the floor.”

“Are you sure it is not residue from spilled fuel?”

“Yes sir…  Its coming out from somewhere on the floor and not dripping from the overhead or spraying out of the fuel lines.”

That was good to know because the lines are pressurized and would spray out of a pinhole leak.  Besides being messy, the fuel mist coming out of a tiny hole quickly vaporizes and will catch on fire if there is a source of heat.

The engines in the H-2 are mounted on the roof of the cabin, just forward of the main transmission.  The fuel lines are inside the cabin and run from the belly of the helicopter to up along the structure to the engines.  Brackets hold them to the airframe.

The Navy jet fuel is known as JP-5.  It is less volatile than JP-4 that the Air Force uses.  In fact, you can toss a match into a bucket of JP-5 and it will not burst into flame.  However, if one exposes it to a constant flame source or electrical sparks, JP-5 will burn.

“Unstrap and see if you can see where it is coming from?”

By now, on his own initiative, the aircrew man had stacked the mailbags on the empty canvas seats.  The pungent smell of JP-5 filled the cabin and the cabin floor glistened.  Our passenger was sitting crosslegged on the canvas seat and his eyes wide.  Even he could tell this was not routine or a prank.

First decision – How do we prevent the helicopter from becoming a fireball?

            Answer – turn off all the electrical equipment not absolutely needed to stay in the air.  Even though they were in the nose compartment, well away from the fuel, the wires to their antennas ran through the belly of the airplane, right where the fuel cells were located..

Second decision – Do we go back to the Oklahoma City or to we continue on to the America?

            Answer – even though the cruiser was closer, once we landed, its maintenance facilities were limited.  Plus we’d clutter up her helicopter deck.  On to the America.

            By now, there was enough fuel on the deck of the helicopter so that it was dripping out the doors and had migrated forward to the cockpit because in forward flight, helicopters fly nose down.  The floor under my heels was slippery.

The aircrew man happened to be one of our jet engine mechanics and he kept a small tool kit on board.  He was busily unscrewing the cover that provided access to the forward fuel cell’s boost pump.  Once it was open, he could look into the belly of the helicopter and see the fuel cell.

The forward one was dry which meant the leak was in the aft cell.  So far, the fuel gauges weren’t showing a big difference between the fore and aft tanks.  There was always some difference between the two.

When he unscrewed the aft access panel, fuel sloshed out.  He didn’t need to shine his flashlight into the compartment to tell him that the aft tank had ruptured.  We turned off the pumps in the tank and pulled the circuit breakers.

Third decision – How much fuel have we lost?  If it was out of the tank, it was unusable.

            Answer – It was unknown.  After a quick discussion, we decided to pump whatever fuel we could out of the aft tank and into the forward a.k.a. the sump tank.  The way the fuel system worked on the H-2 is that fuel is pumped to the engines from the forward tank.  As it empties, fuel is pumped from the aft tank into the forward tank.  By the time this all started, we had burned the fuel from the two external tanks.  From what we could tell, the forward fuel tank was full and not leaking.  That was the only good news.

The forward/sump tank only contained about 675 pounds of JP-5 when it was packed full.  That translated to about 40 minutes of flying.

The assumption we made was that we were landing in 35 to 40 minutes.  Ditching in an H-2 and surviving was not a sure thing.  Assuming we could put it in the water and get out, we’d be afloat in the shark and sea snake infested waters of the Gulf of Tonkin where we often saw both animals basking near the surface.

And, the gulf was full of fishing boats.  Where we were, they were primarily North Vietnamese who would get a nice bounty for bringing in four American POWS.  If the boat that picked us up was Chinese, who knows what would happen?

We turned the TACAN – that’s a gadget that gives a plane the range and bearing to the ground station – back on.  Thankfully, the helicopter didn’t blow up or catch on fire and it worked.  The America was less than 50 nautical miles away.  At our maximum range airspeed of ninety knots, it was going to be close.

Fourth decision – do we stay at a thousand feet or do we descend to a hundred feet so that if the engines started to unwind or we caught on fire, we could just plop the helo in the water?

Answer.  We decided to stay at one thousand feet where the TACAN worked.

At forty miles out, we turned on the UHF radio and declared the obvious – we had a serious emergency.  The ship wasn’t conducting flight operations but scrambled one our detachment’s helos to fly out and escort us back to the ship.

Right at about thirty miles out, the low fuel level light came on.  We now had twenty minutes of fuel left.  The good news was that the light and the fuel totalized now agreed.  The bad news was that we would land with less than hundred pounds of fuel that translates to about six minutes of flying.

I looked into the Plexiglas “chin” bubble just forward of my feet watched about. six inches of JP-5 slosh around.  My co-pilot had a similar amount in front of his feet.

When we touched down on the America, the fire crew had their silver suits on, their fire hoses laid out and charged and the fire truck was just outside the runway markings on the angled deck.  Thankfully, we didn’t need them.

We also didn’t need to shut down the engines.  As we were being chocked and chained down, the engines started to unwind.  The front tank was empty.

After they pumped out the aft fuel compartment, they pulled out the bladder.  It had a split that was about two feet long and when the tank was pressurized to feed fuel to the engines, the fuel just gushed out.  Getting the smell of JP-5 out of the helicopter took much longer.  The cabin had to be washed with a strong detergent so that the fuel and its residue wouldn’t linger and the fuel compartment had to be flushed and drained.

Looking back, I smile when I think about it.  The one good thing about the flight is that the JP-5 got into my leather boots and ruined them so I got a new pair.  Instead of laces, they had zippers up the front.  They looked cool if nothing else.

Anniversary Missed

No, I didn’t forget my wedding anniversary, so don’t go there. For the record, it was number 47….

The title and content for this blog began when I had lunch with a former co-worker and friend this past week. While we were talking, I had one of those “ah ha” moments. He was asking me about my books and congratulated me on being a prolific writer with four books. I then reminded him it’ll be five by the end of this month or early in March.

On the way home, it started me thinking. I don’t think of myself as being a “prolific” writer. W.E.B. Griffin is prolific! He’s written 38 novels in six series.

My career as a novelist started on Valentines Day – February 14th, 2012 when I was notified by Fireship Press that they were going to offer me a contract. That was the first major step after writing the manuscript on a journey. And, I’d forgotten about it.   Should I have bought myself a present? The traditional U.S. gift would be something made of wood and the modern version would be silverware. Hmmmm…. That’s something to noodle about.

In just over five years and a little pat on the back is due because:

Big Mother 40 was released in September, 2012;
Render Harmless was published in March, 2014.
Cherubs 2 came out in June, 2015.
Forgotten hit the market in October, 2016; and
Inner Look will come out in, to be on the safe side, sometime in early March, 2017.

That’s five novels in 61 months. Not bad. Actually, there’s enough dots and experience to suggest that one book per year is doable. It’s early in the year and want to continue the trend.

If you told me six years ago while I was trying to find a publisher for Big Mother 40 that I would have five books out in five years, I would have said you were crazy. By the fall of 2011, I was frustrated, afraid I would have to go the self-publishing route because no one liked my work. Keep in mind, back then self-publishing had a negative connotation that has evaporated.

By October 2011, two more frustrating experiences had run their course. One was with a potential publisher who sat on the book for ten months alternating between telling that they were going to publish Big Mother 40 and no, they were no longer publishing fiction. Unhappy with the indecision, I pulled the manuscript.

The other was with an agent. I’d sent him a query in June 2011 and he responded with a note saying he’d like to read the first 50 pages. That went out the next day. About ten days later, he asked for the first three chapters.  A week later he wanted the entire manuscript. Then he went radio silent. Right after Labor Day, I tried again and was told “I love the book but they really weren’t taking on first time authors. They were just seeing what was out there!”

His rationale was that the publishing industry was going through a metamorphosis with e-publishing, print-on-demand, and an overall drop in book sales. So, they – along with the publishing houses that printed the books – weren’t investing in new authors because they didn’t have a brand. When I asked how did the publishing companies expect to increase sales without introducing new authors with new stories, he hemmed and hawed.

So here we are, five years later, five books out and, to be blunt, I ain’t done! There are more books to come, but at the moment, at least until the end of this March, I’m focusing on getting Inner Look out the door and publicity. Then I’ll focus on finding a publisher for the manuscript tentatively titles The Kurile Wedge Incident.

Marc Liebman

February, 2017

Fun and Dumb Things I’ve Done in Airplanes

The title of this blog is also the title of a new section (page?)  that will be in my updated website.   It will include stories from my flying career in both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. Some are about emergencies I’ve faced and the lessons I learned from them, but most are about what the title says, fun and dumb things. In order to protect the innocent and what’s left of my flying career, I’m not going to mention names and dates, but tell what happened.

All still have to be written and I’m not going to do all at once. But, once the web-site is up and running, I’ll add them like blogs. Every few weeks, there will be another. Here are teasers on some of the ones that will be there when the site is finished.

            Lobster Run – back in the good old days, we – as in Naval Aviators – were encouraged to take cross-country flights in our helicopters. Its good training and if you spend the night away from your home base, its called RON or Remain Over Night. So, one weekend, we took off for the Naval Air Station at New Brunswick, Maine on a cross country and, on the trip home, bring some lobster. I mentioned this to my dad and he asked if I would bring  him some…

            Under the Bridge – build a bridge and military pilots will look at it as a challenge to fly under. They were adding a new roadway on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge back in the seventies and, well you think you know what happened, but you don’t…

            There’s What on the Deck? – it is almost a tradition, or maybe it is fate, but almost every Navy helo pilot on his first flight as an aircraft commander has something odd happen. I’m no different. We were sent on a logistic run to take mail, parts and people up to a ship in the far northern part of the Gulf of Tonkin. It should have been routine but wasn’t.  On the way back a long way from the carrier we called home, the aircrew man keyed the intercom….

            Tomahawk Roll – back when I was working at Piper Aircraft Corporation as their director of advertising and sales promotion, I had a chance to fly one of our newer designs. The prototype I checked out was one of a kind. The plane that would be produced and sold was to be a basic trainer. One – the one I was flying – was modified to possibly be marketed as a fully aerobatic airplane. So, I took off with one of my co-workers in the copilot’s seat who was not a pilot and….

            Whaddaya Mean No Ice! Actually, this two stories, one about my dad and one about me. First my dad. We were living in Newfoundland and he took off one evening in a C-47 to get his four hours in a month so he could maintain his currency and flight pay. My mother and I were waiting for him when he landed. Back in those days, you could walk out on to the flight line once the props stopped. I saw my dad come down the ladder from the cabin with a long screwdriver in his hand. He climbed onto the wheel and jabbed the leading edge of the wing several times. A large chunk of ice fell into his arms with a crescent shape section. He walked past me and then my mother and went directly into base operations without saying a word….

You’ll have to wait until the updated website is ready and read each of these stories to find out what happened. What I’m hoping to do is add one a month. Well, that’s the plan. Right now, my web mistress is working hard on updating the site’s technology and making the changes and I should be writing copy instead of a blog!!!

Marc Liebman

February 2017

 

Web Site Upgrade and Expansion

I’ve been thinking about it for months and now, I’m finally getting around to upgrading my web site. It is one part expansion and one part upgrade so it is not a full overhaul.

Upgrade first. The site is now approaching its fifth birthday and the world of websites, that makes it almost ancient.  That doesn’t mean it has to be thrown out because it is old, but it does need a refresh.  People who visit my site say they find it full of interesting stuff. Visitors usually visit more than one page.  And, I still like it but recognized that changes are needed.

It was originally designed to support more than one book and now there are four in print with a fifth coming later this month or early in March.  So, I’m planning to add content and other tweaks. Here are three that are already in the plan.

First, I’m going to add excerpts from each book. So, if you haven’t read it, you’ll get an idea of some of the content.

Second, I’m going to add 15 – 30 second videos about each novel so that visitors can see/hear me talk about the book. Hopefully, when I get done, there will be at least one per book and possibly a few more.

Third, I’m going to add a section called “Fun and Dumb Things I’ve Done.” You can add the words “in helicopters and airplanes.”  I plan to talk about some emergencies I’ve faced, funny conversations that happened in the cockpit as well as some of the dumber things I’ve done as a pilot.

The second part is that the site is going to be expanded significantly. Right now, it is just an “author’s site.” When we’re done, there will be a landing page that enables you to go to either the “author’s” site or the new part, the “speakers” site.

The reason behind this expansion is that last year, I made the decision to become a professional speaker as a way to continue to build “my brand.” I’ve been doing talks for free on a variety of subjects and think that the time had come to get paid for certain types of speeches.

To do this, I needed a “speaker’s” site to go along with the “author’s” site. I’d already created the talking points to use in helping “sell” myself. For each topic, there’s info about what the audience will learn, a summary of the content and why the information is important. There will be links to vignettes from each speech so the visitor can see and hear portions of the content.

The calendar will be new and easier to find. Right now it is hidden under one of the tabs of the “author’s” site.  The new calendar will be different than the list that is currently there and it will support both the speaker and author sites. It should be easier to see where I’m speaking and signing books.

I won’t get into the technology that goes along with this because, quite frankly, I don’t understand it all. As long as it all works, that’s all I care about.

So, as they say in the TV and radio biz, stay tuned.

Marc Liebman

January 2017

Columnist?

If you don’t know, I love to snow ski. Looking back, I took my first run on skis over six decades ago and gosh, that sounds/reads like a long time ago. It is and much has changed in the sport.

So why the sudden interest? My brother sent me to a link to an on-line magazine called Senior Skiing and its target audience is dedicated to those of us over fifty-five who like to ski. It’s got articles on areas, equipment, getting in shape, etc.

Well, writers write. So, after reading a few issues, I contacted the magazine and offered to write an article or two or maybe three. To my pleasant surprise, the first one appeared in the February 2nd, 2017 edition titled From Level 30-Level 71: A Skier’s Journey Through Time. Hopefully, it won’t be my last.

            It is a bit of a spoof on how my grandkids view things. Rather than curl up with a good book, they bury their nose in video games on their iPads. Dinner table conversations sometimes focus on getting to Level 5 versus what is needed to get to Level 7 and in that game. Their standing amongst their peers is enhanced by the level they reached. The higher one gets, the more kudos and “status.”

So, I looked back at my skiing career so to speak which, among other things, includes being a pretty good racer and becoming a certified ski instructor in two different countries, as a series of levels equated to age. I started with how and what I skied at Level 30, i.e. thirty years old and went decade by decade documenting how, when and where I ski has changed now that I am Level 71.

Is Level 71 better than Level 30? It depends on one’s perspective. I think it is because I still ski between twenty-seven and thirty thousand vertical feet a day. For you non-skiers, that’s a lot and converts to about thirty miles depending on the length and number of runs. BTW, my brother documents it all on an app on his iPhone that tracks our movements via GPS.

Back to perspective…. Do I ski as fast as I did when I was thirty? Hell no.

Do I ski the same number of bump runs? No, my knees protest way too much.

Do I ski icy slopes that look more like ice-skating rinks than ski trails? No, at my age, if I take a bad fall, my bones don’t break, they shatter.

Do I go out when it is minus twenty? Well, it depends on the conditions…

Ahhhh, there’s where wisdom that theoretically comes with age shows up. So, the issue is not so much as, for example, “will I ski bumps, but can I?” And, I hate to say (write?) it, occasionally I do just to prove that I still can.

You do what you can, when you can and the pressure is not brought upon by peers, but by one’s inner self. And, you can always rationalize by saying I’ve done it well before and walk away! And, that, ladies and gentleman is the advantage of being Level 71.

Marc Liebman

February 2017