#1: How things are going & what things are planned.....

Welcome to the new version of my newsletter!

As most of you were with me at tiny letter, you know I migrated over here because they were shutting down. The migration happened just as a I got sued for an article I wrote that was published back in 2022, so getting up and running on Substack has taken longer than I planned.

Let’s just say nothing in life is going as planned these days.

Anyway, the first thing is that I learned some hard lessons about freelancing starting with the fact that when you get sued as a freelancer you really have to figure a lot of things out on your own. For freelancers, it’s not the NY Times and Washington Post back during the Pentagon Papers era where there is a bank of lawyers prepared to defend you. (In case you haven’t seen “The Post”, I highly recommend it.) And, well, that’s pretty much all I can say right now. Things just haven’t worked out how I thought they would with this phase of my career. So, time to pivot and do what I can do which brings me to this and the subscribe button.

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I am going to need money to pay my lawyer. I am writer and I do a ton of research and I write about something that hardly anyone else does and I think that is worth something to the people who read it. So, what I used to write about for publications, now I am going to write about here. If you can pay to subscribe, I would appreciate it. I am still doing the free option as I figure out this newsletter and I totally understand that not everyone can pay. But any dollars you send my way would be helpful. I’m hoping the lawsuit gets dismissed, but it will be thousands of dollars in the meantime and, well, if you’ve ever been in a legal mess you know how it is.

Now - on to other things!

I was working on an article last year about the aircraft management industry and still want to get that done. It’s interesting - this industry is built around folks who have an aircraft but don’t use it much or buy an aircraft for investment purposes and then turn to aircraft managers to…manage it. Basically like property management. The management folks rent it out for the owner, or use it for charter and the owners pay them a fee and to maintain it and whatever else (depending on the contract) and hopefully earn money each month based on how much it is used. BUT, as I found it, this is a WILDLY unregulated industry. The company I was investigating (which went out of business after a crash) went to court a lot for all kinds of shenanigans related to (according to the cases) fraudulent practices. In one example, they sold a couple of planes to a customer and he knew they were in unairworthy condition (the prices reflected that) but when the crates arrived that should have had the engines, they were full of old busted parts! No engines! It’s like something out of a movie. The management guy claimed to be paying to insure the aircraft but in some cases wasn’t. He charged for maintenance that was never done, didn’t report all the money that was earned and when some owners tried to see their planes, he demanded they pay him for access! (Those folks went to the cops and got out to their aircraft that way.)

Anyway, unregulated industry and brushes up against flight safety because they are renting and/or chartering these aircraft which means the FAA is some cases is overseeing a company on flight safety issues while it simultaneously in court for fraud and that just seems…weird. (And totally worth writing about!)

I was also working on an article involving a charter company that was involved in a multiple fatality crash in CA a few years ago and I was compiling a spreadsheet of medevac accidents going back over the past decade. (There are a lot.)

More on all that later.

My next newsletter (in April!) will be about Part 135 accidents last year which nobody really talked about but we need to talk about. It’s funny, Alaska always gets blamed a lot for small commercial aviation accidents in the US but I was pretty stunned by the variety of locations and types of operation last year. And beyond some immediate coverage when the accident is dramatic (like the crash on I-75 in Florida last month), reporters spend a lot more time talking about Boeing than Part 135. (I get it - the Boeing story is juicy, but it’s not the only aviation story that matters.)

Moving Forward….

(Substack says do big fonts occasionally to keep the reader engaged.) (Are you engaged?)

I am working on an article to pitch on the 1932 Mt. McKinley Cosmic Ray Expedition because I still want to write a book about it and need to find some way to move to the top of the agent pile and an article might help my book proposal get notice.

Here’s a picture of Joe Crosson who flew the first part of the expedition onto the mountain and if you knew how cool he was (like I do) (I’ve read a TON on this guy) (and talked to some of his family) (and wrote about his sister), then you would say this book needs to be written too! (And Joe is only one small part of why I want this book to be out in the world!) (Substack also says photos are necessary for keeping readers engaged.)

So, some updates on the expedition book every now and again will be discussed but mostly lots of writing about commercial aviation and what gets overlooked, not only by major media but the aviation publications as well. I just hate reading about an accident that didn’t need to happen and researching them and writing about them is the best way I know to try and prevent them. Last night, I came across a statement from the boyfriend of a pilot who was killed in a crash on January 8, 2022. She was flying a Beech Baron for a cargo company and they spoke right before she took off. Here’s a bit of what he told investigators:

She said that she was not 100 percent confident in the PIC’s ability to make a go/no-go decision because he had commented to her that his IFR and icing conditions experience were limited. She said that the other PICs she had flown with she had more confidence in because they had more time in these types of conditions. She was worried that the flight was dangerous and that the risk was high. She did not think that the PIC and her had enough experience to make the go/no-go decision in these conditions and felt the company would not back a no-go decision. She said that she wasn’t sure she would make it out of this. She knew the company policy is we are going and felt she was required to make the trip.

The NTSB determined the probable cause was loss of control while flying in night instrument conditions due to spatial disorientation.

The female pilot was actually in the left seat, which made her the designated captain (or PIC) on the flight. She had 21 hours of actual instrument time. The other pilot, who was also captain-rated, had flown all of his previous fights in the aircraft as PIC. (I assume they wanted the female pilot to get some PIC time and that is why she was assigned captain on this flight. But it looks like she still regarded her “co-pilot” as the actual Pilot-In-Command while talking to her boyfriend.) (This is not a good thing for crew coordination because of questions that can arise over who is making the decisions, but that’s a whole other issue.)

His logbooks suggest he had about 14 hours of actual instrument but his total in company records was around 200 hours (this would include simulated instrument time). Anyway, there’s nuance far beyond the probable cause as to what happened here. It’s the kind of accident that to understand it requires more than just the accident report and that is part of why I’m trying to find a way to keep doing what I do. Because how crashes like this happen is one thing, the why is what perplexes me, and the question I keep trying to answer.

Here’s the subscribe button again for those who want to chip in some dollars and for all of you - thanks so much for staying with me on this ride.